The Flint Water Crisis: Environmental Racism and the Hidden American Third World Samuel D. Holder | PhD in Law
In April 2014, Michigan governor Rick Snyder made the historic decision to switch the water supply for Flint, Michigan – a city struggling to recuperate from the auto industry decline in the 1970s and 1980s – from the Detroit Water Treatment Department to the Flint River. Despite intense concerns over contamination, primarily regarding industrial waste from the nowsclerotic manufacturing sector, the Flint City Council approved the switch in an overwhelming 7: 1 vote. As a result, tens of thousands of residents of the already overburdened city are now enduring the consequences of debilitating lead poisoning. While the governor and city officials are contrite and quick to suggest solutions, they refuse to acknowledge the more insidious element of the switch: the creeping racism of environmental action in the invisible American Third World. Franz Fanon described the condition of violence in colonised spaces as‘ atmospheric’. This paper attempts to advance three central arguments: 1) The lack of political power and the socioeconomic vulnerability of communities of colour, such as Flint, provide a ripe ground for environmental violence and racism. 2) As a near-invisible political space, Flint and its residents offer a chance for the“ exceptional” nature of colonised action to play out, particularly through ghettoisation. 3) Exceptionalising Flint as a subaltern space works by denying residents their most basic human needs in concert with myriad policies stripping subaltern Flint residents of territory, power and dignity, and instead maintains the Global Northern perspective that such spaces are in need of civil rights reform, not human rights. This project attempts to problematise the water crisis in Michigan as illustrative of the larger problem of subaltern American cities, often demonised and punished with the help of neocolonial tools.
Keywords | Flint • subaltern • spatial invisibility • environmental racism • human rights
Introduction
Flint, Michigan has been undergoing a rapid population loss since the 1970s, primarily due to the decline of the automotive industry in the 1970s and 1980s. In a formerly rising urban center of nearly 200,000 residents, the population now hovers below 98,000. The immense loss of employment during the exit of major manufacturers like General Motors and Buick, further complicated by the white flight of middle-class residents into suburban districts outside the city center, has left the city struggling to meet its tax obligations. The loss of a strong tax base and the marginalisation of a minority community in Flint also complicates the availability and
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