Quests for Justice and Mechanisms of Suppression in Flint, Michigan (original) (raw)
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Organizing Under Austerity: How Residents' Concerns Became the Flint Water Crisis
Critical Sociology, 2018
What might it take for politically marginalized residents to challenge cuts in public spending that threaten to harm their health and wellbeing? Specifically, how did residents of Flint, Michigan contribute to the decision of an austerity regime, which was not accountable to them, to spend millions to switch to a safe water source? Relying on evidence from key interviews and newspaper accounts, we examine the influence and limitations of residents and grassroots groups during the 18-month period between April 2014 and October 2015 when the city drew its water from the Flint River. We find that citizen complaints alone were not sufficiently able to convince city officials or national media of widespread illness caused by the water. However, their efforts resulted in partnerships with researchers whose evidence bolstered their claims, thus inspiring a large contribution from a local foundation to support the switch to a clean water source. Thus, before the crisis gained national media attention, and despite significant constraints, residents' sustained organization—coupled with scientific evidence that credentialed local claims—motivated the return to the Detroit water system. The Flint case suggests that residents seeking redress under severe austerity conditions may require partnerships with external scientific elites.
Flint Fights Back: Environmental Justice and Democracy in the Flint Water Crisis
When Flint, Michigan, changed its source of municipal water from Lake Huron to the Flint River, Flint residents were repeatedly assured that the water was of the highest quality. At the switchover ceremony, the mayor and other officials performed a celebratory toast, declaring “Here's to Flint!” and downing glasses of freshly treated water. But as we now know, the water coming out of residents' taps harbored a variety of contaminants, including high levels of lead. In Flint Fights Back, Benjamin Pauli examines the water crisis and the political activism that it inspired, arguing that Flint's struggle for safe and affordable water was part of a broader struggle for democracy. Pauli connects Flint's water activism with the ongoing movement protesting the state of Michigan's policy of replacing elected officials in financially troubled cities like Flint and Detroit with appointed “emergency managers.” Pauli distinguishes the political narrative of the water crisis from the historical and technical narratives, showing that Flint activists' emphasis on democracy helped them to overcome some of the limitations of standard environmental justice frameworks. He discusses the pro-democracy (anti–emergency manager) movement and traces the rise of the “water warriors”; describes the uncompromising activist culture that developed out of the experience of being dismissed and disparaged by officials; and examines the interplay of activism and scientific expertise. Finally, he explores efforts by activists to expand the struggle for water justice and to organize newly mobilized residents into a movement for a radically democratic Flint.
ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2017
This research study examines the Flint water crisis to determine if Flint residents were the target of a degenerative policy. The study employs critical ethnography to explore the development and implementation of environmental water policy and investigate state-appointed legislator's decision to switch water sources in the city of Flint, Michigan, a predominantly low-income and minority community. In addition to using critical ethnography as a method, the study is interdisciplinary, integrating secondary data from news reports, governmental and nongovernmental documents, and budgets. The residents in Flint, Michigan water source was switched from Lake Huron (Detroit) a source used for more than 50 years to the Flint River. The water switch resulted in lead-contaminated water that poisoned more than 7,900 children and caused a widespread outbreak of Legionnaires' disease.
Environmental Injustice: Examining How The New York Times Frames the Flint Water Crisis
Ohio Communication Journal, 2020
Perceived as one of the current environmental controversies in the United States, the Flint water crisis represents a case of environmental injustice and has attracted public attention and scrutiny. Among mainstream news media outlets, The New York Times is the newspaper that has intensively published news stories addressing the issue. Using qualitative frame analysis as the method, the researchers examined the way in which The New York Times framed the Flint water crisis from when a federal state of emergency was declared in 2016 to the one-year anniversary of this declaration. Examining how the Flint water crisis is framed in a mainstream United States national newspaper is valuable, especially during major national environmental disasters, with holding public officials and government(s) accountable. The researchers found that the newspaper employed four major frames in its coverage: causes and effects, responsibility, remedial efforts, and health crisis. The significance of this research expands and contributes to timely and germane scholarship on coverage and framing of environmental injustice in the print news media. However, a small sample size (N = 29) is one of the limitations of this study.
Notre Dame Law Review, 2017
Officials replaced safe water sources with contaminated water sources for tens of thousands of people living in Flint, Michigan from April 2014 to October 2015. Overwhelming evidence indicates that the officials knew the water was potentially harmful to residents’ health and property. This unfathomable disregard for the residents of Flint sparked national outrage and prompted criminal charges as well as multiple civil suits. Residents’ civil claims included two strands of substantive due process: that the actions infringed residents’ fundamental liberty rights to bodily integrity and to state protection from harmful acts by third parties, and that the government actions “shocked the conscience.” The litigants also raised equal protection arguments that government targeted the community based on race and poverty. This Article makes three claims. First, it asserts that fundamental rights and equal protection arguments that challenge the denial of uncontaminated water face the serious,...
Detroit to Flint and Back Again: Solidarity Forever
Critical Sociology, 2017
For several years the authors have been working in Detroit with grassroots coalitions resisting Emergency Management. In this essay, we focus on how community groups in Detroit and Flint advanced common struggles for clean, safe, affordable water as a human right, particularly during the period of 2014 to 2016. We explore how, through a series of direct interventions – including public meetings and international gatherings, independent journalism and social media, community-based research projects, and citizen-led policy initiatives – these groups contributed to challenging neoliberal governance, to undermining the legitimacy of state officials and their policies, and to shifting public consciousness around the human right to water.
Governance, Rights, and Justice in Water: New Ideas and Realities (Sultana, Farhana; Loftus, Alex eds), 2019
In April 2014, residents of Flint, Michigan, noticed their water turning brown, green, and yellow. Immediately after being switched to the Flint River for austerity reasons, their tap water smelled and tasted foul. Soon the evidence began to mount that it was making them acutely ill: causing widespread lead poisoning and a deadly outbreak of Legionnaire’s disease. Meanwhile, households in nearby Detroit began having their water supply cut off. Over the subsequent years, both cities experienced what can only be described as a water crisis. Drawing on fieldwork and documentary research, this chapter argues that not only were these water crises linked, but they were a direct result of the democratic deficit caused by structural racism and the ‘financialisation’ of governance. In both Detroit and Flint, the imposition of austerity through the antidemocratic means of Emergency Management has been influenced by systematic and structural racism, and the effects on residential water services have also reflected this democratic deficit and racialized political landscape. In this way, the situation in both cities, including the right to water campaigns that have developed in response, is remarkably similar to water justice issues in cities, such as Johannesburg, across the Global South.
Lessons and Policy Implications from the Flint Water Crisis
Center for Social Development Policy Brief, 2019
The purpose of this brief is to describe the shortcomings of Michigan’s EM system and inform policymakers on potential improvements for its eventual replacement. We first frame the EM system within the logic and practice of urban austerity politics. Next, we demonstrate how emergency manager policies are not race-neutral approaches to solving urban financial crises. Rather, historically oppressed groups—and African Americans in particular—tend to absorb its costs. We conclude by considering what the Flint water crisis suggests about policy mechanisms that might prevent future environmental health crises, outlining the role of social workers in this process.