This comparison puts the issue into stark relief: Just since January, the Tijuana River has carried 10 billion gallons (38 billion liters) of mostly raw sewage and industrial waste across the U.S. border, according to International Water and Boundary Commission data. By comparison, a massive pipe that ruptured in January sent 244 million gallons (924 million liters) of untreated sewage into the Potomac River, affecting affluent, largely white communities. That spill prompted federal intervention within weeks.
Please read the @apnews story by my wife and badass journalist, Julie Watson, at the link in my profile.
3 months agoabstractseagull
Ah yes, if a sewage crisis is handled quickly somewhere else, it must be about race. There are, of course, racially diverse neighborhoods within the affected zone. But to treat Coronado as somehow outside the very category just invoked for the Potomac, “affluent, largely white communities,” requires a determined effort to overlook the obvious. Coronado is a neighborhood of multi-million-dollar oceanfront homes, the Hotel del Coronado, Naval Base Coronado, North Island, SEAL teams, and officers’ housing. That's as white and affluent as it gets. The deeper problem is that the comparison itself is false. The Potomac incident was a domestic pipe rupture inside the United States. The Tijuana River is an ongoing international discharge of raw sewage and industrial waste originating in another country. One is an internal American infrastructure failure; the other is a long-standing cross-border problem. Treating these as equivalent, then explaining the different responses by race, is not analysis. It is the substitution of a preferred narrative for the actual facts.
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