(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



How Kamala Harris Would Have Made a Difference [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-04-28

College campuses were in turmoil throughout the presidential campaign between former Vice President Kamala Harris and then-former President Donald Trump. Protesters were pointing fingers at the administration, tossing around phrases like “Genocide Joe.” During her speaking engagements and rallies, pro-Palestinian advocates accused Ms. Harris of excluding them from the conversation. However, she repeatedly spoke about the travesties happening to the people of Gaza. Perhaps her even-handed and practical approach was too little for liberals and not sufficiently cruel for conservatives when she said, “far too many” civilians had been killed “yet again,” she said. So, to those liberals who accused her of being a monster, they effectively contributed to an absolute monster in office who has plans to wipe out the Palestinian population to create beachfront resorts. In a joint meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump proposed relocating the residents and turning the region into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”

As a black American who, as a child, was a victim of gentrification (under the guise of urban renewal), this push for Middle Eastern modernism will most certainly be at the expense of the poor, the hapless, and the underserved. So far, Mr. Trump has blown up the everyday economy for the hard-working man and woman trying to make ends meet, and other issues designed to benefit those hapless Americans falling by the wayside. One of which was a program legislated by the Biden-Harris/ Democrats American Rescue Plan to help rid a black community in Alabama of raw sewage leaking into their potable water. A peer-reviewed paper by a group of Duke researchers points to the long history of racial discrimination in sanitation. Catherine Coleman Flowers, founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice (CREEJ), has shared her expertise with Duke students and faculty as a practitioner-in-residence at the Nicholas School of the Environment, the Duke Global Health Institute, and the Trinity College of Arts and Sciences. One of the conclusions from this collaboration was about the predominantly black community of Lowndes County, Alabama. “I started focusing on the failures of wastewater infrastructure in 2002, while working in economic development in rural Alabama. I saw people being arrested in my home county of Lowndes for having raw sewage on the ground due to failing waste disposal systems and septic tanks,” Flowers said.

Recently, the Trump administration derailed this cleanup effort, which is responsible for hookworm and other parasitic contamination, by using the racist and shopworn excuse of it being a DEI program. In an April 15, 2025, article published in the Alabama Reflector by Nada Hassanein, the dissolution of grants to improve environmental health and safety is not relegated to Alabama. So, what Trump sees as unfair to white communities is poisoning marginalized communities. The Trump administration is betting, yet again, on what it hopes is innate racism in our society to look the other way and, in some cases, ignore the killing of people of color. So, while protesters are being jailed and deported and the right to dissent has been chilled by the fascist actions of a lawless president, poor people and people of color now have to wonder if they live in communities with a ticking time bomb of germs bubbling up beneath their feet.

Your Vote is Still Your Voice

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/4/28/2319284/-How-Kamala-Harris-Would-Have-Made-a-Difference?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/