The Biden DOJ has opened an "environmental justice" investigation of Alabama wastewater treatment policies with an alleged "disparate impact" on racial groups, under the authority of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Just one thing:
In Alexander v. Sandoval, a 2001 case, the Supreme Court noted that interpreting Title VI to cover unintentional discrimination is in “considerable tension” with the fact that the Title VI statute itself “prohibits only intentional discrimination.”I mean, if you're going to get technical. "Disparate impact" analysis once seemed like a good idea: it sometimes flushed out superficially race-neutral policies that were secretly operated to mistreat particular skin colors, generally as demonstrated by smoking-gun admissions on paper or tape. Now that the fashion needle has shifted back to overtly racist quotas and exclusions, but with the colors reversed in order to create the impression that this is progress, it's probably time to admit that "disparate impact" analysis no longer makes sense. Applied honestly, it would prohibit affirmative action and its unholy racist progeny.
Near as I can tell, researchers from Baylor working with ADPH used new extremely sensitive molecular tests for signs of hookworm:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.ajtmh.org/view/journals/tpmd/97/5/article-p1623.xml
Publication showing a "more than one in three people in Alabama's Lowndes County tested positive for hookworm infection." caused a stir, and the ADPH did a re-study: https://www.wsfa.com/story/38230713/adph-surveyors-to-visit-homes-in-lowndes-county/
. . . that was able to re-test 9 of the 20 individuals reported in the first study as having hookworm. They collected stool samples, sent them to the CDC, and the CDC did testing via microscopy for ova and parasites (O & P) and found nothing:
https://www.alabamapublichealth.gov/infectiousdiseases/assets/hookworm-notice.pdf
According to an NPR article the study was inspired by 'environmental justice' activist Catherine Coleman Flowers. One would think that the solution is better enforcement of existing environmental regulations, but it is the enforcement that bothered her, the fact that poor people were being cited and even jailed for causing public-health hazards by using 'straight pipe' septic 'systems' for their homes -- i.e. just running the effluent to a not-too-close ditch or downhill area.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/11/23/937945160/waste-activist-digs-into-the-sanitation-crisis-affecting-the-rural-poor
The process is the punishment. IOW, they don't care if they win or lose.
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