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Around the same time that the Breast Cancer Fund held its press conference on Capitol Hill urging Congress to devote more funds to environmental health research, the U.S. Navy was working to clean up Parcel A—a large tract of land in Hunters Point Shipyard (HPS), an EPA Superfund site. Located next to the Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood in southeast San Francisco, the shipyard was established in 1869 as the Pacific Coast’s first commercial dry dock. In 1940, the U.S. Navy bought the 936-acre property for its shipbuilding and repair efforts. After World War II, the navy used the shipyard for submarine service and testing, as well as nuclear weapons research. By 1976, it had ceased its operations and leased the bulk of HPS to Triple A Machine Shop, a privately owned ship repair firm, which subleased select buildings to other businesses. In 1986, Triple A Machine Shop faced allegations of improper waste disposal, which led the navy to shut the industry down, reoccupy the property, and assess the extent of toxic contamination at the site. The investigation found PCBs, solvents, pesticides, petroleum hydrocarbons, metals, and low-level radiation at various locations throughout the shipyard. Researchers attributed the pollution not only to Triple A but also to other businesses that had occupied the site and to the navy’s long-term activities there. The federal government declared HPS to be one of the nation’s worst Superfund sites and demanded that the navy remove the toxins from the property. In April 1999, the navy finally declared that it had completed the cleanup for Parcel A and that the land was ready for commercial development.1 The cleanup of Parcel A marked a significant step toward the cleanup of HPS, as it represented one of the largest sections of the site. That said, some Toxic Tours Move Indoors Race, Class, and Breast Cancer Prevention Chapter 6 137 residents received the news with skepticism. It had taken years of fighting to push the navy to complete its work, and the navy seemed to be dragging its feet on other cleanup projects. Then, officials did not alert residents to an August 16, 2000, landfill fire on Parcel E that emitted assorted chemicals and toxic gases into the air—at least not until residents began calling officials about the strange respiratory ailments and skin rashes that they were experiencing.2 Ultimately, HPS was only one source of toxic pollution in the community. Bayview Hunters Point is home to one of the heaviest concentrations of industry— and consequently, pollution—in San Francisco. Local activists have long believed that the community carries the burden of such industrial problems because its residents are mostly low-income people of color. These activists also suspect that the disproportionately high rates of various diseases within the community result from its heavy toxic load. One disease of particular concern is breast cancer, which is associated with various toxins found at HPS. Several studies conducted over the past fifteen years have found that breast cancer incidence rates in Bayview Hunters Point (BVHP) are equal to or greater than those in other parts of the region. One of the most notable studies was among the earliest. In 1995, the San Francisco Department of Health released a study finding that between 1988 and 1992 women under the age of fifty in BVHP suffered twice the rate of breast cancer incidence as that of women in the rest of the city. The study also noted that overall incidence rates of breast cancer in this neighborhood almost equaled those in Marin County.3 Like their Marin counterparts, BVHP residents have mobilized to address possible environmental causes of the disease in the community . Yet the breast cancer problem in BVHP has arguably garnered less public attention and action than has the problem in Marin, and media outlets in the San Francisco Bay Area, throughout the state, and across the nation have covered BVHP’s breast cancer problem less frequently than they have the situation in Marin.4 In certain respects, the case of environmental breast cancer in BVHP reflects broader dynamics that play out in the environmental breast cancer movement as a whole. Despite the best intentions of many activists, assorted factors have led the movement to orient much of its environmental breast cancer work toward white, middle-class women. Activists’ increasing efforts to integrate the needs of socially and economically marginalized women into the environmental breast...

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