Yesterday (3.9) a Los Angeles Times story by Sammy Roth explained how thoughtless white commuters and city planners of yore have casually worsened pollution of the air breathed by low-income communities of color.

Would it be be fair to use the term “intentional racist pollution of lower-income Los Angeles air“?

“Many residents of the county’s whiter, more affluent neighborhoods — who were often able to keep highways out of their own backyards — commute to work through lower-income Black and Latino neighborhoods bisected by the 10, 110 and 105 freeways and more,” the story explains.

And so residents of these neighborhoods — Baldwin Hills, Compton, Inglewood, Watts, South Gate, Paramount, Huntington Park — breathe shittier air. Because of cavalier white racist commuters who think only of themselves.

Speaking as a former resident of West Hollywood who would occasionally drive on freeways through the crappy areas of Los Angeles, I am completely ashamed of myself. I didn’t mean to cause residents of color to develop breathing problems, but that’s what I wound up doing. Because I was a deplorable white person with a car, although I mostly drove a rumblehog.

If this was a Woody Allen film made in the early ’70s, it would end with men dressed in white uniforms chasing Roth down the street with huge mosquito nets and forcing him into a straightjacket.