Yesterday, a story hit the wire about the location of the Commonwealth’s most hazardous communities. The 59 page report was authored by Northeastern University sociology professor Daniel R. Faber and Eric J. Krieg, a professor at Johnson State College in Vermont and showed that 24 of the 30 most environmentally hazardous sites in the Bay State also had communities that were 25 percent or more non white. Bostonist can’t help but think about a memo we once read that had reportedly come from the desk of Larry Summers when he was chief economist at the World Bank in 1992. The World Bank memo, which was leaked to the press and published in The Economist might not have been written by Summers and it may have been doctored up before it was released to make the assertions more outreageous. The form we saw it the was certainly outragous.
The gist of the 1992 memo that poorer communities will gain economically and richer, more educated communities will suffer a relatively lesser ammoun, seems to in some ways become practice in Massachusetts. Some of Boston’s poorer neighborhoods; Dorchester, Roxbury, and East Boston are all home to environmentally hazardous sites. Yesterday’s release of the study: "Unequal Exposure to Ecological Hazards 2005: Environmental Injustices in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” asserted that it may not be a deliberate act to go out an contaminate non white communities but it is a form of tacit racism. Bostonist is still curious if Boston University is going to be able to open up their proposed bio-containment lab.
Thanks Paul.
add to digg
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
