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> Postwar US Uranium mines in Arizona and Utah also used Dine (Navajo) and other native peoples with similar levels of racism, exploitation, leaving thousands of people sick etc.

Not exactly just exploiting minorities. My grandpa died because he mined Uranium post-war, but he was white and afaik so was everyone he worked with.

>Not exactly just exploiting minorities.

They didn't say "just" or "only" minorities. However, most of the mines were located on or near, Navajo land and over 4 million tons of ore came for that land. The workers were disproportionately Navajo and the land is now poisoned with radioactive waste from the mining, with cancer rates doubling from the 1970s to the 1990s. Land the Navajo were forced onto. Recognizing the damage this has done to an already persecuted minority population does not negate damage done to individuals of other races or ethnicities.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/04/10/4735472...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3222290/

Only one worth mentioning though apparently

When someone says "wow, something terrible happened to me and I'm very upset" you don't have to respond "Well what about me? My life is hard too!"

Does this have something to do with the article? It reads like a random "mining is racist" rant which has set off some fighting.

The subtitle of the article is "A mine in the Northwest Territories provided much of the uranium used during the Manhattan Project—unbeknownst to the indigenous people who worked there." So broader commentary on uranium mining in other places using indigenous peoples is relevant and using history to compare to modern day is relevant.

Mining isn't racist necessarily, but it is definitely done by exploiting people, and in ways that line up with the power structure at that place and time.

My wife did her (pharmacy) residency at a hospital in West Virginia, which is both incredibly poor, exploited heavily for coal mining (until the recent fracking boom surge in natural gas killed it), and very white. She definitely spent a lot of her time treating black lung and other mining diseases that didn't involve mining for uranium.

Mining exploits the land, it exploits the people who do it, and our civilization is built on it and absolutely requires enormous quantities of it. I don't have a larger point, just that I try to live with it.

So does a community that allows a mining operation to "exploit" it have any say in the matter? Is it possible that the operating brings new jobs to the community that wouldn't have existed otherwise?

Complex question, one of personal morality and judgement, the sort of thing that everyone has to answer for themselves.

For myself, the concerns I have are about consent: how well are the risks explained to and understood by all parties involved, and what happens if one of the parties says no (especially the less powerful group). It should in theory be possible to mostly resolve those issues with consent, though in practice, even among adults it seems we have trouble with it, as the original article makes clear.

There are some philosophers who point out that a lot of the suffering from these sorts of trade-offs are actually felt by people who aren't even born yet- those who grow up amid the dust and debris, those exposed in utero, etc. which raises all sorts of even more difficult questions about consent.

Again, I have no answer for this, but I think it is good practice for humans to at least regularly think about these sorts of moral trade-offs being made by our civilization, because we each have our own point where we have to be the one who walks away from Omelas.

The risks around radioactive materials were very poorly understood at the time, and were largely learned by lethal trial and error.

The Manhattan Project was done to end a war killing tens of thousands of people a day, which I think can defend some grim tradeoffs.

I won't claim all workers were well treated, but many scientists were also killed and injured in this learning process.

More importantly than that, where is the intent that proves racism? Any bad outcome for a minority does not mean there was racism.

The risk was very much known, as all male miners died at about 45. It was called the miners disease. Eg the nazis promised the Jachimov miners to close it, so they won their support. When the Russians kept it going and expanded it, the risk was still known, and simple measures could have saved thousands of lives, but they didn't care.

Shinkolobwe Mine in the Belgian Congo [0].

> This secrecy was maintained long after the end of the war. “Efforts were made to give the message that the uranium came from Canada, as a way of deflecting attention away from the Congo..."

> Under Belgian rule, Congolese workers toiled day and night in the open pit, sending hundreds of tonnes of uranium ore to the US every month.

[0]: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200803-the-forgotten-mi...