The public history of the Flint water crisis (Part 1)
04 March 2016 – editors
Beach-Garland St-Flint River Bridge, Flint, MI, July 2010. Photo credit: Andrew Jameson
Environmental Racism and Lead Poisoning in Flint
I study environmental justice movements, both contemporary and historical. Lead (along with asthma) has been a central urban environmental health issue in the US that hits racial minorities and working-class people particularly hard. Lead is often thought of, for that reason, as an example of environmental racism. Here, geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s definition of racism is useful. She writes that racism is “the State Sanctioned and/or extralegal production of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” Lead poisoning, toxic exposures, and asthma death rates are very concrete examples of group-differentiated vulnerabilities, and why the Flint, Michigan, case is so high profile is because of the explicit way in which the state produced and exacerbated the problems of lead poisoning in Flint.
For historical context, I draw primarily from Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America’s Children, the definitive history of childhood lead poisoning in the US. In it, historians Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner narrate the sad story and contested politics about the prevalence of childhood lead poisoning and its devastating health impacts on children. As they recount, there has been an intense political debate of what to do about lead poisoning for decades, although the science is largely settled.
Lead poisoning has also been a focus of community-based activism, beginning in the 1960s by social justice groups and radical organizations, ranging from the Harlem Park Neighborhood Organization in Baltimore to the Young Lords and the Black Panthers. At the same time, public health advocates and doctors like J. Julian Chisolm, Jane Lin-Fu, and Herbert Needleman conducted important research, wrote reports, and sounded the clarion call about the problems of low-level lead exposure.
As Markowitz and Rosner demonstrate, the sad story of lead is emblematic of larger debates about public health as a field, since lead poisoning challenges paradigms of what constitutes health and disease (dosage effects) and financial debates about solutions (who pays and how is it done). The contest between children’s health and money remains sadly relevant in Flint. In our current political moment, reading public health histories like Markowitz and Rosner’s is like déjà vu.
~ Julie Sze is a Professor and the Director of American Studies at University of California, Davis. She is also the founding director of the Environmental Justice Project for UC Davis’ John Muir Institute for the Environment and in that capacity is the Faculty Advisor for 25 Stories from the Central Valley. She received her doctorate from New York University in American Studies.
Flint’s “Vehicle City” sign on a 1913 postcard. Photo credit: Flickr by Wystan
Invisible Flint
Like any good scholar, I am going to begin with a provocation. Despite the recent barrage that a myriad of media sources reports, Flint’s biggest problem is NOT lead. Comparatively, lead (even with a billion-dollar price tag) would be an easier fix. Rather, the fact that Flint’s residents were left to drink poisonous water for almost two years is symptomatic of a much larger issue that pervades places like Flint across the nation. Flint, Michigan, is invisible. Living with rotting infrastructure is nothing new to many Flint residents. Ask a number of people in Flint, and their cries for someone to assuage the progressively deteriorating quality of life in the city’s neighborhoods have gone unanswered for decades. This is especially true for Flint’s poorest and least white citizens.
It is truly impossible to appreciate this latest challenge without placing it in the historical context of a city that has been gradually disappearing from the radar of concerns that interest most Americans. In many ways, Flint began ignoring its own needs at a time when the city enjoyed its greatest successes. In the 1950s, General Motors was churning out some of America’s most popular cars from Flint production lines. While many reaped the rewards from a cozy relationship between a generous corporation and municipal government, a number of Flint’s residents were frozen out of the political economy that allowed many to step into a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. Racist hiring practices limited the employment choices of African Americans. Government policies combined with real estate practices to forestall neighborhood integration, which restricted black residents to deteriorated neighborhoods, serviced by over-crowded and inadequate schools. As a result, while a number of white Americans built wealth and, most importantly, were able to invest that wealth in subsequent generations, African Americans in Flint were frozen out of that opportunity.
Over time, this invisibility was exacerbated by the gradual deindustrialization of the city. From 1980 to 2010, Flint grew darker and poorer and increasingly disconnected from modern, middle-class American culture. By the time lead had leached into the drinking water, the city’s residents had been protesting overcrowded and underfunded schools, over-policing and under-protection, and deteriorating neighborhoods–all of which met with similar responses.
This lack of acknowledging Flint’s predominantly black citizenry is reflected in how historians have interpreted the city’s history for public audiences. Most sites around the city are dedicated to white industrialists. In the city’s three large archival collections, only a fraction contain Flint’s black voices. Visitors to the Sloan Museum, a regional history museum in Flint, would notice thousands of square feet dedicated to labor heritage, but civil rights in Flint merits only twenty feet of exhibit space–astounding, considering Flint was the first city to pass open housing legislation by popular vote. In an effort to make its distant exhibits more relevant, the Sloan Museum has erected an exhibit dedicated to the current water crisis, replete with public programming and regular updates for visitors. It is hoped that the current rash of visibility will provide some strategies for other historic sites and museums in Flint to make their content relevant and to engage an audience from which most Americans and public historians have turned away for years.
~ Thomas Henthorn is an assistant professor specializing in modern US history, urban history, and public history at the University of Michigan, Flint. He received his doctorate in history from Michigan State University in 2009.
Editor’s note: This series reflects multiple perspectives from public historians, environmental historians, and museum scholars on the emerging public history of the Flint water crisis that began in April 2014 but was not brought to light publicly until last summer. Details are still emerging, but this series aims to spark discussion among public historians about appropriate reactions to this event and others like it. Each post will pair two perspectives in a conversational format.