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Flint water crisis

It's time to speak up about racism in Flint water crisis: Column

A now predominantly African-American city of 100,000 shoulders the costs of a city built for twice as many.

Nancy Kaffer
Detroit Free Press
A Flint City Council meeting on Feb. 3, 2017.

Imagine what would happen if Michigan's self-proclaimed nerd governor, a white Republican businessman from Ann Arbor, held the Michigan Civil Rights Commission's report on Flint in his hands and said yes — yes, systemic and institutional racism created Flint, and the Flint water crisis. Yes, implicit bias played a role in how, and when, we responded. Yes, we have to learn, as a state, to do better.

That's how we could avoid another crisis.

The commission's 138-report answers a question that's often asked in the wake of the Flint water crisis — could the water supply of a wealthier, whiter city, places like West Bloomfield or Birmingham, have been poisoned with lead? Could government have carried on, oblivious, for years as residents complained about water that looked and smelled terrible, that tasted bad, as test results began to show the city's water supply had become dangerously compromised?

The answer, obviously, is no. But it's equally important to understand, the commissioners wrote, not just the implicit bias that allowed the Flint water crisis to endure, but how systemic and institutional racism created the conditions that allowed the crisis to happen.

The commission was careful to use the word racism only where it applies, and to clearly explain the difference between a deliberate act of racism, and the consequences of a racialized system built to reliably produce racially disparate outcomes.

The report roots the Flint water crisis in America's openly racist past, in the discriminatory housing policy that opened the doors of home ownership to whites, while consigning African-American Flint residents to a handful of overcrowded and deteriorating neighborhoods, and in the coded language of the decades that followed, when blatant bigotry was masked by coded concern for neighborhood stability, or property values. As black Flint residents moved into white neighborhoods, whites left. As whites left, so did the city's tax base, leaving a now predominantly African-American city of 100,000 to shoulder the costs of a city built for twice as many.

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That the departure of General Motors dealt another blow to the city, that Flint's budget hit the skids hard, that the city became a candidate for a state takeover and the installation of appointed emergency managers whose cost-cutting work meant pumping Flint River water while a new, supposedly more affordable, regional system was under construction — all logically follows from American's racially troubled past.

Far from finding outright racism at work in the Flint water crisis, the commission documented something that's far more insidious — the end result of a system that, for centuries, has placed a weighted value on who matters, who merits credulity, and who can be dismissed with little consequence.

These are the kinds of uncomfortable truths it's hard for some white folks to accept. But it's the baseline of understanding required for any of us to start to heal.

Gov. Rick Snyder's office issued a tepid reply to my inquiry for comment on the report.

"Some findings of the report and the recommendations are similar to those of the Flint Water Advisory Task Force, the legislative panel and the Flint Water Interagency Coordinating Committee," spokeswoman Anna Heaton wrote in an e-mail. "The governor takes the reporting of each of these panels very seriously, and appreciates the public input that was shared. He has appointed an Environmental Justice Work Group to build on this work and conduct their own review statewide. We have been and continue working to build strong relationships between state government and every community we serve to ensure a crisis of this magnitude never happens again in Michigan."

The commission's report recommends that state government modify the emergency manager law, requiring managers to address causes, not just symptoms; that state government train employees to recognize their own implicit bias, so they can equitably serve all the Michigan residents to whom they should be answerable; a truth and reconciliation commission, to develop and share a narrative of Flint's crisis that all residents can accept the truth of; regional policy-making that doesn't divide concentration of wealth along artificial boundaries; a framework for equitability and investment.

"You can’t build policy, you can’t build practice, if we're going to remain in these isolated places, not know one another as a common humanity," said La June Montgomery Tabron, president and CEO of the Battle Creek-based W.K. Kellogg Foundation, which launched a Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation effort last year, and says Kellogg is willing to support a similar effort in Flint.

"The truth is not appealing. And the truth is where the reaction may be strongest at the beginning. If you’ve been in denial and you hear something that is contrary to your beliefs, the first reaction is to discount, and to judge. You need to bring people together to reflect and reconcile stories around that this truth is a truth that needs to be reckoned with."

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The point of that effort isn't to blame or shame one race or class, Tabron said, but to allow honest discussion that yields new perspective.

And for acknowledgement.

"It is paramount," Tabron said. "The first value in that is that it makes those who have been the victim visible again. And it actually affirms their identity, which is at the core of this work. That’s the truth of that work — validating one’s stories is the starting point of where we believe change happens."

That's why it's so important for folks who don't live in Flint, for residents of those whiter, wealthier communities —  that never seem to contend with environmental injustice like a poisoned water supply or a noxious incinerator or a landfill in the backyard — to speak up and to acknowledge the reality that led to the Flint water crisis.

When victims of systemic injustice speak up, it's easy not to listen. If Rick Snyder said it, who might listen?

Nancy Kaffer is a columnist for the Detroit Free Press, where this piece first appeared.

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