Plastic particles and chemicals pollute all of our bodies. But people living on the fencelines of the fossil fuel, plastic, and waste industries face even more life-threatening pollution.

By Erica Cirino

Louisiana’s “River Parishes,” located along the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, shoulder some of the worst industry impacts in the United States. As a result, this region has acquired a grim reputation as “Cancer Alley.” Stretching across 85 miles of rural land along both banks of the Mississippi River are around 200 industrial plants—many of which process fossil fuels to produce petrochemicals and plastics, “reportedly the largest concentration of such plants in the Western Hemisphere,” according to a 2024 Human Rights Watch report.

Across the U.S., most regions show a cancer risk of around five to twenty-five in a million, based on my assessment of 2019 Environmental Protection Agency data. For people living in Welcome, Louisiana, in St. James Parish, and across the rest of Cancer Alley, that risk runs at least double—and in some places, is up to seven times greater than—the national average. Across St. James Parish, about a dozen polluting facilities, many of them petrochemical plants, emit a constant cocktail of emissions, including toxic and carcinogenic ethylene oxide and formaldehyde. This, plus all the light, noise, and diesel emissions from constant freight train, tanker, and truck traffic, and frequent spills of gas, oil, chemicals, and plastic pellets from machinery, pipelines, and vehicles, makes the region a constant health hazard for residents.

While plastic and other consumer products pollute our environment and—as scientists have detected—our bodies, they begin inflicting harm far before they’re sold farther up the pipeline. A survey of plastic’s impacts isn’t complete without taking into account how plastic and other industrial manufacturing pollutes air, soil, and water—especially in communities where poor, rural, Black, Indigenous, and people of color live.

St. James Parish, Louisiana

Living in Welcome, a predominantly African American neighborhood in St. James Parish, retired special education teacher Sharon Lavigne (born in 1950) has watched her neighbors and family members grow ill with cancers, heart problems, autoimmune disorders, and other conditions known to be caused by a variety of factors that include, most notably, exposure to industrial fossil fuel pollutants. The governmental, political, and corporate systems and cultures enabling and favoring the unjust placement of polluting industries in Black communities like Welcome are textbook examples of environmental racism.

The consequences are clear: In America, Black people are more likely to die prematurely due to toxic air pollution because decades of racist housing, voting, financing, and other social policies have made sure that the air they breathe is the dirtiest in the country. People who are Indigenous, unhoused, poor, or belong to other historically underserved groups share this increased risk of pollution exposure. While America’s Clean Air Act of 1970 has, over time, reduced some disparity in populations made to bear the burden of industrial pollution, to this day, industries continue to overwhelmingly target underserved communities—often enticed by local governments looking to profit from development.

Protecting communities from further colonization by industries requires constant effort. In 2017, Lavigne and her neighbors watched as the state wrested an enormous rural plot, formerly home to two plantations, from the local community and quietly sold it to FG LA LLC (FG), one of many business endeavors run by the Taiwanese manufacturing conglomerate Formosa Plastics Group. By 2018, then-Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards and Formosa executive Keh-Yen Lin announced FG’s plans to build a $9.4 billion chemical and plastic complex on the land the company had bought.

To prevent further industrial colonization of her community, in 2018, Lavigne retired from teaching to form RISE St. James Louisiana, a faith-based activist organization whose members document pollution, attend public hearings and community meetings, bring lawsuits against polluters and dysfunctional government regulatory agencies, write to lawmakers, and pray.

By 2024, Lavigne and RISE had prevented FG from completing its plan to build in Welcome what has grown to be a proposed $12 billion complex of 16 facilities spread across the 2,400-acre plot—according to a 2019 ProPublica investigation done along with other publications. This complex would more than triple Welcome residents’ exposure to cancer-causing chemicals.

FG’s plant is expected to spew 13.6 million tons of carbon dioxide into the air each year, the amount of carbon that 3 million cars would add to the atmosphere in one year. This is in a region already feeling the heat cast by humanity’s uncontrolled greenhouse gas emissions—oppressively hot, humid days and sinking coastlines, deadly floods, and catastrophic storms have occurred more frequently and intensely than ever.

Even if the U.S. and the rest of the world curbed carbon emissions right now, between 2040 and 2060, experts estimate that between 2 and 5 percent of St. James will be regularly underwater at high tide, with temperatures soaring high enough to make it too dangerous to go outside. This will become a regular occurrence.

Point Comfort, Texas

Residents in Welcome who are wondering what a new plastic plant would mean for their community can get an idea from Point Comfort, Texas, a small working-class port community about 400 miles west of Welcome, Louisiana, where more than 50 percent of residents are Latino, Black, Asian, or biracial. In Point Comfort, Formosa operates a plastic complex comparable in size and design to that proposed for St. James Parish. There, Formosa’s biggest opponent has been Diane Wilson, a fourth-generation fisherwoman and retired shrimp boat captain who has spent more than 30 years documenting and challenging the pollution caused by the company in court.

Wilson’s efforts include  ta 1994 lawsuithat saw Formosa agreeing not to discharge any plastic from its Texas facility into Lavaca Bay—a promise the company ultimately failed to keep. She waded and paddled with her kayak into the facility’s outfall pipes along Cox Creek, scooping plastic pellets and powder into thousands of store-bought plastic bags.

Wilson used these samples as evidence in court to challenge the company, ultimately garnering a $50 million settlement in the largest Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act lawsuit ever filed by a private individual. Since the settlement, Formosa has agreed to pay about $3 million in fines in 2021 for its continued pollution and nearly $30 million to clean up its plastic pollution from nearby waterways in 2022, which Wilson and her allies at San Antonio Bay Estuarine Waterkeeper have continued to monitor.

Ha Tinh, Vietnam

Formosa is a massive industrial manufacturing conglomerate based in Taiwan that runs about 100 companies spanning petrochemical processing, electronics production, and biotechnology worldwide. Formosa’s subsidiaries have been accused or found guilty of polluting in every country they operate.

Formosa’s extensive industrial portfolio means it creates an enormous array of industrial emissions. In 2016, the company’s steelworks in Ha Tinh, Vietnam, discharged toxic wastes into local waterways. The chemical emissions killed many marine animals, hurt the local environment, and affected more than 5 million people across four of Vietnam’s provinces—the work of more than 179,000 fisherpeople in the region was ground to a standstill as a result of this.

After scientists revealed the extent of damage, Formosa publicly admitted it caused the pollution. Yet, residents say this has not helped address the 2016 disaster or curb continued pollution from the Formosa plant. The company was eventually required to provide $500 million in compensation, but victims of the 2016 disaster say the Vietnamese government has not correctly distributed the funds.

In 2022, Wilson and Lavigne joined Texas-based filmmaker Nancy Bui, an advocate for those harmed by Formosa’s pollution in Vietnam, to form the International Monitor Formosa Alliance (IMFA). IMFA is an international alliance representing human rights, peace, justice, environmental, and commercial fishing organizations that seek justice for victims of Formosa’s and other corporations’ industrial pollution in Vietnam and beyond.

In May 2023, Bui, Lavigne, and Wilson traveled to Taiwan to tell Formosa shareholders during their annual meeting how the company has harmed people and the environment, especially in South Texas and Vietnam. They emphasized that while residents of South Texas won a lawsuit resulting in a major settlement, residents harmed by Formosa’s pollution in Vietnam had not, despite more than 8,000 people filing a lawsuit calling for accountability—and urged the company to take action. Until then, victims of Formosa’s pollution at the Ha Tinh steel factory and their allies continue to fight for their rights.

Unfortunately, Welcome, Point Comfort, and Ha Tinh are just a few of many regions facing the devastating pollution and environmental injustice caused by the fossil fuel and plastics industries. With the increasing expansion of plastic and petrochemical production—despite dwindling fossil fuels—come growing streams of pollution trespassing into our homes and bodies.

Across the world, frontline communities and their allies are uniting to hold corporations accountable for their harm to people and the planet. These activists and advocates for environmental justice are calling for an end to the growth of lethal industries that pollute the air, water, soil, and human bodies.

These efforts have become especially important in light of World Health Organization findings that industrial activities and infrastructure contribute to 99 percent of the global population breathing unhealthy air, one in three people worldwide not having access to safe drinking water, and worsening soil pollution widely threatening human health. Ultimately, activists and advocates show us that, without systemic action, environmental injustices will continue to grow unchecked.

Author Bio: Erica Cirino is a writer, artist, and author who explores the intersection of the human and more-than-human worlds. Her photographic and written works have appeared in Scientific American, the Guardian, VICE, Hakai Magazine, the Atlantic, and other publications. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, and others, as well as several awards for visual art. She is a contributor to the Observatory.

Source: Independent Media Institute

This adapted excerpt is from Thicker Than Water: The Quest for Solutions to the Plastic Crisis by Erica Cirino (Island Press, 2021). Reproduced by permission from Island Press. This web adaptation was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

 

 

Judy Heumann was an internationally recognized advocate for the rights of disabled people. She was widely regarded as “the mother” of the Disability Rights Movement. At 18-months-old, Judy contracted polio in Brooklyn, New York and began to use a wheelchair for mobility. She was denied the right to attend school at the age of five because she was considered a "fire hazard." Later in life, Judy was denied her teaching license by the same school district. After passing her oral and written exams, she was failed on her medical exam because she could not walk. Judy sued the New York Board of Education and Judge Constance Baker Motley (the first Black female federal judge) strongly suggested the board reconsider. They did and Judy went on to become the first wheelchair user to teach in the state of New York.

In 1977, Judy was a leader in the historic 504 Sit-In in San Francisco. This 26-day protest (the longest sit-in at a federal building to date) led to Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act being signed into law. Judy was instrumental in the development and implementation of other legislation including the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. These pieces of legislation have been integral in advancing the inclusion of disabled people in the US and around the world.

From 1993 to 2001, Judy served in the Clinton Administration as the Assistant Secretary for the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services in the Department of Education. Judy then served as the World Bank's first Adviser on Disability and Development from 2002 to 2006. In this position, she led the World Bank's disability work to expand its knowledge and capability to work with governments and civil society on including disability in the global conversation. In 2010, President Obama appointed Judy as the first Special Advisor for International Disability Rights at the U.S. Department of State, where she served until 2017.  Mayor Fenty of D.C. appointed Judy as the first Director for the Department on Disability Services, where she was responsible for the Developmental Disability Administration and the Rehabilitation Services Administration. She also was a Senior Fellow at the Ford Foundation, where she produced the white paper Road Map for Inclusion.

Judy was a founding member of the Berkeley Center for Independent Living which was the first grassroots center in the United States and helped to launch the Independent Living Movement both nationally and globally. In 1983, Judy co-founded the World Institute on Disability (WID) with Ed Roberts and Joan Leon, as one of the first global disability rights organizations founded and continually led by people with disabilities that works to fully integrate people with disabilities into the communities around them via research, policy, and consulting efforts. Throughout her life, Judy served on a number of non-profit boards, including the American Association of People with Disabilities, the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, Humanity and Inclusion, Human Rights Watch, United States International Council on Disability, and Save the Children. 

Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist, written by Judy with co-author Kristen Joiner, was published by Beacon Press in 2020. Following in 2021 was the Young Adult version, Rolling Warrior. Both audiobooks are read by Ali Stroker, the first wheelchair user to perform on Broadway. After a four studio bidding war, Being Heumann’s movie adaptation will be done by Apple TV+ with producer David Permut (Hacksaw Ridge) and writer/director Sian Heder (Academy Award Winning ‘Best Picture’ CODA).

Judy is featured in Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution, the 2020 award winning, Oscar-nominated documentary film, directed by James LeBrecht and Nicole Newnham and produced by the Obama Higher Ground Production Company. She has been featured in numerous other documentaries on the history of the disability rights movement, including Lives Worth Living and the Power of 504. She delivered a TED talk in 2016, “Our Fight for Disability Rights- and Why We’re Not Done Yet”. Her story was also told on Comedy Central’s Drunk History in early 2018, in which she was portrayed by Ali Stroker. In 2020, Judy was featured on the Trevor Noah show. She also hosted an award-winning podcast called The Heumann Perspective, featuring a variety of members from the disability community. 

Judy graduated from Long Island University in Brooklyn, NY in 1969 and received her Master’s in Public Health from the University of California at Berkeley in 1975. She was awarded several honorary doctorate degrees from universities across the United States including New York University, University of Pittsburgh, Middlebury College, and Smith College. She also received numerous awards including being the first recipient of the Henry B. Betts Award in recognition of efforts to significantly improve the quality of life for people with disabilities and the Max Starkloff Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Council on Independent Living. 

Judy Heumann passed away on March 4th, 2023 at the age of 75. News of her passing was reported on by major outlets in the United States and around the world.   Judy Heumann passed away on March 4th, 2023 at the age of 75. Stay up-to-date on projects in Judy’s honor by following Judy Heumann Legacy on Instagram and Facebook or subscribing to the Judy Heumann Newsletter.

  Learn more about the life and work of Judy:             https://judithheumann.com/

Pharmaceutical companies are resisting public scrutiny and suing over modest drug price regulations. It’s past time to regulate their profiteering.

By Sonali Kolhatkar

Major pharmaceutical companies in the United States are battling with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders over an issue that is at the heart of whether we value human wellbeing over corporate profits. As chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), Sanders has vowed to force CEOs of pharmaceutical companies to publicly answer for why their drug prices are so much higher than in other nations. He plans to bring a committee vote to subpoena them. The subpoenas are necessary because—brazenly—the CEOs of Johnson & Johnson and Merck have simply refused to testify to the HELP committee. What are they afraid of?

In a defensive-sounding letter to Sanders, an attorney for Johnson & Johnson accused the Senator of using committee hearings to “punish the companies who have chosen to engage in constitutionally protected litigation.” The letter does not specify the litigation in question—perhaps because it would sound so ridiculous and would reveal the company’s real agenda. Last July, the company, along with Merck and Bristol Myers Squibb sued the Biden administration fceuticalor allowing the Medicare program to regulate prescription drug prices.

It appears that Johnson & Johnson and Merck are indeed afraid of being questioned by lawmakers about drug-profiteering in the U.S.

One pharmaceutical expert, Ameet Sarpatwari of Harvard Medical School explained to the New York Times that, “The U.S. market is the bank for pharmaceutical companies… There’s a keen sense that the best place to try to extract profits is the U.S. because of its existing system and its dysfunction.” Another expert, Michelle Mello, a professor of law and health policy at Stanford university, told the Times, “Drugs are so expensive in the U.S. because we let them be.”

In other words, it’s been a free-for-all for pharmaceutical companies in the U.S. In 2003, then-President George W. Bush signed a Medicare reform bill into law, promising help for seniors struggling to pay for medications, but that law stripped the federal government of its power to negotiate drug prices for Medicare’s participants. It was a typically Republican, Orwellian move: promise help to ordinary people and deliver the exact opposite.

Nearly two decades later, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which Biden signed into law in 2022, tied Medicare drug prices to inflation and required companies to issue rebates if prices rose too fast. It was the first time since Bush’s 2003 law that drug manufacturers were subject to any U.S. price regulations. Pharmaceutical companies aren’t having it, and not only did they sue Biden over the IRA, they don’t seem to want to answer for their actions publicly.

It’s not enough for Medicare to be able to cut drug prices. There needs to be nationwide regulation on all drug prices for all Americans. After all, American taxpayers generously subsidize the research and development of most drugs. A report by Sanders’ staff explained that “[w]ith few exceptions, private corporations have the unilateral power to set the price of publicly funded medicines.” The report’s authors chided that “[t]he government asks for nothing in return for its investment.”

What’s more, the report rightly points out that people in other nations benefit from having access to lower-cost drugs that Americans have paid global pharmaceutical companies to develop. For example, SYMTUZA, an HIV medication that scientists at the U.S. National Institutes of Health helped to develop, is available to U.S. patients for a whopping $56,000 a year, while patients in the UK pay only $10,000 a year for the same drug purchased from the same company.

It’s not as if companies like Johnson & Johnson have some perverse preference for European patients over American ones. It’s merely that their prices are regulated by most other industrial nations. The U.S. “happens to be the only industrialized nation that doesn’t negotiate” drug prices, explained Merith Basey, Executive Director of Patients For Affordable Drugs NOW, in an interview on Rising Up With Sonali last fall.

Indeed, countries like the UK, France, and Germany, offer models for the U.S. in drug price controls and much has been written about what works best. Further, there is—unsurprisingly—a strong public desire for price controls. According to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll in August 2023, “[m]ajorities across partisans say there is not enough regulation over drug pricing.” Moreover, a whopping 83 percent of those polled “see pharmaceutical profits as a major factor contributing to the cost of prescription drugs.”

There is no shortage of ideas for specific price control regulations that could work in the U.S. For example, the Center for American Progress’s October 2023 report, “Following the Money: Untangling U.S. Prescription Drug Financing,” delves deep into how market prices are determined for medications and suggests interventions at every stage of drug price setting.

Frankly, such complex solutions would not really be necessary if all Americans could simply join Medicare health coverage and if Medicare’s bargaining power to negotiate drug prices could be applied to all drugs. But, in the absence of this commonsense holistic approach to healthcare, even complex price controls would be better than no price controls.

Predictably, conservative capitalist critics have trotted out the same, tired arguments against government price regulations of pharmaceuticals. “Drug Price Controls Mean Slower Cures,” declared a Wall Street Journal editorial headline. The paper’s editorial board called the IRA, “the worst legislation to pass Congress in many years,” and went as far as accusing the Biden administration of “extortion.”

But who is engaging in extortion? Economists studying the pharmaceutical industry have found that for years companies have been so flush with cash that they have spent hundreds of billions of dollars in stock buybacks and exorbitant executive bonuses and pay packages. “The $747 billion that the pharmaceutical companies distributed to shareholders was 13 percent greater than the $660 billion that these corporations expended on research & development over the decade,” wrote William Lazonick and Öner Tulum in a report for the Institute for New Economic Thinking.

Further, the Wall Street Journal’s screed ignores price controls in the UK, France, Germany, and other nations. If those have no bearing on the speed and quality of drug development, why should U.S. price controls have an impact? And if they do have an impact, then Americans are being unfairly required to bear the burden that people all over the world benefit from.

The Journal’s editorial board made one accurate claim, saying that the IRA “will also give companies the incentives to launch drugs at higher prices and raise prices for privately insured patients to compensate for the Medicare cuts.” The paper made this prediction without any comment on unfettered corporate greed. Indeed, if anyone is engaging in de facto extortion, it appears as though pharmaceutical companies may be the guilty parties in punishing Americans for price controls.

Pharmaceutical companies launched the new year with announced price hikes on at least 500 medications—a massive effort at gouging the public. In contrast, the IRA’s drug price controls apply to only 10 medications so far, and will be expanded to 15 drugs per year for the next four years, and 20 drugs per year thereafter.

Rather than removing price controls on the paltry numbers of medications the IRA can regulate, an easy fix is to apply those same regulations to most or all drugs. Best of all, in order for such a solution to be implemented, pharmaceutical company CEOs wouldn’t even have to drag themselves into committee hearings to explain away their corporate greed.

Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her most recent book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

To the surprise of no one but naive liberal backers of the police, expensive reforms to law enforcement have done nothing to curb the killings.

By Sonali Kolhatkar

The nation’s biggest investment in the past decade to fix police abuses has failed. The New York Times, in collaboration with ProPublica conducted an extensive 6-month-long investigation into the use of body cameras on police officers and found that it has done little to stop police killings. Reformists ought to be shocked—however, they may be too busy concocting yet another expensive scheme to pour money into policing rather than out—but abolitionists are hoarse from saying, “We told you it wouldn’t work.”

When 18-year-old Mike Brown, newly graduated from high school, was gunned down in 2014 in cold blood by officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, his killing sparked one of the early waves of the Black Lives Matter movement. The New York Times rightly faced protest as well for referring to Brown as “no angel,” a familiar media post-mortem of Black police victims that paints them as deserving of death.

And, as Ferguson burned with rage, academics and politicians declared the staid solution to such killings: body cameras worn by police officers to capture them in the act of killing.

Well, okay, police reformists hoped that the body cameras would dissuade police officers from killing rather than merely catching them in the act of doing so. Or, if the cameras failed to restrain police, they would capture evidence to hold police accountable. But such faith in the armed enforcers of racial capitalism was naive at best. At worst, it was a measure of the ardent belief that officers are actually trying to keep people safe. Liberals have been as guilty as conservatives in their unquestioning belief in the sanctity of policing. It was a Democrat, President Barack Obama, who in 2014 asked Congress to authorize spending $263 million of taxpayer funds to outfit cops with cameras.

The price of liberal naivete was on full display in 2020 when Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin slowly and brutally choked George Floyd to death in full view of bystander Darnella Frazier’s phone camera while he knelt on Floyd’s neck. Chauvin had been outfitted with a body camera that fell off him while he killed Floyd. In 2017, Chauvin had been caught at least twice using the same tactic of kneeling on top of a person's neck while wearing a body camera. The city paid out more than $1 million to settle with the victims, who were lucky enough to survive. Chauvin then went on to kill Floyd three years later.

When Chauvin was ultimately convicted, it was no thanks to his body camera. Massive public pressure from the largest protests in the nation’s history, and Frazier’s testimony and recording, helped to indict him for Floyd’s murder.

The fact that police departments themselves supported the use of body cameras when they were initially proposed ought to have warned us that the project was doomed to failure. What the New York Times/ProPublica investigation found is that police have used body camera footage to actually justify their killings. In the 2017 fatal shooting of a man named Miguel Richards, the New York Police Department used selective footage from officers’ cameras to absolve them, not hold them accountable. It is frequently the police themselves, depending on the city, who get to decide whether or not to release body camera footage. Body cameras did not deliver accountability; they were just new weapons to help police in the war they have been waging on the public.

Decades of police rpolice dominance of city budgetseforms have sucked up hundreds of millions of dollars, and have kicked the can of accountability down the road, maintained , and ultimately failed to curb the killings. Even the Washington Post called it “an ongoing exercise in reform that never ends.”

The police kill at least 1,000 people a year, with 2022 being the deadliest year ever recorded. And it appears as though 2023 may surpass it. In other words, police fatalities rose after body cameras were deployed (it’s true, correlation does not necessarily mean causation). A deeper look at the data shows that Black people are the most likely to die at the hands of police and are twice as likely to be killed than whites, despite being a much smaller racial group. And, younger Black people are the most vulnerable to bloodthirsty cops.

So, what would actually keep police from killing? The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), in conjunction with GenForward at the University of Chicago, asked the group most victimized by violent police—Black Americans—what their opinions were on moving money out of policing and into the things that have been proven to foster safety (housing, health care, education, and other social services). The extensive survey, called Perspectives on Community Safety from Black America, found high levels of fear toward police among Black Americans. Younger Black people were the most fearful. This is not surprising given that they are the most targeted by police.

More importantly, the survey found broad support for an “Invest/Divest” approach to public safety. Specifically, this means, “86 [percent] of Black people support creating a new agency of first responders who specialize in de-escalating violence and providing mental-health support and other social services that would take over these responsibilities from police.” The survey also found that “78 [percent] support a process whereby city officials promote public safety by investing in solutions that do not rely on incarceration.”

Dr. Amara Enyia, M4BL’s Policy and Research Director, told me in an interview on YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali, “When people say reform, so often it’s this tweaking around the edges of police and policing. It’s things that we know don’t really get to the root causes of harm that come from the policing system.”

Enyia questions the reliance on policing altogether, especially in scenarios where the presence of armed officers often makes things worse. “Why should armed police be pulling people over for traffic violations?” she asks. “Or why should police be giving bicyclists tickets for riding their bike on the sidewalk, for example? Why should individuals who are having a mental health crisis, why should armed police be called to the scene?”

There are no good answers to these questions. And body cameras do nothing to discourage police from killing in such scenarios because they merely validate policing as a tool for safety. Police are enforcers of order, not safety.

Safety does not enter the equation except for those members of society who rely on the strict maintenance of the existing order: well-off white Americans for example, who enjoy the greatest economic benefits from generational wealth and, not coincidentally, experience the least harm from police. Rethinking the role of policing in society needs to go hand in hand with rethinking our economy as a whole.

M4BL asks a stark question in the report on its survey results that ought to form the basis of any changes to policing: “Can you imagine a world where policing is obsolete and everyone has what they need to thrive?”

 

Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her most recent book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is Chief Correspondent and Writing Fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and Senior Editor covering race and economy at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

 

 This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

As some elite colleges resume SAT requirements in admissions, will we ever see an end to the outdated practice of weeding out prospective students on the basis of race, gender, and class?       

 BY Sonali Kolhatkar

 

When the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020, higher education institutions throughout the United States started adopting a progressive standard of education that advocates had demanded for decades: they began dropping standardized tests such as the SAT and the ACT as requirements for admissions. As was the case with so many other pandemic-era societal adaptations—government economic relief that lowered poverty rates, a pause in student loan repayments, free vaccines, an end to public library late fees—this offered an opportunity for a grand experiment in promoting equality.

The move to drop the tests can actually be traced to a time before the pandemic, but it was accelerated by students being unable to travel to testing sites during the lockdowns. Further, the mass racial justice uprising of summer 2020 pressured elites into embracing ideas rooted in equity.

Many celebrated the spurning of tests as the right direction for institutions that have ensured the maintenance of white supremacist patriarchy since their inception. But as elite universities such as Yale, Harvard, and Caltech recently reneged on the promise of leveling the playing field by returning to test requirements, are those celebrations premature?

Research has confirmed over and over that requiring students to take the SAT or ACT weeds out women, people of color, and other marginalized groups. As a physics and astronomy undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin, I participated in efforts in the early 1990s to address how such tests undermine women’s entry into STEM fields. I was a perfect example: a straight-A student whose academic record had only one stain: a mediocre SAT score which severely narrowed my college options.

Robert Schaeffer, director of public education at FairTest: National Center for Fair & Open Testing, which is one of the leading advocacy groups against required SAT and ACT testing, told the 19th, “Despite the fact that young women get lower scores on the test than young men, they earn higher grades when matched for identical courses in college than the boys.”

Although the SAT has evolved significantly over the years, its origins in racist beliefs are telling. The test’s precursors, the Army Alpha and Beta tests, were analyzed and championed by Carl Brigham, a psychology professor at Princeton University and a eugenicist who believed that testing offered unbiased and scientific proof of white superiority.

Black and Latino students routinely score lower on the SAT’s math section compared to whites and Asians. This is not evidence of a racial difference in educational ability and intelligence as Brigham might have liked to believe. Rather, it is evidence of racial bias in the test.

There is a similar bias based on class. Wealthier students routinely do better on the test than low-income students. This is no surprise given the lucrative industry built on test preparation, helping students navigate the notoriously tricky test in exchange for hundreds or even thousands of dollars. The fact that SAT scores are used to determine many a student’s eligibility for scholarships further entrenches class bias.

Indeed, because of the SAT’s racial and class bias, the Los Angeles Times reported in 2019 that officials at the University of California were convinced “that performance on the SAT and ACT was so strongly influenced by family income, parents’ education and race that using them for high-stakes admissions decisions was simply wrong.”

By 2021, in response to a lawsuit brought by the Compton Unified School District, the entire UC system at this experiment has been in place shows promise in opening up higher education to historically excluded communities.permanently dropped tests as requirements for admissions. The move seemed to herald a new era in higher education, and indeed, data from the few years th

But, as advocates of racial, gender, and economic justice painstakingly chipped away at the exclusivity of higher education, conservatives predictably pushed back. A wave of right-wing attacks in recent years has taken aim at affirmative action admissions policies, the teaching of Critical Race Theory, and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) campus initiatives.

It was only a matter of time before elite institutions such as Harvard, Yale, and Caltech did a backflip on their commitment to equity by reverting back to SAT requirements. Opinions of elite commentators such as New York Times Education Editor David Leonhardt helped validate this decision. Leonhardt wrote, “Standardized tests have become especially unpopular among political progressives, and university campuses are dominated by progressives.”

He highlighted a 2023 paper by an organization called Opportunity Insights to justify reinstating test requirements. The paper concluded that “SAT/ACT scores and academic ratings are highly predictive of post-college success.” It was precisely the ammunition elite institutions were waiting for. Harvard specifically cited the paper in its reversal on testing.

But, according to FairTest’s Schaeffer, the conclusions that Opportunity Insights comes to are flawed. He told the New York Times, “[W]hen you eliminate the role of wealth, test scores are not better than high school G.P.A.” The organization, in a report responding to Leonhardt and Opportunity Insights, accused researchers of omitting student demographics such as “family income, parental education, and race/ethnicity.” They found that when accounting for these critical demographic markers, the SAT fails to predict academic merit and that students’ grade point averages (GPA) in high school are better markers.

Aside from GPA, public school educators have backed the idea of “Performance Based Assessments” (PBA) as a better alternative to the SAT. Such assessments measure the totality of students’ expertise, achievements, and ideas. They are, by design, complex and varied—just as human beings are—and are based on interaction and collaboration—just as society functions in real life.

The SAT is largely a multiple-choice test. It is an individualistic assessment designed for an individualist mindset and is therefore an exceedingly narrow measure of a person. Aside from its essay section, each question has only one correct answer embedded in an array of wrong answers. There is no room for complex thinking and ideas. According to FairTest, “Using the SAT as the gatekeeper for higher education turns out to test one thing above all else: existing station in life.”

Standardized tests, and the idea that universities may revert back to using them, are a source of undue stress on students and their families. Thankfully, thousands of universities and colleges remain test-free or test-optional. Ultimately, only a tiny sliver of the nation’s students are able to attend the institutions that steadfastly cling to elitist practices. If anything, the decision by some to insist on outdated racist, sexist, and classist standards is a further indication of how irrelevant they are to modern American society.

 

Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her most recent book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

 This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.