Purdue University Press spoke with author Carolyn Boiarsky about her new book Lead Babies and Poisoned Housing: Environmental Injustice, Systemic Racism, and Governmental Failure.
Q: Could you give a brief description of your book?
Drawing on historic sources as well as present-day interviews, Lead Babies and Poisoned Housing is a story about systemic racism, environmental injustice, and the failure of government.
In 2016, 1,100 mainly minority residents of a low-income housing complex in East Chicago, Indiana, received a letter from the city forcibly evicting them from their homes because a high level of lead was found in the soil under their houses.
Five years later, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Office of Inspector General charged three federal agencies—EPA, HUD, and CDC—with causing the lead poisoning of children living in the complex. The EPA, responsible for the cleanup, had been aware of the situation for 35 years. The director of the local housing authority admitted to building the complex over a demolished lead smelter. When health issues arose, the housing authority blamed the residents’ sanitary habits rather than its own failure to maintain the structures. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s testing of blood lead levels was revealed to be faulty. In short, the very agencies that were supposed to protect these people instead neglected, ignored, and blamed them.
Q: What is the goal of your book? What motivated you to write it?
I read a newspaper article about 700 families whose lives were uprooted when lead was found under their homes in a low-income, mainly Black and Brown, housing complex, and decided to write a follow-up article about what happened to these people. What I found through my research and speaking with the residents was startling. EPA had known about the problem for over 30 years but done nothing about it. Why? I wondered and began to dig through old newspaper articles and books dealing with the political and economic history of the city.
There are over 1,300 of these Superfund sites around the country, 80% of which are located near working class, often Black and Brown, communities. Many of the sites became polluted in the early 1900’s at the beginning of America’s industrial age. My goal in writing this book is that as we attempt to solve the problems caused by Climate Change, we do not substitute one problem of pollution for another. By providing the historical causes of today’s pollution and the effects it has had on communities, it is my hope that we will be able to avert similar situations in the future. “Those who do not know history, are bound to repeat it.”
In addition, it is my hope that those who read this book will take action to pressure their local, state, and federal legislators to fully clean up the 1,300 Superfund sites still listed on EPA’s National Priority List (NPL).
Q: Please tell us a little bit about the roles family and community play(ed) in the experiences of the people affected by the lead poisoning crises in Calumet.
This book is not just a story of victimization, it is also about empowerment and community members insisting their voices be heard. Lead Babies and Poisoned Housing records the human side of what happens when the industries responsible for polluting leave a community, but the residents remain. Those residents tell their stories in their own words—not just what happened to them, but how they acted in response.
You can get 30% off Lead Babies and Poisoned Housing: Environmental Injustice, Systemic Racism, and Governmental Failure and any other Purdue University Press book by ordering from our website and using the code PURDUE30 at checkout.