A Terrible Thing to Waste

Harriet A. Washington’s A Terrible Thing to Waste confronts claims that racial differences in measured intelligence reveal inherited biological hierarchy. Drawing on reporting and scientific research about lead, heavy metals, air pollution, pathogens, deficient prenatal care, nutrition, and industrial waste, she redirects attention from genes to environments structured by racism. Black, Latinx, and Native communities are more likely to live and work near toxins, receive inadequate sanitation and healthcare, and have their injuries neglected by regulators. Cognitive harm is therefore neither natural nor randomly distributed; it is a political outcome of housing, labor, infrastructure, and environmental policy.

The book belongs in feminist analysis because toxic exposure travels through bodies and care relations. Pregnancy, childhood development, domestic work, neighborhood survival, schooling, and the unpaid labor of managing illness connect environmental racism to reproductive justice and women’s health. Washington also shows how racist science performs a second injury: institutions first create unequal conditions and then cite their consequences as evidence of group inferiority. Her use of IQ is deliberately tactical—she criticizes it as a biased and limited measure while using documented changes to make neurological damage publicly legible. That choice gives the argument force but also leaves a tension readers should examine rather than ignore.

The book is primarily a United States account and cannot substitute for environmental-justice histories elsewhere or for analysis of gender differences within affected communities. Nor should cognitive capacity become the measure of whose life deserves protection. Its most important contribution is causal and political: it makes supposedly individual deficits traceable to preventable exposure and institutional abandonment. For FemRes readers, Washington connects medical racism, environmental justice, and the politics of knowledge, showing that dismantling biological myths requires more than better ideas—it requires changing the material environments that make inequality enter the body.