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	kylenne 2008-07-13 08:06 pm UTC (link)
	Sounds like life on the rez. A lot of folks don't have running water or even electricity there. Every privileged ignoramus who swears we've "solved" racism in this country needs to read that story. (Reply to this)(Thread)

	notjo 2008-07-13 08:17 pm UTC (link)
	Yeah, and then they'll read to the bottom of the article and decide it's all LIES because of the 2nd last paragaph. ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGG. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	chaimonkey 2008-07-13 08:22 pm UTC (link)
	Near Zanesville? Big surprise there. (Reply to this)

	rennyn_alerothi 2008-07-13 08:34 pm UTC (link)
	WHAT. The. FUCK. D: (Reply to this)

cat_mcdougall
2008-07-13 08:58 pm UTC (link)

Landes countered that about half of Muskingum County residents are not tied into the public water system even today. Among those without it are county commissioners, judges and other prominent officials, he said.

Zanesville has about 25,000 residents on the edge of the state's Appalachian region. One in every five families is below the federal poverty level, and the unemployment rate in Muskingum County in May was 7.4 percent. The national unemployment rate that month was 5.5 percent.

Oh. So it's like Ashtabula county. Okay.

I'm not trying to downplay the racism here. I just thought the comparison interesting.

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	mcity 2008-07-13 10:26 pm UTC (link)
	That's it; this comm is now officially to depressing to keep on my FList. (Reply to this)(Thread)

	mcity 2008-07-13 10:27 pm UTC (link)
	*too depressing (Reply to this)(Parent)

	criticalcricket 2008-07-13 11:26 pm UTC (link)
	Seriously. The last six posts on my f-list were from this comm. I come to JF for distraction, not depression. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	miraba 2008-07-14 01:48 am UTC (link)
	Ditto. I think I'll be removing it for a while. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	zyna_kat 2008-07-14 11:48 am UTC (link)
	Yep. I thought this comm was about people acting batshit over unfunny business. It's become "bad news item of the day", or "four bad news items of the day". (Reply to this)(Parent)

also_not_a_pipe
2008-07-14 01:13 am UTC (link)

Hmm. I'm a little skeptical.

The article startled me at first, because I read the dateline and was going "Columbus? WTF?" (because Cincinnati and Dayton have reputations for being hysterical and wanky over their race issues but Columbus isn't so bad that way, see).

I didn't see any evidence in that story that jumps right out at me as blatant discrimination. The article says "Residents of a mostly black neighborhood in rural Ohio," not "white folks were getting water and black folks weren't." According to Google Maps, Coal Run is forty miles from the nearest city, and that's just Zanesville. For cities larger than 30,000 people you have to go 99 miles west to Columbus or 145 east to Pittsburgh. I used to live in that part of the state (fifty miles south of Coal Run, it looks like). Southeastern Ohio is just riddled with tiny little ten-person burgs that don't have public water. They're tiny, poor towns in a pretty rugged part of the state and can be hard to drive to, let alone lay pipe in. Even in Athens, which has a big university, I knew a lot of people who didn't get public utilities because of where they lived.

If the black residents asked for public water and didn't get it, that's one thing. If some people in town got water and others didn't, and the people who didn't lived in an equally accessible area, that's criminal. But having seen places like Coal Run, I don't immediately disbelieve the argument that this was a case made into something bigger than it actually was by out-of-town lawyers.

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cat_mcdougall
2008-07-14 02:27 am UTC (link)

Exactly. I live up along Lake Erie in the North Eastern part of the state (Ashtabula County) and we have quite a few places that don't have public utilities. It's a price you pay for rural living.

In fact, within the city limits of Conneaut (One of the bigger 'towns' in the county), they just, in the last five years, finally got three-quarters of the city on public sewer/water. Most were on wells/septic tanks. It's just one of those things you deal with.

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also_not_a_pipe
2008-07-14 04:28 am UTC (link)

I'm west of Dayton in Montgomery County now, and even being a pretty wealthy county for Ohio there are people not on anyone's city water here. As much as folks around here yowl about how Ohio is not either the hick state them liburls in California think it it, this state is still very, very rural. I'm not going to have adventures like the time I went hunting for Buckeye Furnace State Monument back east (Buckeye Furnace turned out to be four occupied houses, three abandoned ones, and I think a grocery store or an auto body shop. Seeing the monument involved driving up what was basically a narrow hiking trail along the side of a hill with a swampy stream at the bottom) here, but you still can't drive more than about fifteen to twenty minutes anywhere in the Dayton area without finding yourself surrounded by cornfields.

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melannen
2008-07-14 03:24 am UTC (link)

Yes, this. I grew up without public water and we're on the I-95 corridor right between Washington and Baltimore, in one of the most densely populated and richest areas of the country. Yeah, "not on public water" isn't the same thing as "no running water", though the article seems to be trying to give that impression.

That said... it's fully believable that there was insititutional discrimination involved, at least back in the 1950s when they were originally planning out the local public water system. At least part of the reason my area has such patchy utility coverage is that the original development of the area included some of the first black suburbs, so when the first big push for utilities came through in the '40s and '50s, it got skipped over. (Since the '60s it's been developed and redeveloped and that history is mostly hidden, but the traces of race-based policies are still all over the place if you can read the map. All over the *country*, in fact, once you learn to see them.)

So no, I doubt the city planners have spent fifty years cackling evilly as they forced the black people to bathe in mud puddles. I would believe, though, just from that article, that fifty years ago race-based decisions were made as to which tiny communities got subsidised infrastructure built, and since the people who lived there have been too poor, too uneducated, too intimidated (and too Black) to speak up about it until now, the discrimination has been allowed to passively perpetuate. That's still worth being angry about.

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also_not_a_pipe
2008-07-14 04:20 am UTC (link)

Oh, to be sure. Reading some of the associated articles linked on that page, it looks like there may be a Zanesville suburb called Coal Run they're talking about instead of the actual town of Coal Run, Ohio that I found on the map. If that's the case, there's no excuse for the city to have denied a neighborhood access to public utilities for so long. Even if it were the case that there was an old mining town that happened to be mostly black, I certainly wouldn't be surprised if the county hadn't tried as hard as it could to get them on the grid back then.

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	mercat 2008-07-14 07:00 pm UTC (link)
	WHAT THE HELL OHIO NOT COOL. (Reply to this)