The inquiry into whether such a crisis would’ve gone unmitigated for more than a year if it affected the rich and white isn’t awkward, it’s rhetorical.
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“Would this happen in a different community,” Flint Mayor Ms. Karen Weaver—referring to the slow response to mitigate the contaminated drinking water in her city—asked at a national conference in Washington, D.C. for U.S. mayors on Wednesday. According to Ms. Hillary Clinton, the perceived front-runner among Democratic Presidential candidates, it wouldn’t have.
“If the kids in a rich suburb of Detroit had been drinking contaminated water and being bathed in it, there would’ve been action,” she said at NBC’s Democratic debate last Saturday.
The Washington Post on Wednesday classified the racial inquiry as an “awkward question” that no one wants to answer. The inquiry into whether such a crisis—high levels of lead detected in a City’s water supply—would’ve gone unmitigated for more than a year if it affected the rich and white isn’t awkward, it’s rhetorical.
No answer is needed, because there’s decades, even centuries, of social precedence that communicates a hard American truth: black lives, poor lives more specifically, are disposable; they’re not nearly equal in value to a life full of riches and whiteness. Flint, Michigan, 70 miles north of Detroit, has a 9.7 unemployment rate. In fact, 4 in 10 of its residents—the majority of them African-American—live in poverty.
“It’s a minority community, it’s a poor community, and our voices were not heard,” Ms. Weaver, the first female mayor of the City, said to reporters.
The social status of the people in Flint not only explains the national media blackout, it’s also the reason, I assume, that residents didn’t revolt, though they did, almost immediately, complain. More often that not, those who are impoverished feel less authoritative in the political arena than their counterparts.
Not only would there have been swift action if a quality-of-life-threatening crisis—in 2015 Virginia Tech, according to The Washington Post, confirmed that lead was present in water samples at rates that could cause kidney damage and neurological problems in children—impacted rich white kids, the parents of those endangered and privileged minors more than likely would have not just complained, but revolted, demanding accountability from, and lobbying consequences for, those in charge.
The aforementioned observation is by no means an attempt to blame the victims for their circumstances, but it is, in some ways, a wake-up call to those who feel they lack the agency—social and political clout—to act on their own behalf and advocate strongly for themselves. The rich and white aren’t just revered because of their status and assets, but because of the manner in which they use their voices.
The great thing about voice(s) is that it’s an asset that the majority of the American public has, despite their station in life. Though Flint has returned to using Detroit’s water source, those who oversaw this crisis and were slow to act, or didn’t act at all, need to be dealt with, and that is where the poor people of Flint, Michigan, need to make up for lost time.
They need to come together, as they have begun to do, and unite their voices until it drowns out all other noise, making a clear and concise demand: Governor Rick Snyder, and those who were complicit in what could be considered an attempt at genocide must be fired and jailed. Let’s be clear, what happened in Flint wasn’t just a crisis, it was criminal.
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Photo: Getty Images