There Are No Accidents
The Deadly Rise of Injury and Disaster—Who Profits and Who Pays the Price
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- 169,00 kr
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- 169,00 kr
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A journalist recounts the surprising history of accidents and reveals how they’ve come to define all that’s wrong with America.
We hear it all the time: “Sorry, it was just an accident.” And we’ve been deeply conditioned to just accept that explanation and move on. But as Jessie Singer argues convincingly: There are no such things as accidents. The vast majority of mishaps are not random but predictable and preventable. Singer uncovers just how the term “accident” itself protects those in power and leaves the most vulnerable in harm’s way, preventing investigations, pushing off debts, blaming the victims, diluting anger, and even sparking empathy for the perpetrators.
As the rate of accidental death skyrockets in America, the poor and people of color end up bearing the brunt of the violence and blame, while the powerful use the excuse of the “accident” to avoid consequences for their actions. Born of the death of her best friend, and the killer who insisted it was an accident, this book is a moving investigation of the sort of tragedies that are all too common, and all too commonly ignored.
In this revelatory book, Singer tracks accidental death in America from turn of the century factories and coal mines to today’s urban highways, rural hospitals, and Superfund sites. Drawing connections between traffic accidents, accidental opioid overdoses, and accidental oil spills, Singer proves that what we call accidents are hardly random. Rather, who lives and dies by an accident in America is defined by money and power. She also presents a variety of actions we can take as individuals and as a society to stem the tide of “accidents”—saving lives and holding the guilty to account.
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Journalist Singer debuts with a trenchant study of the root causes of accidents. Noting that there are 173,000 accidental deaths in the U.S. each year, Singer argues that these incidents are the "predictable result of unequal power in every form—physical and systemic." She points out that a car striking a pedestrian inspired such outrage in the early 1920s that drivers were dragged from their cars and beaten by crowds of bystanders, and explains how in response the automobile industry "popularized the idea of ‘jaywalking' both as an insult and as law" to redirect blame away from vehicles and their operators. She also describes how the passage of America's first workers' compensation laws in 1911 led corporations to push the idea that "clumsy, irresponsible, or drunk workers" were to blame for accidents. Elsewhere, Singer discusses how "racist planning policies," including the building of highways "straight through Black neighborhoods" in the 1930s and '40s, create hazardous conditions that lead to traffic fatalities and other accidents and contribute to the kind of "racist stigma" that blames Black and Latino victims while absolving whites. Ultimately, Singer advocates for accident prevention policies rooted in the idea that "you cannot prevent human error, but you can control the built environment to prevent injury and death." Lucid and well researched, this is an eye-opening call for rethinking the nature of accidents.
