Like many of you, I have been appalled reading about the Flint, Mich., environmental crisis turned federal state of emergency.
For those of you who are not familiar, Flint drinking water became contaminated with lead in April 2014. As an attempt to cut costs, the city began to draw its water from the Flint River while waiting for new pipes. However, the water from the Flint River was never properly tested or treated with the necessary chemicals to make it less corrosive before being dispensed to residents through lead-filled pipes. Therefore, anyone who drank water from the tap was exposed to lead.
This is America. This is 2016. This is a catastrophe that residents of Flint will feel for years and likely decades to come.
Children are much more susceptible to lead poisoning than adults, which makes this water crisis so devastating. High levels of lead can affect a child’s brain and nervous system. What is even more worrisome is that lead can also affect fetuses. Therefore, pregnant women who drank water from the Flint River have exposed their unborn children to extremely dangerous levels of lead. To add even more devastating news, pregnant women who visited Flint friends or relatives in Flint have exposed their unborn children to these toxins.
A few weeks ago, President Barack Obama signed an emergency declaration and ordered federal aid for Flint, authorizing the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Homeland Security to coordinate relief efforts.
What occurred in Flint was not a hurricane or a tornado. What occurred did not strike the Flint community for a day or two. What we are witnessing is a roughly two years of events in which predominately poor and Black residents of a city in the United States were denied access to clean drinking water. For those of you who remember middle school science, that also likely means they are currently living on tainted soil as well.
This senseless set of events enrages me because it further reinforces what many Blacks in America have felt and continue to feel each day, which is that being poor and Black in this country is tantamount to a death sentence. For some communities, the death sentence comes at the hands of the state or the hands of a senseless neighborhood shooting due to an influx of cheap and illegal guns, and in this case, the death sentence comes from drinking water. Water.
As government officials sift through thousands of emails to see who will ultimately take the blame for the negligence that occurred, we are left wondering what really happened and what needs to be done to protect the people still living and working and going to school in a community ravished by a public health disaster.
Christina Greer, Ph.D., is an associate professor at Fordham University and the author of “Black Ethnics: Race, Immigration, and the Pursuit of the American Dream.” You can find her on Twitter @Dr_CMGreer.