Noam Chomsky:Foreword

Excerpt from No Fear: A Whistleblower’s Triumph Over Corruption and Retaliation at the EPA by Marsha Coleman-Adebayo courtesy of Chicago Review Press. Materials presented here cannot be distributed without written consent of the publisher.

Noam Chomsky:Foreword

With Marsha Coleman-Adebayo’s book, we now have the benefit of the records she kept as an insider within the seat of power from about the mid-nineties, as well a US federal court transcript that put US foreign policy makers under oath at trial. We also have her account of progressing from the politically organized working class in Detroit of the 1960s through an elite education at Barnard Collegeand her doctoral program at MIT, during which I sat on her dissertation committee. Her professional working experience includes fieldwork for the United Nations, senior policy analysis for international affairs for the Congressional Black Caucus, work as a senior social scientist for Africa at the World Wildlife Fund, and senior policy analysis for the Environmental Protection Agency. Her activism intertwined with a professional career spanning from the latter part of the civil rights movement as a high school student, to the environmental movement of the eighties, through her activism in the antiapartheid movement in the nineties.

Dr. Coleman-Adebayo was the US official to whom the first reports of illness and death relating to vanadium mining were given by black South African union leaders, and later by the new environmental leadership within the Nelson Mandela government. As she discusses, the US government ignored these reports, choosing to protect the American-owned and multinational corporations that were operating in South Africa. The reports included instances of tongues turning green, bronchitis, asthma, bleeding from nearly every orifice of the body, and impotence in young, healthy male workers. Even after the U.S./South Africa Binational Commission (BNC) agreed that a team of experts from the United States would investigate these reports, no serious investigation ever occurred. Instead, EPA dispatched a single veterinarian to care for its new, black African partners, as the United States focused all its serious efforts and resources on developing a private sector project.

Excerpt: Chapter1 “Welcome to EPA: Consider Yourself an Honorary White Man”

About a week later I went to Alan Sielen’s office for my annual performance review. During my maternity leave, Paul Cough had been given a noncompetitive promotion, making him my supervisor, although Paul had neither my experience nor my educational background. When I mentioned this to Sielen, he was incredulous.

“There you go again,” Sielen said, “complaining. Look, you’re an intelligent woman. You know how to prevent pregnancy. How can you let yourself get pregnant and still expect to compete with a man?” He wasn’t done. “No wonder people think you’re hard to get along with. People around here are starting to think you’re uppity.”

“Uppity, Alan? Do you know what that means?”“Yes, I know what it means.”

“Who have you heard say that they think I’m uppity?”

“The other day Alan Hecht told me he thinks you’re uppity.”

Alan Hecht was Sielen’s boss. He hardly even knew me.

I didn’t think it could get worse but it did.

Marsha! Hecht said furiously, as I walked into his office in the executive suite that he shared with Bill Nitze, a Clinton appointee and the assistant administrator of EPA Office of International Activities. Why don’t you just go down to the office of civil rights and file a complaint? I wasn’t sure if I was interrupting the rantings of a lunatic or I was an invisible visitor in a conversation Allan was having with himself. Hecht was yelling at the top of his lungs and banging his fist on the table he sat behind.

“Alan, what are you talking about, I repeatedly asked. I felt ambushed, paralyzed, trapped. I couldn’t get enough air in my nostrils and my stomach felt like a soccer punch had hit me. He was so self absorbed in his own conversation that I don’t think he heard me ask what was he talking about. I cautiously sat down, looking around the room for a window or any alternative route of escape, hoping that one of the secretaries would open the door to investigate the shouting and banging in Hecht’s office

“We didn’t have these kinds of problems until “you” people came here,” he said.

“What are you talking about? I had no idea-“ I tried to interject but his yelling intensified, his face getting closer and closer to mine. I could feel the heat radiating from his skin and I could smell and feel particles of recently ingestedtune. His eyes were bulging and his face had turned a bright red. He had worked himself into a state of self-induced frenzy. Pounding the table, he yelled again, “Just file a complaint! I’m sick of this!”

“Stop shouting at me! “I demanded with equal force using every nerve in my body to steady my voice; hoping that he wouldn’t hear my voice quaking.

I stared him down “get out of my face!” I said slowly but firmly.

He moved back, finally I could breathe for the first time since entering his office.

“Marsha, one of your colleagues told me that you made an inappropriate comment at the last Africa team meeting. This kind of behavior will not be tolerated, do you understand!” His voice had started to rise again.

“Allan, you’ve got the wrong black person – Franklin attended that meeting not me.” I quickly picked up my notepad and headed for the door, “the next time you decide to call someone in and yell at them, I suggest you get the right person because we don’t all look alike!”

Franklin was over 6’2 and a man.

I reached my office reeling from a cocktail of disbelieve and anger. I contemplated calling the police but in the process of second guessing myself I worried that my colleagues would consider this akin to treason, weak; bitching, unprofessional and definitely a career ender. But, what I knew, without any hesitation, was that I would never allow myself to be alone in a room with this man again.

I called Segun it was difficult to tell him what had just happened between the sobs and hyperventilation. There was a pause – deep sorrowful breathing and then silence.

“Just come home, Marsh, come home. “

Chapter 23: Discrimination or Disappointment?

Excerpts from the official court transcript of

Coleman-Adebayo v. Carol Browner

“Now, you recall, don’t you, Dr. Hecht, having a session with Marsha Coleman-Adebayo where you screamed at her? You called her in specifically to raise your voice to her?” [said attorney David Shapiro, representing Dr. Coleman-Adebayo]

“Yes.”

Ms. [Wyneva] Johnson [representing the Department of Justice] rose to object. “Your Honor, beyond the basis!”

“Well, I’m assuming that there’s some issue that will be tied up. Continue.”

“I recall an incident in which I yelled at her, yes.”

David fixed his eyes on Hecht.“You banged on the table?” David pantomimed hitting the table with his fist. The jury sat frozen in their seats.

“That, I’m not certain about,” Hecht said, suddenly aware of his own size and shifting his weight in his seat. David’s voice rose, demonstrating a man’s yelling.

“It was just the two of you in the office, wasn’t it?” David demanded.

“Yes.”

“You called her in specifically to raise your voice to her.”

“Yes, I did!”

I watched the women jurors, who, to a person, sat back stiffly. Two of them looked at me with furrowed brows, near bursting into tears. Before that incident, I had never experienced being assaulted by a man. Whether these women ever had been or not, they conveyed a sense of their wanting to hold me, protect me, of feeling for themselves the humiliation of being pinned unexpectedly inside a closed office by a much larger, much stronger man, his spit and sweat flying as he bellowed in their faces. Once again I felt the shame that had kept me from calling the police that day, as if it were me who were guilty.

Again I felt the fear that senior managers at OIA instilled with yelling, name calling, and physical threats during meetings. I looked back at the women in the jury and tried not to cry, remembering being hysterical when I called Segun, babbling, and him telling me to come home.

As Hecht left the witness stand, he seemed naked. His face was red and tight. He had to wait for the clerk who had a folder for the judge. Hecht stood briefly with his hands crossed in front of himself like they were cuffed, then put one in his pants pocket, removing it again and looking down as he walked quickly out of the courtroom.

Afterword by Rev. (Congressman) Walter E. Fauntroy

…Just as America had not seen Rosa Parks coming in 1955, in 1995 America did not see another black woman, this one named Marsha, coming either. This time, a Barnard College graduate and MIT-trained social scientist who had benefited from Rosa’s stand stepped forward. This time the means of transportation was not the back of a segregated bus but Air Force Two, and the scene of the discrimination was in the highest reaches of the American government. This time, the jurisdiction would not be a single white judge in the Deep South it would be the federal court system in Washington, D.C…..

In a variation on the theme the government employed at Marsha’s trial, two African-American women now run the two office that were pivotal during Marsha’s struggle at EPA: Lisa Jackson is EPA administrator; and Michelle DePass is the assistant administrator of the Office of International Activities. Both of these women are wont to quote civil rights heroes. It is easy to quote the dead. But neither has acknowledged their own indebtedness to the African-American woman who preceded them at EPA and made their appointments not only necessary but – from the perspective of the status quo – inevitable.