For the past six years, Leeds residents have dealt with the proliferation of “trash and noise and human sewage going into the water” at local swimming areas and have made reasonable requests to the city and private property owners for the timely remediation of these concerns.
Greta Jochem’s article “Reaching ‘a boiling point’” obfuscates the concerns of Leeds residents and reduces such concerns to “tensions” that are framed in terms of a false dilemma, namely the “question of who gets to swim.” This question is misleading, first, because it is based on a premise of accessibility, and as Orange Dam is private property, access by anyone other than the property owner constitutes trespass. Second, the tensions in Leeds are not grounded in the question of “who gets to swim”; instead, they have to do with littering/trash, defecation/human sewage, full diapers, noise, and an unwillingness of city leaders to commit to a management/mitigation plan that encourages responsible use of the river and conservation areas. Third, in utilizing Ward 7 Councilor Rachel Maiore’s observational and non-evidence based statement, “I sense some tension between the mostly white residents and the mostly people of color utilizing the swimming holes” and presenting her view as truth, Jochem shifts the focus of the tensions from the aforementioned issues to that of race and the perceived fear of the “mostly white residents,” a convenient red herring to employ.
Admittedly, there is tension between residents and people who utilize the swimming holes, and Maiore could have accurately identified the tension as occurring between residents and visitors/users who are abusing the river and surrounding neighborhoods, but she chose to racialize the issue and to bolster Jochem’s insistence upon perpetuating an unsupported race-based “us vs. them” dichotomy. To do so posits Leeds residents’ concerns with “trash and noise and human sewage going into the water” as unreasonable, as fear and race-based, and at odds with a “let people live” ethos that evidently applies to visitors to the rivers but not to Leeds residents, to those who enjoy the river responsibly and to the river ecosystem.
Erin Mahon-Moore
Leeds