Wow... Truly an eye-opening read that explores environmental racism and the commitunities it disproportionately affect. Harriet Washington did an amazing job at researching the content in this book. I think this book will be a foundational text in the years to come as we see more of the effects of climate change have devastating effects on the environment.

This book will open your eyes, make you angry, and then point you toward solutions for ending the plague of pollution-related health problems in marginalized communities of color.

I received a free copy from netgalley in exchange for an honest review. Vote a terrible thing to waste is a great way to introduce an entire generation to the idea of fighting for voting rights especially for women. This book provides a very concise history of the women and men who fought for women's suffrage. I think this would be a helpful book in a lot of middle and high school classes in instructing students about the legacy of women in history.

Harriet Washington’s A Terrible Thing to Waste is a chock-full study of the impact of environmental racism on communities of color in the United States. Washington, a science writer and ethicist, has written prolifically including the acclaimed book Medical Apartheid. Like that book, A Terrible Waste recounts gripping stories of communities in trauma owing to the taint of such toxins as lead, arsenic, and PCBs. The main premise of the book is that dangerous chemicals have tainted the ground, air, and water of POC communities resulting in lowered I.Q.s.

After outlining the ways in which I.Q. testing has been historically conducted and also shedding light on the racial gap, Washington moves on to the strength of the book— the infiltration of lead, arsenic, microbes, and other neurotoxins in communities of color. The core of the book is the second part comprised of four chapters on environmental racism. Tellingly, Washington illuminates a lead poisoning case involving more than 30,000 Baltimore children during the 2000s. She suggests that like the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment where African Americans were knowingly left untreated, children were left with toxic levels of lead in their bodies under the Kennedy Krieger Institute-led study. Other chapters examine the impact of waste sites in fence line communities, or communities that border chemical plants; carcinogens in the air; and microbes infested in homes and food. These chapters offer the reader much insight. However, a final section on advocacy seems like it belongs in a different book. In the two final chapters Washington offers advice for dealing with environmental racism in one’s communities, but it is the insistence on taking such actions as breastfeeding and making one’s own baby food at home to ward off toxins in food and water that seems oddly out of place.

A Terrible Thing to Waste is an interesting, well researched book. There is a lot of scientific jargon in the book, so despite clearly attempting to make the information available to the masses, I'm not sure that they succeed. The book does a decent job of describing the problems, showing the research and then describing steps you can take to make things better. In the end, I don't feel super excited about the steps to make things better. The truth is that the issue described is systematic and rather terrifying. The steps to make things better are small. Though the resources appear great and helpful, I honestly have doubts about making things work in a real and lasting way. That leads me to be a bit disappointed in the book.

Being a science communicator is hard. You have to be able to walk the incredibly fine line of not talking down to the people who are experts in the field while simultaneously trying to convey exactly the right amount to information to make the layman reader understand and not feel overwhelmed or too stupid to keep listening. Harriet Washington does a fantastic job of this.
The introduction stars us off on the topic of IQ. I was mildly worried I was not going to enjoy this book because I knew just enough about IQ to be dangerous. But Washington takes the reader on a history of what IQ measures, its flaws and limitations, and defines its use in her book.
<blockquote>"Some question how critical IQ is. We’ve long known that IQ measurements, in the United States and around the world, are dramatically biased. We also know that it is not possible to administer the test in a manner that gives meaningful comparisons across a wide variety of cultures. Beyond this, the meaning of “intelligence” varies from culture to culture, it is multifactorial, and IQ tests provide an admittedly limited and biased measure of achievement, not the oft-touted innate ability." (page number to come)</blockquote>
<blockquote>"Although IQ scores are not a consistently accurate measure of intelligence, IQ is too important to ignore or to wish away. For Americans, IQ, usually measured by the Stanford-Binet and Wechsler scales, although there are many variants, has proven a predictor of success in school, social settings, work achievement, and lifetime earnings"(page number to come)</blockquote>
The way she addressed IQ was interesting, and it gave the reader a solid framework for the book.
Washington is very witty, the topic of this book obviously does not leave a lot of room for levity, but the way she addresses some areas of the book made me very interested in scrolling through her twitter, she seems like she is hilarious.
Back to the content. Washington takes the reader through different environmental factors that can be detrimental to humans health on multiple levels. She addresses the effects on our bodies and minds and then she dives into the statistics and case studies that show these factors have a higher chance of harming people of color, most often black and indigenous populations. Heavy metals (lots of talk about lead in specific), environmental neurotoxins, microbes, and other chemicals are all delved into during Part 2. She addresses how they harm adults, children, and fetuses, and how dangerously hard it can be to prove they are actually harming people, especially when those people are black.
I learned so much while reading this book. It was at times overwhelming with the amount of information I was being introduced to at once, but this book does not require you have an extensive scientific background to understand the point Washington is making.
Also, to alleviate the overwhelming amount of horrible reality you will be confronted with, Washington leaves the book on a hopeful note. She gives the reader specific things that can be done and writes hopefully about current and future political action to protect the minds and bodies of all vulnerable people.
When I picked this book up I did not know about her past books, now that I have read <i>A Terrible Thing to Waste</i>I will certainly be going through her backlist soon! I will be recommending this book to people interested in public health, structural racism, environmentalism, and nonfiction focused on science. This book is released on July 23rd, 2019.
<i>ARC provided by NetGalley, all opinions are honest!</i>

There is a (perhaps) lesser known aspect of American racism whereby people and institutions assume blacks are dumber than whites, that they are untrainable and don’t deserve as much pay for the same work as whites. Blacks don’t think clearly or fast enough, they don’t process or retain well, and they’re slow to move, think and speak. Harriet Washington shows in no uncertain terms that blacks have been systematically neglected and poisoned into this condition in A Terrible Thing To Waste.

In chapters jam-packed with statistics and scientific findings, Washington shows that blacks get Alzheimer’s at twice the rate of suburban whites who don’t live with the same polluted air, soil and water. Whites don’t breathe the lead paint dust in their homes or drink water from lead pipes.

Lead is the biggest villain the book. It attacks forming brains of infants and even fetuses, ensuring perverse developments later in life. For example, only 56% of lead-exposed students in Baltimore graduate high school. It affects behavior too, as black children grow into violence and crime. She gives the examples of well-meaning people who can’t fill out a form to apply for a job, to the point of not being able to remember their own birthdate. At the other extreme, a highly skilled child starting in a new school was automatically put into a special needs class with illiterates simply because he was black. Until his mother demanded he be tested - against the will of the teachers and officials - and fought their refusal to do so, assuming that all black children were dim.

To lead, add iodine, the lack of which is the single biggest cause of mental retardation, Washington says. Grocery deserts don’t provide the fresh produce that would allow for sufficient iodine. For a hundred years, the US has mandated iodine be added to salt to alleviate the shortage, but it is not enough, and the fashion for iodine-free sea salt exacerbates it. So all of America is dumbing down.

The (white) establishment does little or nothing to remediate the situation, keeping blacks in impoverished slums, moving garbage dumps into their neighborhoods, and allowing factories to spew whatever they want.

The extent of the arrogance can be seen in Anniston, Alabama. There, Monsanto hired a University of Mississippi professor to prove that the waters flowing through the town were not polluted by Monsanto’s dumping of millions of pounds of PCBs. The first test was letting 25 bluegills into the water, to see how they would react. They all died within three and a half minutes. “It was like dunking the fish in battery acid,” according to a team member. Just thirteen years later, Monsanto finally closed the plant. The pollution remains behind for all to enjoy. Kids splash in the streams, vegetable gardens soak it up, the water flows through the taps, and the black community is mentally damaged, generation after generation.

The vicious circle starts with low land prices. Factories move in, cheap housing goes up around them. The factories poison the soil, water and air, keeping the local residents from realizing their full potential in life. The factories close down, leaving a bunch of unemployed and unemployable people in housing completely worthless because no one will buy where the air, soil and water will kill them and their children. People can’t even refinance their mortgages because their homes have no value. The cycle of poverty deepens along with the diseases and conditions as local government refuses to throw resources at a hopeless neighborhood. Of blacks.

Lest anyone be lulled into thinking this pollution is localized, Washington cites figures that apply everywhere and to everyone:
-One in ten samples of organic juices exceeded the level of arsenic permitted by federal law.
-80% of infant formulas test positive for lead and/or arsenic.
-20% of baby foods contain lead.
-All lipsticks contain arsenic.
-DDT does not break down in nature. Lead and arsenic persist in soils for decades.
-Only 32% of US students show proficiency in mathematics, compared to 50% of Canadians and 63% of Singaporeans using standardized international tests.
-Pregnant women should limit their seafood intake to three servings a week due to methylmercury contamination. Even the FDA says no one should eat more than four shrimp – per month. Most saltwater fish are now toxic to humans.
-Amyloid plaques and magnetite, the trademarks of Alzheimer’s, develop from air pollution, as seen in autopsies in Mexico City.

The USA is far more polluted than most understand it to be, and like the Roman Empire collapsing around its lead-addled ruling class, the whole country is being damaged going forward. Washington cites billions upon billions of dollars diverted into to dealing with the mentally handicapped, who should not be and don’t have to be. Education costs, medical costs, welfare costs, and government oversight are all unproductively needed to deal with a polluted, damaged population. And by far the biggest block of victims is the black population. It is not genetic and not race-based. It is manmade toxicity that is fully preventable, and is, when found in white-majority areas.

There is a contradiction throughout A Terrible Thing To Waste. Washington devotes a lot of space to deconstructing and dismissing the notion of IQ. She points out that Alfred Binet invented the Intelligence Quotient or IQ measurement, and from the onset denied that it gave any indication of potential intelligence from birth or race. He said it could only evaluate intelligence for those not already performing adequately. He even refused to rank people using IQ. Washington goes farther, showing how it is an invalid test based on culture and context, such that perfectly intelligent people on other continents show up as morons when given American IQ tests. But then she cites IQ repeatedly throughout the rest of the book, showing that this disease cost 25 million IQ points or that condition cost eight million. That it lowered the average IQ by five points. This makes no sense after her work to dismiss IQ as a valid measure.

There is also a lot of repetition. The book could have been a faster read with even more impact given some more editing. But overall, it is a shocking wakeup call to end the voluntary stupidity that racism foists on the vulnerable.

Poverty remains the most punished crime in America.

David Wineberg