Environmental racism in Holyoke

SOMETIMES, THE world we live in is so starkly oppressive one cannot help noticing it, and in those moments, the parts of the social whole illustrate the nature of the whole.

I recently had such a moment in reading The Sun, a free community newspaper in Holyoke, Mass., where I live and work. In an article titled "Councilor files lawsuit against city health board," staff writer Aimee Henderson reported that City Councilor Diosdado Lopez is a plaintiff in a lawsuit Holyoke Organized to Protect the Environment (HOPE) filed against the Holyoke Board of Health, charging that its approval for a waste transfer station is harmful to the predominantly Puerto Rican neighborhood that the board approved as the site for the station.

HOPE charges that the station will harm the neighborhood by increasing "traffic, odor, pollution, noise and poor conditions." Councilor Lopez is quoted in Henderson's report as observing that the board never asked the proponents of the station to provide "comprehensive air and traffic studies, and that the data used was from other cities." Moreover, in a city where 41 percent of the population is Latino, persons attending Board of Health hearings on the proposal "were not allowed to address the board in Spanish."

To pile injury onto injury, Major Michael J. Sullivan asserts that because Lopez joined HOPE in filing suit against the board, he "will no longer be able to vote as a city councilor on legal matters if issues should arrive surrounding the project."

As I recently argued in a letter to SocialistWorker.org regarding Israeli apartheid directed against Palestinians, apartheid is a "universal crime" under international law, and "a regime commits apartheid when it institutionalizes discrimination to create and maintain the domination of one 'racial' group over another."

Apartheid did not die with apartheid South Africa, and its practice is not limited to apartheid Israel. It is alive and well in Holyoke, Mass.
Mark Clinton, Holyoke, Mass.