Poison pipes: 'Structural racism' beneath Flint water crisis

It’s hard to believe anything healthy could come from the Flint water crisis. The poisoning of Flint’s water supply was many things: a humanitarian disaster, a massive failure of state and local government, a shameful betrayal of a beleaguered American city and an international scandal.

But it’s also the perfect teachable moment for secondary and college students who want to make sure such things don’t happen again, according to a publication released this month by Michigan’s Department of Civil Rights.

After months of fine-tuning, the Civil Rights Dept. has boiled the February 2017 Civil Rights Commission report on the crisis, “Systemic Racism Through the Lens of Flint,” into a streamlined, jargon-free study guide.

The guide sets ambitious goals for the next generation of citizens and leaders.

Above the ground, in the headlines, the Flint Water Crisis spawned a tangle of criminal prosecutions and private lawsuits meant to find and hold accountable the decision makers involved.

But the Civil Rights Commission didn’t want to “wander down paths already worn bare by reporters and attorneys,” the study guide explains.

The report and study guide dig deeper, below ground, where a corrosive, interlinked system of racist laws and practices, set in place over a century, lies waiting to be painstakingly dismantled. These poison pipes, laid when segregation, redlining and discriminatory hiring were the law of the land, still ooze with the toxins of structural racism and implicit bias.

“When the state took over the management of Flint but did not address the economic inequities between suburban Flint and urban Flint, or accept any input from the residents of Flint, the residents lost trust in their government,” the guide declares.

Alfredo Hernandez, equity officer at the state Department of Civil Rights, helped develop the study guide.

“It is designed to promote discussion, critical thinking, reflection and introspection on the many reasons inequities based on race helped contribute to the crisis,” Hernandez said.

A touchstone for Hernandez in his work on the study guide is the influential 2017 book by Joy DeGrury, “Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome.”

Hernandez was struck by an episode in the book when DeGruy brought her granddaughter to her first day in kindergarten. DeGruy asked the teacher what plan was in place to deal with implicit bias in the classroom. The teacher told her such plans are not necessary because the school is not racist.

In the same way, Hernandez said, ostensibly “color blind” policies such as Michigan’s emergency manager law can often make matters worse by ignoring their disparate impacts on populations of color.

“The report did not find that the inequitable outcomes for residents of the city were intentionally created because Flint is a city made up mostly of people of color,” the guide states. “Instead, the Commission found that decades of systemic racism had been built into the city’s policy decisions.”

“Often we think of things through an individual lens,” Hernandez explained. “The goal of the study guide is to help students to think systemically, to promote the deeper introspection that helps people understand that no matter how hard I work or how good I try to live my life every day, there are systems that will impact people.”

The guide encourages students to take a deeper, more critical look at many of the widely accepted narratives about Flint. The decline of the auto industry, the most frequently cited cause of Flint’s current troubles, is framed as part of a larger and longer story — the unequal distribution of wealth between Flint and surrounding Genesee County.

“Residual wealth created by those working in the automobile industry is spread out everywhere except within the city limits,” the report reads, “yet at the same time the residual costs of that era are still being borne primarily by those who live there.”

Hernandez knows that he and his team are fighting human nature. “Systems thinking” is not as emotionally satisfying as pure, unrefined blame.

Faced with a massive systems failure involving so many players, it’s hard not to echo the evicted, Depression-era farmer in “The Grapes of Wrath” who listens to a convoluted chain of causation involving wholesalers, landlords, mortgages, little banks and big banks, and finally yells,  “Well, who DO we shoot?”

The report, and the study guide, avoids the epithet “racist” as ill-defined and not helpful to a deeper understanding of the crisis.

“We’re going to have to acknowledge some things that make us uncomfortable at times,” Hernandez said. “But it’s not about blame or shame.”

The guide also introduces and explains the concept of environmental justice and lays out the frequently disparate impacts that major infrastructure decisions, from urban renewal to building freeways to managing water and other utilities, often impose on cities with a majority nonwhite population.

With so much corroded cultural and historic infrastructure to replace, preventing the “next Flint” will not be easy, but Hernandez hopes the study guide will help young people get a handle on the complexities of the problem.

Educators are encouraged to contact the Civil Rights Department to arrange a classroom visit from Hernandez or other staff members who can explain how best to use the study guide.

The Department of Civil Rights also provides training in race awareness to help a variety of organizations become more racially conscious and understand the need to think at a systems level.

“Without intentional strategies to create the change we all want to see, we all will continue to see much of the same,” Hernandez said.