• Public

  • Public
  • Network
  • Groups
  • Featured
  • Popular
  • People

Simon tells me about his rst trip to Hamlet, twenty years after the re, when he sat down with three local journalists who had covered the story at the time. All were older white men. “They all insisted to me that the re was an accident, and that it was caused by the owners of the plant, and that they were greedy, and if they were not greedy, nothing would have happened,” Simon says. But this simple story eliminates the history and politics that brought those workers to labor under those conditions. “Those people did not just end up in that plant that day. Historical forces brought a particular kind of person to that plant, and the fact that no one cared about them didn’t just begin that day.” Instead, Simon says, “what we call accidents are in some ways manufactured vulnerabilities.” The journalists Simon met in North Carolina, who insisted that the cause of the re was the owners’ greed, erased the way that race and class made the victims vulnerable. Those workers were vulnerable to taking any work they could get, being passed over for an OSHA inspection, and working under dangerous conditions—and they were vulnerable to being blamed for an accident. A