Review: A Terrible Thing to Waste by Harriet A. Washington

A Terrible Thing to Waste is a deeply informative take on the ways negative environmental factors disproportionately affect people of color in America, this book mostly focuses on black populations as is alluded to by the title. Harriet A. Washington takes the reader through all sorts of pollutants and describes exactly how they have been unequally hoisted upon communities of color and then dives into the science of how these things affect the human body. She also ends the book with a wonderfully hopeful segment on how the system can be changed.

Being a science communicator is hard. You have to be able to walk the incredibly fine line of not talking down to the people who are experts in the field while simultaneously trying to convey exactly the right amount to information to make the layman reader understand and not feel overwhelmed or too stupid to keep listening. Harriet Washington does a fantastic job of this.

The introduction stars us off on the topic of IQ. I was mildly worried I was not going to enjoy this book because I knew just enough about IQ to be dangerous. But Washington takes the reader on a history of what IQ measures, its flaws and limitations, and defines its use in her book.

"Some question how critical IQ is. We’ve long known that IQ measurements, in the United States and around the world, are dramatically biased. We also know that it is not possible to administer the test in a manner that gives meaningful comparisons across a wide variety of cultures. Beyond this, the meaning of “intelligence” varies from culture to culture, it is multifactorial, and IQ tests provide an admittedly limited and biased measure of achievement, not the oft-touted innate ability." (page number to come)

"Although IQ scores are not a consistently accurate measure of intelligence, IQ is too important to ignore or to wish away. For Americans, IQ, usually measured by the Stanford-Binet and Wechsler scales, although there are many variants, has proven a predictor of success in school, social settings, work achievement, and lifetime earnings"(page number to come)

The way she addressed IQ was interesting, and it gave the reader a solid framework for the book.

Washington is very witty, the topic of this book obviously does not leave a lot of room for levity, but the way she addresses some areas of the book made me very interested in scrolling through her twitter, she seems like she is hilarious.

Back to the content. Washington takes the reader through different environmental factors that can be detrimental to humans health on multiple levels. She addresses the effects on our bodies and minds and then she dives into the statistics and case studies that show these factors have a higher chance of harming people of color, most often black and indigenous populations. Heavy metals (lots of talk about lead in specific), environmental neurotoxins, microbes, and other chemicals are all delved into during Part 2. She addresses how they harm adults, children, and fetuses, and how dangerously hard it can be to prove they are actually harming people, especially when those people are black.

I learned so much while reading this book. It was at times overwhelming with the amount of information I was being introduced to at once, but this book does not require you have an extensive scientific background to understand the point Washington is making.

Also, to alleviate the overwhelming amount of horrible reality you will be confronted with, Washington leaves the book on a hopeful note. She gives the reader specific things that can be done and writes hopefully about current and future political action to protect the minds and bodies of all vulnerable people.

When I picked this book up I did not know about her past books, now that I have read A Terrible Thing to Waste I will certainly be going through her backlist soon! I will be recommending this book to people interested in public health, structural racism, environmentalism, and nonfiction focused on science. I gave this book five stars on Goodreads. It is released on July 23rd, 2019.

ARC provided by NetGalley, all opinions are honest!