In the weeks since the toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, conservative pundits have managed to turn the conversation to their favorite topic: wokeness. In their view, the lack of media attention and federal emergency response from the Biden administration is proof that American elites care more about wokeness than the people living in the largely white, Trump-voting district.

But they’ve got it backward. In reality, the abandonment of East Palestine residents is something with which black and brown working-class communities across the country are all too familiar. Rather than accentuating their differences, the story actually highlights an experience that working-class people have in common: when profit-hungry and unscrupulous corporations dump toxic waste into communities, nobody comes to their rescue, harm is never fully redressed, and the perpetrators are rarely held accountable.

On February 14, Tucker Carlson told his viewers that because East Palestine is “overwhelmingly white and politically conservative” the federal government and the media don’t have much concern for the health of the people living there. “Imagine if this happened in, well, the favored cities of Philadelphia and Detroit,” he opined, “In both cases, had it affected the rich or the favored poor, it would be the lead of every news channel in the world.”