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Right cheap as bleep about paying to fix black neighborhoods Jim Crow destroyed; evidence rises. [1]
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Date: 2023-05-08
Jackson Mississippi mayor talked about massively deficient infrastructure in the state's capital; now it's coming to many other cities nationally.
Item: today, the WaPo has a terrific article about the PLANNED POLLUTION AND URBAN DESTRUCTION that took place in heavily black parts of Oakland, while wealthy and white parts of the city were spared:
www.washingtonpost.com/...
City planners targeted a Black community for heavy pollution. Can the damage be undone? Highway and city planners saddled a once-proud Black community with freeways and diesel fumes, while more affluent white neighborhoods were spared the traffic and toxics. Proud but beleaguered, West Oakland is easy to spot on a map. This Black enclave — not far from the stately Bay Bridge and just downslope from the mansions of the East Bay hills — is sandwiched by three major freeways. Each day, the trucks and cars that travel these concrete corridors spew toxic pollution into yards and homes, where roughly 45,000 people live. West Oakland is an example of how government leaders purposely deployed infrastructure to disenfranchise people of color. Starting in the 1940s, urban planners deliberately located heavy industry and truck corridors around the area’s historically black neighborhoods, according to a sitting city planner and documents reviewed by The Washington Post, along with federal and state documents.
This was, of course, and extremely common pattern in cities around the nation, where successful black areas were DELIBERATELY split away from main urban areas and covered with bad air, bad water, inadequate sewerage treatment, poor health facilities, huge areas of toxic landfills, inadequate schools, surrounding railroads and highways, etc. The result was vast poverty, vast deterioration of wealth, vast proportions of poor health, inadequate education, and vast costs for repair that were never met. Now, of course we have two more incredibly dangerous and overlapping patterns:
--The House trying its damnedest to force reductions in spending that would include repair to these Jim Crow-damaged populations, communities and neighborhoods; and
--Imminent additional danger from weather events related to climate change that will often show up worst in communities that are not well-protected, and will deteriorate further as climate change leads to vast increases in floods, fires, droughts, badly damaged infrastructure, etc.
To be sure, many among black voters are frustrated that the Biden Administration hasn’t already done more to fix these patterns. My initial thought here is that without more progressive power in states, both houses of Congress, and fixes to SCOTUS, this is all imminently going to get far, far worse.
Thoughts and comments on what can be done are appreciated, but in my view, they all start with convincing younger voters, especially among people of color, that this is at least in part a Democratic GOTV issue. The history here is ugly and evident, and the right would be happy to make it WORSE.
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/5/8/2168243/--Right-cheap-as-bleep-about-paying-to-fix-black-neighborhoods-Jim-Crow-destroyed-evidence-rises
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