Rabach VtP Annotation: Reading Toxicity

Toxicity is imagined as static and singular in many ways. X chemical company led to X pollution in X lake. In many ways the discussion ends there. The blame is pointed toward one individual, rather than looking at the multiplicity of factors that produced the chemical concentration in the first place, not the least to mention Congressman Bill Huizenga’s continued support of bills that lead to the deregulation of environmental standards, such as his votes to sponsorship and support of legislation like H.J. 41 which repeated a rule requiring oil and gas companies to disclose in detail payments to the government for commercial development or HJ Res. 38 that repeated stream protection rules.  This type of isolationist narrative continues with horrifically racist events that recently occured in my county. In Muskegon County in 2017 a noose was placed on the playground of an elementary school with a large black population and in the same year hate speech was graffitied on a high school in the area. Many conversations around these events labelled them as individual “incidents” and “to tie this to our President shows a special kind of stupid.” Just this year a long standing cop in Muskegon was exposed to have a shrine to the Ku Klux Klan in his home. Again, people spoke about this one person’s actions, not the structures that produced it.