A Terrible Thing to Waste ― Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind

A powerful indictment of the notion of hereditary intelligence, A Terrible Thing to Waste shows how environmental racism drives the black-white IQ gap and explains what can be done to remedy its toxic effects on marginalized communities.

The 1994 publication of the The Bell Curve and its controversial thesis catapulted the topic of genetic racial differences in IQ to the forefront of renewed and heated debate. Now, in A Terrible Thing to Waste, award-winning science writer Harriet A. Washington adds her incisive analysis to the fray. She takes apart the spurious notion of intelligence as an inherited trait, pointing instead to environmental racism -- a confluence of institutional factors that relegate marginalized communities to living and working near sites of toxic waste, pollution, and urban decay -- as the prime cause of the reported black-white IQ gap. Investigating the deleterious heavy metals, neurotoxins, deficient prenatal care, bad nutrition, and pathogens as the main factors influencing intelligence, Washington explains why certain communities are so disproportionally affected and what can be done to remedy the problem.

Featuring extensive scientific research and Washington's sharp, lively reporting, A Terrible Thing to Waste is sure to outrage, transform the conversation and inspire debate.

Harriet A. Washington has been the Shearing Fellow at the University of Nevada's Black Mountain Institute, a Research Fellow in Medical Ethics at Harvard Medical School, a senior research scholar at the National Center for Bioethics at Tuskegee University, and a visiting scholar at DePaul University College of Law. She has held fellowships at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Stanford University. She is the author of Deadly Monopolies, Infectious Madness, and Medical Apartheid, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Oakland Award, and the American Library Association Black Caucus Nonfiction Award.