’Flint Is the Urban Crisis of the Century’: A Conversation With Anna Clark - Pacific Standard
▻https://psmag.com/environment/flint-is-the-urban-crisis-of-the-century
By now, Americans are generally familiar with the long-term disaster in Flint, Michigan, where lead in the drinking water highlights our nation’s failing infrastructure and the inadequacies of government’s current response to public-health crises. But to see Flint’s crisis fully, one must understand what Michigan resident and journalist Anna Clark calls “the American urban tragedy”—the history of segregation that has been built into the architecture of America’s cities for centuries. In her new book, The Poisoned City: Flint’s Water and the American Urban Tragedy, Clark digs deep into our nation’s industrial past to tell the story of Flint’s water alongside the story of our collective urban tragedy.
From Flint’s genesis as a functionally segregated auto manufacturing center, to the “white flight” inspired by desegregation in the 1960s, to the near vacancy of the city after General Motors auto plant closures in the 1990s, Clark details Flint’s rise and fall, and how its story is embodied in the lead that turned up in the water in 2014. When Michigan brought in an emergency manager to oversee the disastrous switch from treated water piped in via Lake Huron, to poorly treated water pumped from the notorious Flint River (all through pipes that hadn’t been used for decades), corrosive waterborne material came to poison the city’s citizens. But it was the poorer communities and communities of color that were disproportionately affected, and it’s these same communities where justice has taken the longest to prevail.
When we talk about cities, we are talking about people. For all the high-pitched coverage of Flint, sometimes the human stories—in all their range and contradictions and depth and beauty—have been lost in the noise. For decades this city has been made invisible and its voices dismissed. Nonetheless, the residents have continually shown up, worked together, shared knowledge, and advocated in every way they could imagine. They weren’t victims waiting to be rescued by someone else; they were agents of their own lives. I wanted not just to tell that story, but to show it.
Flint has a lot to teach the nation about the value of community organizing. No one single person has all the answers, nor should he have all the power. This is why transparency laws, strong independent journalism, clear environmental regulations, robust public institutions, and empowered community engagement are meaningful checks against corruption.