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Shingle Mountain

JacksinPA

JacksinPA

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How a pile of toxic pollution was dumped in a community of color

Marsha Jackson didn’t go to the mountain. The mountain came to her.

From her home in south Dallas, she watched it grow until it towered at 60 feet tall and spread all the way to her backyard, “a few feet from my bedroom.”

The mountain is human-made — an environmental nightmare of discarded roofing shingles stretching more than a city block. Even though it’s an illegal toxic waste dump on the edge of a neighborhood, it took months of pressure to get city officials to even acknowledge its existence and finally make plans to take it down.

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Shingle Mountain didn’t just appear from out of nowhere. It formed just south of a section of Dallas settled by formerly enslaved people, an area that for more than a century has been zoned for everything White citizens didn’t want in their neighborhoods: industrial rail yards, chemical plants, concrete mixing facilities, warehouses that lure up to 100 diesel trucks per day and a massive landfill.

The stars at night are big and bright...
 
JacksinPA said:

How a pile of toxic pollution was dumped in a community of color

Marsha Jackson didn’t go to the mountain. The mountain came to her.

From her home in south Dallas, she watched it grow until it towered at 60 feet tall and spread all the way to her backyard, “a few feet from my bedroom.”

The mountain is human-made — an environmental nightmare of discarded roofing shingles stretching more than a city block. Even though it’s an illegal toxic waste dump on the edge of a neighborhood, it took months of pressure to get city officials to even acknowledge its existence and finally make plans to take it down.

========================================================================================
Shingle Mountain didn’t just appear from out of nowhere. It formed just south of a section of Dallas settled by formerly enslaved people, an area that for more than a century has been zoned for everything White citizens didn’t want in their neighborhoods: industrial rail yards, chemical plants, concrete mixing facilities, warehouses that lure up to 100 diesel trucks per day and a massive landfill.

The stars at night are big and bright...
Click to expand...

If it makes you feel any better, Texas has been bamboozling poor white trash the same way for years.
Nestled in between Mansfield (where wife and I lived for six years) and Cedar Hill (an affluent mostly black suburb also in South Dallas) sits Midlothian, a mostly white bedroom community and host to no less than FOUR lunker size concrete plants.
Midlothian racked up one of the highest rates of birth defects in the entire country for several years in a row.

Basically, if you wanted to live in a cleaner area, you had to go North of I-30.
For black families that was not an option because Interstate 30 was historically a racial line, NO developers, NO HOA's and NO banks would permit black families to move in anywhere north of I-30 but even today, it is damn near impossible unless you are Deon Sanders.
Your presence as a black family north of I-30 is almost guaranteed to get you a very chilly reception.
 
JacksinPA said:

How a pile of toxic pollution was dumped in a community of color

Marsha Jackson didn’t go to the mountain. The mountain came to her.

From her home in south Dallas, she watched it grow until it towered at 60 feet tall and spread all the way to her backyard, “a few feet from my bedroom.”

The mountain is human-made — an environmental nightmare of discarded roofing shingles stretching more than a city block. Even though it’s an illegal toxic waste dump on the edge of a neighborhood, it took months of pressure to get city officials to even acknowledge its existence and finally make plans to take it down.

========================================================================================
Shingle Mountain didn’t just appear from out of nowhere. It formed just south of a section of Dallas settled by formerly enslaved people, an area that for more than a century has been zoned for everything White citizens didn’t want in their neighborhoods: industrial rail yards, chemical plants, concrete mixing facilities, warehouses that lure up to 100 diesel trucks per day and a massive landfill.

The stars at night are big and bright...
Click to expand...
How evil. We should shut down all of modern society right away. I can just imagine all the white Robber Barons smoking cigars and deciding to poison them colored kids just because they’re white and evil.
 
EMNofSeattle said:
How evil. We should shut down all of modern society right away. I can just imagine all the white Robber Barons smoking cigars and deciding to poison them colored kids just because they’re white and evil.
Click to expand...

You really should try out the whole "common decency" thing sometime.
 
SouthernDemocrat said:
You really should try out the whole "common decency" thing sometime.
Click to expand...
You’ve already said you support destroying the livliehood of hundreds of thousands of people if it merely increases your perception of quality of life. You have zero decency and so your BS statement is completely disingenuous
 
EMNofSeattle said:
You’ve already said you support destroying the livliehood of hundreds of thousands of people if it merely increases your perception of quality of life. You have zero decency and so your BS statement is completely disingenuous
Click to expand...

Again you really should try out common decency. For example, it's indecent to mischaracterize the views of others. I stated that the West Virginia model of an economy based on extraction industries doesn't benefit anyone in the end. I then pointed out that the real growth and opportunities in our economy (and other developed economies around the world) are knowledge economy jobs. I would also extend those to the trades.
 
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