it seems difficult to talk about putting in place a project that deals with racial discrimination when you can’t use race in evaluating it. It’s real… - Beverly Wright

I think that black people’s concerns about the environment and environmental justice are synonymous. I believe that black people understand the environment because of the injustices that exist in their communities as it relates to their health and exposure. It all merges around the larger concept of civil rights, and so we have combined the idea of environmental protection with civil rights.

People of my age group are so angry, Why are we in the same place? We’ve actually lost some of the progress.

Environmental injustice occurs in a number of ways. The fact that, first of all, when you look at the federal level they never addressed soil contamination that exists all over the city. We have extremely high arsenic levels, and PCBs, cause where we live we use a lot of pesticides; we have a lot of pests. From rat poisoning, to pesticides for roaches and mosquitoes, you already have all of that, right, and then you add to that the big mixture that came in all the water from all over, even from the bottom of Lake Pontchartrain, then you add to that human feces and everything from the sewage treatment plants. That water was extremely filthy. And very dangerous. And then it settled. There was a light dust that covered everything when we came back home.