I don’t think it was race; Flint is almost 40% white. I think it was MDEQ and other state and city officials not wanting to admit the colossal mistake that they had made at the outset (switching sources without treating the water), sort of like a kid who breaks a rule and then tells bigger and bigger lies to avoid having to take responsibility for his initial poor judgment. Racism is not needed in order to explain that sort of behavior, just self-interest and a (possibly criminal) lack of ethics.
The color of his skin is black, but the content of his character is pure whitie.
No, I didn’t ignore your second paragraph. I rejected it. In Los Angeles County, there has been an ongoing methane gas leak mixed other toxins in an upscale area called Porter Ranch. The issue dragged on for months before government officials stepped into the matter. The full extent of the health problems that may arise may not be known for years. I assume Occupy Democrats/ Uncut Democrats / and Tin Foil Democrats haven’t made it a political issue because they can’t find a Republican to blame for this. Why not call California Governor Jerry Brown a murderer too?
My post you responded to was sloppy both factually and in how it was worded. I was just trying tonrespond to the general criticism of an EM. I realize Earley and his 2 or 3 direct predecessors were appointed under a new law by Snyder, but Flint had an EM between 2002-2004 under Grandholm. I don’t think appointing an EM is a job any governor wants, they do so because they have no choice.
Well you rejected my first one too, but didn’t stop you from addressing it.
I have no idea who or what groups are protesting the methane leak in CA, if any. I suppose it’s up to the people out there to decide who is responsible for that, and act accordingly. Go ahead and start a thread to complain about a lack of anger and protesting there, or a thread praising the calm level heads of California for not jumping to conclusions on that problem-- I don’t give a shit.
The people here in Michigan are looking squarely at Gov. Rick Snyder, who set this up through his EM legislation, the people he hired, his lack of action, etc. I guaran-fucking-tee that if the people of West Bloomfield, Novi, Holland, Ann Arbor or Milford were complaining about their discolored, foul water, it wouldn’t take two years for the state to believe them and do something about it. The people in those cities actually have the money and connections to cause political damage to the Republicans in charge.
If the people of Flint had local control of their city when this all went down, the anger would be entirely different. But when the Republicans pushed through the Emergency Manager law-- after it was soundly rejected by voters two months earlier and then made “repeal proof” though adding a financial component to the legislation-- many people feared this sort of thing would happen.
When there’s no local control or accountability, and a revolving door of appointed administrators who answer only to the governor, then who is actually looking out for the people living there? Obviously, no one was, because no one took the complaints seriously, the state blew them off, the elected city government had absolutely no power to do anything about it, and now everyone’s pointing fingers.
And to say race doesn’t come into this because 40% of the city is white-- Flint ranks eighth on a list of cities (population 100,000+) with most African-Americans nationally. It’s 60% black! With large chunks of the city at 50, 60, 70 or 80% poverty.
And if you think the only people making this a big deal are fringe Democratic groups, your idea of who is fringe needs to be adjusted. And it also says something when no Republican-leaning or conservative organizations are up in arms about the fact that a city in the United States doesn’t have access to water without fucking lead in it, and hasn’t had access to water without fucking lead in it for over two years.
Listen, I don’t think Snyder’s an evil guy, he’s just weak, incompetent and plutocratic. And he fucked up royally-- how much he fucked up will likely be revealed in the days ahead.
But don’t you know that if there’s even one white person living in the city then race can’t possibly be a factor?
I just saw these pictures today of what the water looked like in Flint during the worst of it. Holy shit, that’s far below third-world bad.
This talk about water filters? Can you filter something that is dissolved into the water? Wouldn’t the water have to be distilled to have any effect on the lead content? I can grasp how filtering might remove flakes and chunks of lead, but isn’t it the lead that is already merged with the water that is the problem?
What am I missing here?
I don’t know the details of the way they planned on treating the water, but you don’t have to distill water to remove unwanted ions. There are processes like the use of ion exchange resins that will do the job by simply passed the water through a cartridge filled with resin particles. It looks just like passing the water through a filter cartridge that removes particles on the basis of sizer, so I could easily see people calling it “filtering”
Perhaps you’ve heard the expression “never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to incompetence.” I think that’s applicable in this case.
Which is most likely:
A) An entire network of government officials hates black people to such a virulent degree that they would happily risk the health and well-being of ~40,000 white people just to ensure that 60,000 black people suffer.
B) An entire network of government officials is so imbued with incompetence and a CYA attitude that once this whole fiasco was set in motion (by the decision to use untreated Flint River water), they refused to lift the lid on the problem until they were absolutely forced to do so by the rising tide of complaints from the public and from external investigators. My guess is you’ll say “well, it’s not that they hate black people, it’s just that they don’t care about them.” The implication there would be that they do care about white people. This does a poor job of explaining their behavior, since they have injured the health of everyone in Flint; it would appear they don’t care about white people or black people in that city. IOW, their indifference is equal-opportunity.
You may argue that black people in Flint tend to be poorer, so tend to live in cheaper residences, which tend to be older residences, which tend to be the ones with lead supply pipes. In other words, the water crisis has had a disproportionate impact on the black residents of Flint. While that may be true, do you really think all of the officials involved in all of this - the mayor, the emergency manager, the MDEQ officials, the EPA officials - were smart enough to perform this detailed mental calculus and come to the conclusion that “it’s mostly affecting just the black people, I’m confident we can sweep this under the rug,” but were not smart enough to anticipate the huge public/media uproar that would develop?
People who assert racism as an explanation are attributing the government with an impossible blend of malice, indifference, intelligence, and stupidity, when the whole fucking thing is most easily explained by pure stupidity.
Racism is a subtle thing, usually emotional, and often unintentional and unconscious. If a middle class, or upper class, white has an image in their mind of a city consisting to a large extent of poor minorities, they may not feel as emotionally connected as they would if they thought of the residents as being just like themselves. This isn’t necessarily intentional or deliberately malicious. Yes, there are lots of whites, including middle and upper class, in Flint and one would assume that a racist would take that into account, but we’re not talking about rational analysis, we’re talking about an unfortunate side of human nature which isn’t always rational.
Even if you put race aside, upper class people often don’t identify with a working class city like Flint, regardless of race.
Do I think that any of this was done deliberately? No. Do I think that facts were hidden and feet were dragged because someone consciously thought “these are black people, they don’t matter”? No. Do I think that it’s possible that people didn’t feel as much urgency because it was Flint and because it has a large black population? Yeah, I think that’s a possibility.
In any case, regardless of the causes or motivations, the obfuscation and delaying are unforgivable.
To accuse people of unconscious racism sounds a lot like kafkatrapping.
You’re saying that it’s possible that all of these officials together - the mayor, the governor, the emergency manager, the state DEQ officials, and the federal EPA officials - all felt this way? What are the odds of such a confluence of race-based indifference, versus the odds of widespread incompetence and CYA behavior?
In my previous post, I allowed for the possibility of subtle and/or overt racism too. And then I dismissed it as being far less likely than simple incompetence and a juvenile refusal to own up to mistakes and solve the problem.
It’s not an active n-word, white sheet, give-your-seat-up-for-a-white-person kind of racism, but here’s a city that’s majority African American that was begging for someone to help out with their foul water for two years…where does this sort of bullshit happen? You can’t blame the black folk living there for feeling a little like the institution has been stacked against them-- maybe for their color, maybe for how they vote, maybe for their lack of money and influence.
I can’t imagine this same foot-dragging, patronizing, placating behavior would’ve happened in a community that was whiter/richer/Republicanier.
“Brown water that smells like a fetid dog turd coming out of your tap? And you’re getting a rash? Completely unrelated! Water’s fine! No need to worry!” Yeah, not gonna happen in Novi or even the downriver area (which is not wealthy or very Republican, but definitely whiter.)
On preview: What davidm said about the lack of urgency because of who lives in Flint is what I’m getting at.
What I hear you saying is “how could it be anything but racism?”
And the alternative candidate I’m offering “staggering, jaw-dropping incompetence,” which has a long history of causing amazing death and destruction. Consider for example NASA, which killed 14 astronauts and blew up several billion dollars worth of space shuttle because of an amazing ability to ignore glaring evidence of hazards that had manifested on prior flights. I’ve never heard of NASA being accused of racism in the awful decisions that led to those disasters - although I suppose if you were determined, you could assert racism, since the crew of each doomed shuttle was 14% black.
You’re not doing your argument any favors with tortured comparisons like that.
Look, I think everyone agrees with you that “staggering, jaw-dropping incompetence” is the reason they ended up in the mess initially. But if a rich, white Republican town had undrinkable, poisonous water, the response would have been quicker than what we saw in Flint. If you want to believe that’s the case solely based on the “rich” part and subtle racism played absolutely no part, we’re not going to be able to say anything to convince you otherwise. And if that was the only example of possible racism I saw in this country today, maybe I’d even believe it too. But I see examples of subtle racism like that every day.
If NASA repeatedly blew up shuttles over a two year period, on which a solid majority of the astronauts were black, and those astronauts were not given any alternative but to get on the ship despite their outcry that something’s wrong because these damn shuttles just keep blowing up for no good reason, then yep I’d seriously wonder if race was playing a factor in the agency’s indifference toward the lives of its astronauts.
In your given scenario, not so much. As TroutMan said, it’s a painfully tortured comparison (14% black vs. 60% in Flint?).
The biggest problem I have with accusations of racism in cases like this is that the evidence often boils down to “the victims were black, and it wouldn’t have happened if they were white.” Given that many government officials in many different agencies failed to act in the interests of the residents of Flint, the accusation of racism must surely encompass all of those officials, and that’s a pretty large and serious claim; I would have hoped to see more evidence to support it.
My suggestion that NASA could be accused of racism was facetious. The point I was trying to make is that incompetence and head-in-the-sand behavior can easily and completely account for Flint’s predicament - not just the initial decision to use untreated river water, but in the continued brushing-off of concerns from residents, and the sloppy testing (e.g. flushing of taps before drawing samples) that showed no lead problems. I offered the Space Shuttle program as an example of what incompetence and head-in-the-sand behavior can do.
Right, but what’s being argued is incompetence and head-in-the-sand behavior would be remedied much faster had it been a richer, whiter city like Novi, Birmingham or hell, even Troy.
The problems may go beyond lead.
Picture of the tap water in a Flint hospital: http://www.commondreams.org/sites/default/files/styles/cd_large/public/headlines/grossflintwater.jpg?itok=qDsUxei7
