This essay is featured in
Boston Review’s new book,
Climate Action.
Tallevast, Florida, is a predominantly Black, unincorporated community between Manatee and Sarasota Counties. If anyone outside of the area knows of the town of fewer than eighty homes spread across two square miles, it is likely because, about twenty years ago, its groundwater was discovered to have been poisoned by the manufacture of weapons-grade beryllium during the Cold War.
Environmental racism is global, but it is particularly common to Black communities in the U.S. South, where state authorities tend to allow more latitude to industrial polluters.
The plot will sound familiar: a polluting industry, privately owned but authorized by the state, is placed near Black homes, fouls the natural resources, and causes irreversible harm to the community’s health. Environmental racism is global, but it is particularly common to Black communities in the U.S. South, where state authorities tend to allow more latitude to industrial polluters. Consider Warren County, North Carolina, where a dump for the neurotoxin PCB was sited adjacent to the homes of poor Blacks. Or Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley,” where petrochemical production has devastated dozens of Black communities along the banks of the Mississippi. Such occurrences extend the timeframe of plantation-like mechanisms of control and dispossession. Of course, it’s not only in the South. Change a couple key details and you have Flint, Michigan, or Secunda, South Africa.