GARY, INDIANA, May 10—When a waste company and government bosses wanted to build a dump in a mainly Black working-class neighborhood, students and residents confronted this blatant environmental racism head on. They shut down a bosses’ meeting and physically ran out the politicians and local capitalists.
Black students from a local school have been some of the most militant leaders of this developing fightback. The communist Progressive Labor Party commends these brave fighters and is present to help build and sharpen the class struggle here against the racist bosses.
Bosses plan garbage dump next to school
Last April, students, teachers, and administrators from the Steel City Academy Charter School learned that a private corporation applied for a solid waste processing permit. They intended to build a $60 million waste facility less than 100 feet from the school. The application, completed by Maya Energy, LLC, was filed with the Indiana Department of Environmental Management (IDEM).
The waste facility was presented as a “recycling center.” The school and residents often refer to the facility as a “dump” because it is expected to house and compact 2400 tons of garbage a day within close proximity to students and educators. Many already suffer from health issues as a result of toxic air pollution, lead poisoning, and other byproducts of a murderous capitalist system. Gary’s population is 80 percent Black, and the median household income is $29,522. The bosses’ racist disregard for working-class lives is self-evident.
After negative feedback from Gary workers and youth, Maya Energy was allowed to revise their application and resubmit it this past February. In March, Maya Energy was invited to explain their revised project once again to the school and residents.
One thousand people submitted their comments opposing the project, with many requesting a public hearing, that IDEM and Maya Energy reluctantly agreed to hold at a local union hall on May 10.
‘Our education over your dump’
At the union meeting, PLP joined over 200 students, teachers, administrators, and residents to put Maya and the city bosses on notice. Union misleaders said that people would be let in at the start time of the meeting, but when students, teachers and workers began chanting “Hey, Hey! Ho, Ho! Maya E has got to go!” the union leaders quickly showed their sell-out nature and announced that the meeting was cancelled. They even turned away union members who opposed Maya Energy and the dump!
IDEM bosses, wanting to save face, moved the meeting to the school. The working-class crowd refused to play nice with them there, either. Students were quick to hang up signs that read “Our Education Over Your Dump” and “We Will Not Sacrifice Our Community/Playground/Education.”
They lined up to ask IDEM questions about how Maya Energy’s dump would affect not only the students’ health, but also the health of the surrounding community.
Students tied in themes of environmental racism and exploitation in their questioning. When one student asked, “Do you care about our well-being?” an IDEM official responded, “It’s not my authority to do so.”
All were angry at this response that laid bare the capitalist system’s fundamental contradictions. One parent said, “We are not trash. Gary is not for sale.”
The capitalist bosses and their lackeys can only be expected to make decisions that keep their system profitable, even as those decisions constantly result in the destruction of workers’ lives.
Towards the end of the meeting, a city boss took it upon himself to verbally attack everyone in the room, noting that “the school should have never existed” and telling parents to “be quiet” in order for him to continue talking.
The antiracist crowd immediately shut him down and chased him out of the meeting. The owner of Maya Energy showed up almost on cue to make his business pitch again, but we chased him off as well. It was a real glimpse at the potential of workers’ power, and the power we can have once we unite.
For environmental change, build communism
Capitalism’s racist impact on the environment doesn’t begin and end in Gary, Indiana. Globally we see the aftermath of the havoc the profit system has wreaked on communities where mostly Black and brown workers live. From the lead crisis in Flint, Michigan and East Chicago, to allowing the levees to collapse during Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, to annual flooding and mass displacement in South Asia, capitalism and workers’ health just don’t mix.
While workers and students called out the lying, manipulative nature of city officials and the system, they also spoke about reviving the environment in the same breath. Students led this discussion because before the Maya Energy struggle, many were learning about composting, alternative energy sources, and creating community gardens for their school and the city.
It remains our task as communists to connect these ecological projects and growing fightback to the need to build a mass PLP that will ultimately destroy capitalism, the fundamental source of environmental destruction. What we learn today will later help us build our egalitarian communist society, where workers’ collective health and the environment are the priority, not profit.