Until 2 February it was business as usual in the small rural community of East Palestine, Ohio. The local paper carried obituaries and sporting results, interspersed with stories of a homecoming queen, an abusive puppy mill and the driver in the Toughest Monster Truck Tour who was arrested for human trafficking.
The next day it all went up in flames.
“Train derailment sparks massive fire, prompts evacuations.” “Videos show major fire raging after tanker train derails.”
The derailment of a 50-car freight train carrying toxic materials on 3 February shattered daily life in East Palestine and sent a pall of black smoke over the region. Potentially lethal chemicals spewed into the air, ground and water.
Three weeks into the disaster, a new set of headlines has started to billow up from right-wing outlets and commentators. Now the tragedy of East Palestine has morphed into a racialized lament for the “forgotten” people abandoned by the uncaring “woke” Biden administration.
For “forgotten”, read white.
Leading the charge, as is so often the case with such white-America nativist fearmongering, is the Fox News star Tucker Carlson. “East Palestine is overwhelmingly white, and it’s politically conservative,” he said recently. “That shouldn’t be relevant, but it very much is.”
Carlson went on to describe East Palestine as a “poor benighted town whose people are forgotten, and in the view of the people who lead this country, forgettable”. He highlighted the indisputable suffering of local residents who were forced to evacuatea two-mile area and since they have returned home remain fearful about the quality of the air and water.
Then Carlson contrasted such hardship with what he called the “favoured poor” who live in “favoured cities” such as Detroit and Philadelphia – a clear euphemism for urban centers, often led by Democratic mayors, with large Black populations.
In these “favoured” places, he said, “everyone feels for them and everyone wants them to be safe”.
The idea that the rail disaster should be viewed through a racial lens has spread like a toxin from Fox News, through right-wing news sites and social media, into the political realm. JD Vance, the first-term Republican US senator from Ohio, picked up the clarion call of the “forgotten” Americans, calling the residents of East Palestine, pointedly, “our voters”.
Charlie Kirk, a rising star within the Make America Great Again (Maga) universe, was more direct. He lashed out on his show at Biden’s “crusade on white people” and claimed that America’s Democratic leaders “hate working-class whites”.
Perhaps inevitably, Donald Trump then rode into town. He careened into the region on Wednesday bearing bottled water and promising that he would ensure justice for the people of East Palestine.
“You are not forgotten,” he said, repeating the mantra that has been a central tenet of his Maga posturing since his first presidential run in 2016.
Some aspects of the racialized analysis proferred by Carlson and others are accurate. East Palestine (pronounced Palesteen), a community of 4,700 people, is overwhelmingly white; latest census data puts it at 98% white and 0.2% African American.
Carlson’s description of East Palestine as “poor” seems to paint the community with broad brush strokes: the community is certainly not wealthy, with a median household income of $44,000, according to the Census Bureau . But the 9% of residents who live below the poverty line form a smaller proportion than the national rate of 11.6%.
It is true that it is largely, though not exclusively, conservative, with 72% of Columbiana county in which it sits voting for Donald Trump in 2020.
Where the right-wing pundits come unstuck is the idea that white communities in rural America are getting a far rougher deal at the hands of government and media elites than the Black urban poor. The argument is misleading, and some environmental justice advocates suggest, actively dangerous.
“The idea that Black people are advantaged when it comes to environmental justice is a very insidious, divisive narrative,” said Evlondo Cooper, a senior researcher on climate and energy with the watchdog group Media Matters for America.
“Poor whites do have legitimate environmental justice claims. But when Carlson and others suggest that this is a unique grievance, they are ignoring that this stuff happens to poor black and brown and indigenous communities every day.”
Carlson’s acerbic designation of Detroit, one of the Blackest cities in the US, as a “favoured city” will come as news to its own residents. The Detroit metro area continues to contend with toxic air, lead poisoning and tap water that is laden with contaminants that can cause cancer, brain impairments and other serious health threats.
Numerous studies have found that low-income communities, including white ones, suffer disproportionately from air pollution. But within that demographic, poor Black communities have by far the greatest risk of premature death from particle pollution.
The argument that poor white communities are “forgotten” compared with the lavish attention bestowed by the media and politicians on Black inner-city areas is also a distortion. Last August the 79% Black city of Jackson, Mississippi, grappled with a drinking water crisis that had been brewing for years yet largely ignored by the media as a whole. Media Matters found that one TV channel stood out for the relatively paltry six minutes it devoted to the immediate aftermath of the catastrophe – Fox News.
Despite these obvious flaws in the forgotten-white-Americans thesis, it has for some time been gaining traction within the Republican party. Philip Gorski, a Yale sociology professor and author of The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy, sees it as a calculated political strategy.
By leaning on race-baiting, he said, Republicans hope to be able to smooth over the glaring gulf between white, working-class Americans who make up a large proportion of the party’s Maga base and the super-rich, corporate-friendly donors who bankroll the movement (Trump included). “So you racialize the problem - and say that white folks are being cheated out of economic opportunities by the ‘woke mob’ - or Detroit and Philadelphia, to take attention away from the challenges you face forging a coherent economic line,” Gorski said.
Those challenges are all too visible in East Palestine. Trump’s much-vaunted visit to the derailment this week may have been intended to highlight his “forgotten Americans” meme, but it succeeded in drawing attention to his own environmental record. When he was in the White House, Trump overturned new safety rules introduced under Barack Obama requiring more sophisticated brakes on trains carrying flammable materials.
Trump’s presidency proudly presided over a bonfire of regulations, including health and safety controls, and eviscerated almost 100 environmental protections. The changes included weakening routine rail safety audits following accidents and throwing out minimum staffing levels on freight trains. And they were made under the pressure of the private rail industry devoting $25m to lobbying in 2022 according to Open Secrets, including $1.8m from Norfolk Southern which owned the derailed train.
The problem with the right-wing effort to turn the derailment into a racial culture war, environmental justice advocates believe, is that it distracts attention from the the dearth of public safety controls that leaves millions of Americans – of all races and ethnicities – vulnerable to the disaster that has befallen East Palestine. Estimates suggest that 25 million Americans live within one mile of rail lines that carry toxic crude oil and the number of households within blast distance of toxic chemical lines is even larger.
“This should not be a race issue, it’s a health issue,” said Michael McIntyre, an oil refinery worker who was the former president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Steubenville, a small city to the south of the derailment along the Ohio River. “East Palestine is not getting what it needs, not because its people are white, it’s because they are poor, and Trump never cared about them.”
Sonya Lunder, senior toxics policy advisor at the Sierra Club, wants events like this to unite rather than divide. “Catastrophic impacts of hazardous material trains should connect the interests of rural communities with those of industrialized inner cities,” she said.
Rather than sowing discord, Lunder implored those with a public platform to seek solutions. “Modernising safety systems for toxic trains, regulating the shipment and use of highly toxic chemicals – there are several commonsense policies that can make living in America safer. For everyone, no matter their zip code.”
