Residents are raising concerns about environmental impact…
You’re watching people stand up and fight for what’s being built in their community, but this fight really isn’t about just one project or one data center. It’s about the infrastructure that already decided who has power over those communities.
Dr. Robert Bullard, known as the father of environmental justice, has spent decades proving that these patterns.
He showed us that race is one of the strongest predictors of where hazardous and industrial developments are placed.”
When I say infrastructure, I’m talking about the systems that decide:
where people got to live and what resources they got access to. I go deep into the meaning of social infrastructure in my book.
Generations ago, this country decided where we could exist through the sundown infrastructure. We were placed into neighborhoods, and we didn’t get to freely choose where we ended up in. “The placement of the data centers can be traced to the sundown infrastructure.
Boundaries were drawn, and our resources were limited. Then our Mobility was controlled.
As Environmental justice scholar Dr. Beverly Wrights research shows once communities are segregated and under-resourced…
They become the easiest places to put things nobody else wants to see or smell.
If we look back, when we were forced into these neighborhoods and made them thrive, highways would be built that cut through our neighborhoods for white people to come back to the city after white flight ugh. I go into this my book.
Factories and dumps were built next to our communities polluting our land and air.
And now?
Data centers.
People in these communities, rightfully, have concerns about these new data centers…
companies like xAI are growing, quickly,
and they use insane amounts of electricity, and huge amounts of water.
So, systems set in place a few generations ago helps people like Elon musk layer inequality on our communities.
For many of us, we can’t afford to move out of the communities that we were forced into, and we’ve been dealing with injustice for many generations in those same communities.
We’ve built our communities up but those in power decided a long time ago that innovation won’t erase inequality. That’s documented throughout history.
Listen, we can’t fix what’s happening today…
if we don’t understand what built it.
And what built it… is infrastructure.
Go to my YouTube to see this in video form to see all the extra clips to help understand this story.
Until next time. Let’s learn.
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