And he’s absolutely wrong.
When interviewed on MSNBC’s Morning Joe about Flint’s lead crisis, Gov. Rick Snyder had this to say about whether the issue is environmental racism:
Absolutely not. Flint is a place I've been devoted to helping. Look at all the work we've done in Detroit. Several cities, Detroit, Flint, Pontiac, Saginaw -- I've made a focused effort since before I started in office to say, we need to work hard to help people that have the greatest need. So we've done a lot in terms of programs there to go help the structurally employed get work, in terms of public safety, we've done a lot. Healthy Michigan was a whole Medicaid expansion. And many of those people getting the greatest benefit are people in places like Flint and such, because they deserve better medical care. So many of these things are actions we've taken. What is so frustrating and makes you so angry about this situation is, you have a hand full of quote unquote experts that were career civil service people -- that made terrible decisions, in my view. And we have to live with the consequences with that. They work for me so I accept that responsibility, and we're going to fix this problem
Snyder has faced increasingly intense criticism and calls for his resignation as the lead crisis in Flint continues. Yesterday, President Obama approved $80 million in water aid and infrastructure to the city of Flint after researchers and the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services found elevated blood levels of lead among people who drank or bathed in city tap water. The lead exposures came at the tail end of a number of drinking water issues following Flint’s temporary switch to the Flint River as a water source. The decisions that led to the switch—along with the campaign to minimize test results and the subsequent lack of regard for citizen complaints about the water—have led to calls that the Flint crisis is an end result of environmental racism.
Flint is predominantly black, and according to the 2010 Census, almost two-thirds of its citizens are nonwhite. Flint was a major destination for black workers leaving the South during the second Great Migration in the mid-to-late 20th century, and the associated white flight that accompanied waves of black migrants changed the face of the city. All the while, the automotive industry—led by giant GM—polluted local towns and the Flint River more and more. Although black people came to the city for jobs, soon the local automotive industry would decline sharply, and the population of the city began to decline just as sharply. As companies pulled out of Flint, they left its mostly-black population—one that couldn’t afford to move to less-polluted suburbs—with the environmental bill of an industry from which it barely profited.
That history is important in today’s crisis. The Flint River, while declared by many to be safe to drink, was still at least more polluted than other sources, and its contamination with E. coli combined with Flint’s aging and inadequate infrastructure led to this crisis. Contamination reports and rust led to increased treatment by local officials with chlorine, which corroded aging lead-lined pipes and added lead to the water that homes received. All of these problems are the end-result of racialized and inequitable lack of investment and environmental concern.
The emails released by Snyder’s own office suggest that either race or poverty were factors in the state reluctance to respond to the concerns of Flint citizens. Concerns were passed off as overblown or the result of “anti everything groups” riling up ignorant people who could not understand data. It is hard to imagine state officials responding similarly to concerns if they had been made by an influential white populace—like a community similar to Snyder’s current home of Ann Arbor.
Snyder’s home illustrates the insidious nature of environmental racism. Ann Arbor is only 8 percent black, a far cry from the demographics of maligned cities that Snyder mentions like Detroit, Saginaw, and Flint. Ann Arbor is part of the Huron River watershed, “considered to be the cleanest urban river in Michigan.” The Huron River Basin is home to a number of cities that are almost entirely white, from Milford to Dexter and South Lyon. It is unfathomable that a similar crisis could happen or go on for so long in this well cared-for and considered area.
That’s why Snyder is wrong, regardless of whether his personal or policy intentions are or were deliberately racist. According to activist Ben Chavis (who coined the term), environmental racism includes “racial discrimination in environmental policy-making and enforcement of regulations and laws” that can be deliberate—or the end result of exclusion and lack of concern. And environmental racism can absolutely intersect with other issues, from exploitation of the poor (of all races) to disregard of small cities. Flint looks like a pretty concrete case study in just that.