Remember when Republicans claimed infrastructure couldn’t be racist? The notion was quite foolish.
They were wrong in suggesting U.S. infrastructure hadn’t been built or operated in ways that disadvantage Black people, yes. But fundamentally, their claims suggested a disbelief that infrastructure could be built to disadvantage anyone.
If infrastructure can’t exhibit racism, is classism out of the question, too? The train derailment in Ohio earlier this month has some Republicans sounding like progressive environmentalists, claiming they want to investigate how the poor, largely white community of East Palestine, Ohio, was subjected to conditions that effectively transformed the town into a toxic waste dump.
With that in mind, I think it’s fitting to highlight Pulitzer Award-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson with today’s edition of “Black History, Uncensored,” our ongoing project centered on Black authors targeted by right-wing bans.
Wilkerson’s 2020 book “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,” which focuses on systemic social inequality in the United States, has been the target of some conservative whitewashers.
“Caste” is just one in a long list of works by Wilkerson that discuss the plight of the “forgotten Americans” — people neglected by U.S. institutions — whom Republicans only claim to care about.
In this post, I’m highlighting her Pulitzer Award-winning coverage of the Midwest’s Great Flood of 1993. That year, in a dispatch from Hardin, Missouri, a small town in the largely white Ray County, Wilkerson wrote about the heartbreak residents experienced when a cemetery flooded, carrying caskets away in the rising water, with some never to be seen again:
When the Missouri River barreled through town like white-water rapids this summer, and grain bins and City Hall and the Assembly of God church and houses and barns gave way and there were no telephones or electricity or running water, people in this tiny farm town thought they…
Read the full article here
