Over the years, environmental racism has been the subject of hundreds of articles at Daily Kos. Here’s much-missed Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse taking about “eco white privilege” back in 2010, Walter Einenkel reporting on a refinery that pours hydrogen cyanide gas into Denver’s poor neighborhoods in 2018, and Meteor Blades—who has covered this topic extensively—writing last year about how the high levels of pollution in a Black Detroit neighborhood. In almost every town or city, there is some expression of environmental racism. It might be the Houston suburbs where Black and Latino families suffered from flooding after a series of storms, or cities where kids suffered from water laced with lead, or neighborhoods still dealing toxic fumes, but there is a direct link between poverty, race, and pollution. In some cases, that line was even written in extra bold ink, as exclusionary housing practices guaranteed that Black families would have to live in areas next to factories, dumps, or other environmental disasters. But few articles have ever put the ugly intersection of racism and environmental neglect together in the way as this article in ProPublica. Using the kind of sophisticated analysis you might think should be done at the EPA, but isn’t, ProPublica specifically looked at factories putting out toxins that are known to be carcinogens, and the health of those in the area where one, or ten, or over a hundred factory plumes overlap. If you’ve ever thought that all disease clusters were just the result of statistical coincidence, these maps should go a long way toward changing that belief. Read more