CalArts Garden

Yaasmeen B. 
Systematic poisoning of minorities 

Systemic poisoning of minorities is a vital issue for me because of the personal connection I have to this piece. My grandmother grew up on Chauncey Street and Ralph Avenue in Brooklyn, Ny in the 50's and experienced all types of racial oppressions such as segregated school systems, lack of resources in public housing, police brutality, and high incarceration rates in the Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood. Growing up as a child I remember listening to my grandmother share stories about her own childhood and how at night she would lay in bed and pick the paint chips off the wall and consume them. My grandmother was the daughter of a woman that went to clean apartments for white people in white neighborhoods and wasn't informed about the dangers of eating paint chips let alone paint chips that were filled with Lead. When my grandmother consumed the lead nothing was done she was poor and she was black and that alone met that she didn't matter. My grandmother cannot remember feeling any differently from consuming the lead but according to the Mayo Clinic Signs and symptoms of lead poisoning in children include Developmental delay ,Learning difficulties, Irritability ,Loss of appetite, Weight loss ,Sluggishness and fatigue ,Abdominal pain ,Vomiting, Constipation, Hearing loss, Seizures, Eating things such as paint chips, that aren't food. When I first heard about the Lead being found in the Flint's water I thought about all the black/brown children that are being harmed because of the color of their skin and I though back to my grandmother and how her mother migrated to the south seeking a better life and was forced into a ghetto that intentionally tried to harm them. Flint like New york is another segregated city. Black thought that by leaving the south they would have a better chance at life. Instead they forced into highly populated ghettos,

"that formation came as a direct result of specifically racist government policies, economic and labor factors that drastically disadvantaged black workers, and actual racial violence that made it impossible for blacks to live in other neighborhoods. These factors created many conditions for the urban uprisings of the sixties. Putting it simply, the American ghetto exists almost entirely a result of intentional state action and extra-legal white supremacist violence." 

 Long before the recent crisis garnered national headlines, the city of Flint was already dealing with issues with their water . For more than a century, the Flint River, has served as an unofficial waste disposal site for treated and untreated refuse from the many local industries , from carriage and car factories to meatpacking plants and lumber and paper mills. The waterway has also been mixed raw sewage from the city’s waste treatment plant, agricultural and urban runoff, and toxics from leaching landfills.

https://www.nrdc.org/stories/flint-water-crisis-everything-you-need-know

https://timeline.com/redlining-federal-housing-racist-14d7f48267e8