Here We Go Again

In the course of my interview with environmental-justice scholar and leader Robert Bullard, we discussed his current work on the history of environmental racism in the South. He had plenty to say about the ways that inadequate government response to disasters has affected people of color over the past seven decades. I asked him whether Katrina was part of the norm or stood out somehow, and this was his reply.

African-American refugees from a Mississippi flood.

Photo: NOAA Photo Library.

I think it's important that we not look at the response to Katrina as an isolated incident or an aberration. Research I'm doing with my colleague Beverly Wright, who's at Dillard University, is showing that, over the last seven decades in the South, whether it's floods, droughts, hurricanes, or accidents, government has responded to emergencies in ways that have endangered the health and welfare of African Americans.

During the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, African Americans were rounded up and cordoned off in Greenville, Miss., while they evacuated the white people. They made the blacks stay and forced them to work on the levees at gunpoint.

A year later, in 1928, there was a hurricane in Okeechobee, Fla., where over 3,000 mostly black farmworkers and migrant farmworkers from the Caribbean and the deep South were killed. They were buried in mass graves, and a lot of the bodies were piled and burned. It was kept quiet to protect tourism in Florida.

Nearly 10 years later, one of the worst industrial accidents in the history of this country [surfaced] in West Virginia at Gauley Bridge. It's called the Hawk's Nest Incident. Union Carbide wanted to build a tunnel through a mountain to produce electricity in that area, and that brought a whole bunch of black men from the South. They made them work in those mines and without respirators -- the white people were treated very differently: they were paid more, they were given better equipment. Thousands died [of silicosis]. And again, they were buried in mass graves.

Coming into the '30s and '40s, you have the Tuskegee syphilis experiment [in which 399 black men suffering from the treatable disease were given placebos so researchers could study its fatal progression]. We're also looking at government response to childhood lead poisoning and experimentation on kids, black children in Baltimore -- this was in the 1990s -- and coming all the way up to how the government responds to terrorism and looking at the anthrax attack in Washington, D.C. The government responded very differently to anthrax in the Senate, which is all white, and in Senate staffers, who are mostly white, than they did to anthrax in postal workers at Brentwood Post Office, who are mostly black. In the Senate, the government responded immediately with testing and quarantine and medical treatment. At the post office, it was days before they even started that type of activity. And as a matter of fact, two postal workers died.

And even when we look as recently as January of this year, in Baytown, Texas, here's a case where the world's largest corporation, ExxonMobil, has a facility located right next to a public housing project. They had an accident and spilled heated processed gas on the neighborhood and didn't notify officials until some 24 hours later. They wrote a letter to the people two days later. And the county officials didn't hear about it until three days later, when they read about it in the newspaper. And that's after Katrina.

What we've done is systematically show that, whether it's a health emergency like childhood lead poisoning or the syphilis experimentation or industrial accidents or train wrecks or natural disasters, the disaster is made worse by the way society differentiates between who is impacted and who is not impacted. So these weather-related disasters oftentimes really are exacerbated by plain old racism: some people just don't have the right complexion for protection.

Click here to read the full interview with Robert Bullard.

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