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In 2017, a United Nations official whose job it was to travel the globe investigating the various issues related to extreme poverty – and reporting on various ways that poverty affected the residents of those impoverished areas – stopped in Lowndes County for a tour.
What he found was a problem so unique, so unexpected, so astonishing that he told media outlets around the world about it. Because there in Lowndes County – an accessible, navigable county under the purview of the State of Alabama – was a sewage crisis that was so awful Philip Alston had never encountered it.
In Lowndes County, Alston and other officials found that more than 34 percent of the population had contracted hookworm – a parasite that has been eradicated throughout most of the country but persists only in areas of extreme poverty, where issues with sanitation, sewage and the absence of clean drinking water persist.
Various news agencies wrote hundreds of stories on the waste water and drinking water crisis in Lowndes, starting as early as the late 1990s. In 2019, a Guardian photo documented children playing nearby an open pool of raw sewage. There were stories in state outlets about raw sewage and human feces flooding homes, streets and yards. Stories in the New York Times, Washington Post, CBS News and almost every state news outlet told of the reprehensible conditions facing the people in Lowndes (and other portions of the Black Belt), almost all of which stemmed from decades of neglectful infrastructure funding and planning by the state and the blatantly racist manner in which various state agencies, the Legislature and the governor’s office doled out funding and infrastructure projects.
An investigation that began in 2021 by the U.S. Department of Justice, initiated by a lawsuit filed by Catherine Coleman Flowers, found that as many as 80 percent of Lowndes County residents lacked reliable sewage services. Residents in the county had been fined and even imprisoned for failing to install or repair septic systems.
Those same residents paid their federal, state and local taxes, including property taxes and gas taxes and income taxes, which should have gone towards basic infrastructure costs, including one of the most basic services provided by all civilized societies.
Basic sewer services.
But in Lowndes, and other predominantly Black counties in Alabama, such services had been neglected. Even when complaints were filed and reports of illnesses – including numerous and frequent illness outbreaks among young children – the state of Alabama and its Alabama Department of Public Health repeatedly failed to act.
If you doubt this, allow me to point out one thing: There is no greater concentration of hookworm-positive cases anywhere else in the developed world than Lowndes County.
Nowhere else on the planet.
So, two years ago, the DOJ entered into an agreement with ADPH to finally adequately address the wastewater issues in Lowndes, and to start moving the state towards a plan that would see it provide the proper infrastructure in the county to address the very obvious and well documented issues.
On Friday, the Trump administration terminated that agreement, calling it “DEI.”
Because fixing the catastrophic results of decades of discrimination is really, really unfair to the people who discriminated.
You know, I often hear Republicans and Trump supporters whine about being labeled racists, and ask with genuine confusion for people to provide an example of that racism. While there are many examples, this is perhaps one of the most obvious and reprehensible.
There is no question that discrimination led directly to these issues. There is no question that Alabama has a duty and need to correct these issues faced by its tax-paying citizens. There is no question that the DOJ took a measured approach to its settlement agreement with ADPH, asking nothing more of it than for it to do what it should have been doing all along.
Doesn’t matter.
“The DOJ will no longer push ‘environmental justice’ as viewed through a distorting, DEI lens,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon. “President Trump made it clear: Americans deserve a government committed to serving every individual with dignity and respect, and to expending taxpayer resources in accordance with the national interest, not arbitrary criteria.”
Because nothing says dignity and respect quite like raw sewage flowing through your living room.
But then, this is what the whole “anti-DEI” movement is about. It has nothing to do with actual unfairness or “wokeness” or any of the other crap that magas spew constantly to justify their abhorrent racism and childish hatefulness.
It’s about never, ever having to take responsibility for anything. It’s why they freak out over a proper history being taught in schools. It’s why they bristle at the suggestion that slavery built the country. It’s why they throw hissy fits when you point out that Native Americans got a raw deal. It’s why they go berserk when you remind them that their childish response to the pandemic prolonged it and made it worse. And it’s why rectifying decades of injustices is being wiped away with a Friday afternoon press release from a two-bit, conservative hack lawyer who quite clearly doesn’t know the definition of irony.
The people of Lowndes County do, actually, deserve dignity and respect. Just as much as all the other people around this state who have received the basic services that the people of Lowndes have been denied.
If you think that’s somehow unfair, you could use a good dose of DEI.
