That Side of Town

An Associated Press analysis of a little-known government research project shows thatblack Americans are 79 percent more likely than whites to live in neighborhoods where industrial pollution is suspected of posing the greatest health danger.

Residents in neighborhoods with the highest pollution scores also tend to be poorer, less educated and more often unemployed than those elsewhere in the country, AP found.

"Poor communities, frequently communities of color but not exclusively, suffer disproportionately," said Carol Browner, who headed the Environmental Protection Agency during the Clinton administration when the scoring system was developed. "If you look at where our industrialized facilities tend to be located, they're not in the upper middle class neighborhoods."

With help from government scientists, AP mapped the risk scores for every neighborhood counted by the Census Bureau in 2000. The scores were then used to compare risks between neighborhoods and to study the racial and economic status of those who breathe America's most unhealthy air.

President Clinton ordered the government in 1993 to ensure equality in protecting Americans from pollution, but more than a decade later, factory emissions still disproportionately place minorities and the poor at risk, AP found.

In 19 states, blacks were more than twice as likely as whites to live in neighborhoods where air pollution seems to pose the greatest health danger, the analysis showed.

Though it is unofficial and unanalyzed, it has become achingly clear that blacks, minorities, and the poor also live in areas likely to be annihilated by catastrophe. They are the worst effected, and the worst treated. We allow industry to spew pollution into these neighborhoods; we allow these people to live in very-high-risk areas will little, or no, assurances of protection and evacuation.

We only seem to think this way of life is okay so long as we do not have to prepare a universal health care plan ["Keep spewing that toxic waste into the South Side's school yards. We don't have to pay for their cancer treatments!"] and so long as we can remain sufficiently distracted from any real conversation about democratic values with some ridiculous war. Shameful.