Valerie Hawkins Review of A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind

I wrote this review of Harriet A. Washington’s Hachette/Little, Brown Spark publication, A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind for Booklist magazine in 2019. It wasn’t published. But this is what I wrote.

A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind. Washington, Harriet A. (author). July 2019. 368 pages. Little, Brown Spark, hardcover, $28 978–0–316–50943–5; e-book, $34 978–0–316–50942–8; audiobook, $34 978–1–4789–7575–5.

Harriet Washington’s newest, A Terrible Thing to Waste, noticeably builds on the research that informs her three previous titles, Deadly Monopolies: The Shocking Corporate Takeover of Life Itself — And the Consequences for Your Health and Our Medical Future; Infectious Madness: The Surprising Science of How We “Catch” Mental Illness; and Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. This book’s goals are likewise threefold. Washington effectively dismantles the persistent myth that people of color genetically have lower IQ than other groups. Conversely, Washington documents, with locations and dates, that industrial pollutants that poison an area’s air, water, soil, and/or housing, and thereby cause a host of health issues for its residents, including damage to cognitive development in the unborn, are found more often in the…