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Forming a Critical Race Theory of Environmental Disaster: Understanding social meanings and health threat perception in the Flint Water Crisis

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Abstract

A Critical Race Theory of Environmental Disaster can aid researchers in better contextualizing racially disproportionate environmental disasters and their intricate social meanings to survivors. Such a theory, as proposed and operationalized here, incorporates interpretations of the causes and consequences of environmental disaster. In so doing, this theory weighs the racial and economic stratification often preceding environmental disaster and that which reflexively becomes more embedded in the aftermath. Focusing on the water crisis in the racially diverse, socioeconomically diminished city of Flint, Michigan, this article examines survey data from research conducted with city residents. The analysis considers residents' attitudes and beliefs around the crisis' scope and its intentionality and residents' health outcomes. Results suggest that various institutional and community-level mechanisms contribute to processes of meaning-making during crisis, or "crisis-making," finding consistent variation in residents' understanding of the nature and scope of the water crisis that is associated with specific cultural and health-related experiences. This construction substantiates that a Critical Race Theory of Environmental Disaster must consider not only race, but class in the context of race, as instrumental in developing social understandings of, and experiences with, environmental disaster.

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... While access to drinking water is often taken for granted in the United States, this is not the reality for all regions (US Water Alliance 2023). Certain areas, particularly those with vulnerable populations, face reoccurring water crises (i.e. times when drinking water services are unreliable; Sivakumar 2011, Krajewski et al 2019 that have far-reaching implications (Ezell and Chase 2022, Bisgin et al 2023, Kilpatrick et al 2023. For example, after changing drinking water sources, the city of Flint, Michigan experienced high levels of lead in their water system (Chavez et al 2017). ...
... For example, after changing drinking water sources, the city of Flint, Michigan experienced high levels of lead in their water system (Chavez et al 2017). This contamination resulted in health issues and political distrust (Nowling and Seeger 2020, Sobeck et al 2020, Ezell and Chase 2022. ...
... Race emerged as a significant topic during both crises, consistent with previous studies on other events like the Flint water crisis (Ezell and Chase 2022, Bisgin et al 2023, Kilpatrick et al 2023. In our study, race was one of the most frequent codes in the qualitative analysis and a prominent topic in topic modeling during both JWCs. ...
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... This kind of behavior was observed also related to other threats, like the proliferation of nuclear weapons during (Burdekin and Siklos, 2022) the Cold War, and to be more precisely "Cuban Missile Crisis" from (Cyr, 2022) 1962, when many Americans started building atomic bomb shelters in their backyards. Other crises that affected the behavior of the population we might add, the Great Depression, the terrorist attacks, the Economic Crisis, the CoVid19 pandemic, earthquakes and even Climate Change Crisis that can (Ezell and Chase, 2022) influence not only a society in its whole, but as well as the human race. ...
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Thesis
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Mark Peplow extols two books on broken pipes and promises in Michigan. Mark Peplow extols two books on broken pipes and promises in Michigan. LeeAnne Walters holds two bottles of dirty water, one brown one yellow, that she took from her home to show officials.
Article
An 18-month prospective epidemiological study of gastrointestinal illnesses was conducted on 300 families consuming conventionally treated tap water and 300 consuming the same water after further treatment by reverse-osmosis. Drinking water met current bacteriological and physicochemical quality standards, but was found to be associated with a significant level of gastrointestinai illnesses: a reduction of 30% of the gastrointestinal illnesses was observed in the group consuming the filtered water. The presence or absence of total coliforms or fecal coliforms was not indicative of the health effects observed. The heterotrophic plate counts at 20°C in the distribution system were weakly associated with the duration of the symptoms when the data was analyzed by subregion. Several approaches to clustering of the family data to the nearest sampling site were attempted: no association could be demonstrated. Even if consumers of reverse-osmosis water experienced, on the average, less gastrointestinal illnesses, their illnesses were significantly associated with the number of bacteria growing at 35°C on medium R2A. The problems associated with the predictive value of the bacterial content of a water sample and in particular, the major differences between water quality at the tap and in the distribution system are presented. For example, standard procedures require analysis of the water after flushing the tap for several minutes: this is not however typical of the water that is consumed. Water that comes out of the tap has stagnated for long periods in household pipes and regrowth of bacterial contaminants can easily occur. The bacteria growing in this water might thus be responsible for some of the health effects observed in tap water.
Article
In this article, we review evidence from the social and medical sciences on the causes and effects of lead exposure. We argue that lead exposure is an important subject for sociological analysis because it is socially stratified and has important social consequences - consequences that themselves depend in part on children's social environments. We present a model of environmental inequality over the life course to guide an agenda for future research. We conclude with a call for deeper exchange between urban sociology, environmental sociology, and public health, and for more collaboration between scholars and local communities in the pursuit of independent science for the common good.
Article
Environmental justice (EJ) literature rarely offers an explicit theory of race to explain processes of disparate environmental exposure and recourse in non-white and low-income communities. Failing to do so, analyses of environmental inequality risk eliding a central driver of environmental racism. Based on a case study of a contested birth defect cluster in California, this article traces the ways in which the evidence of environmental health harms are rendered conceptually invisible by the institutions mandated to protect public health and the environment. Turning to a theoretical model of contested illness mobilization, I demonstrate the value of critical race perspectives to clarify the production and maintenance of intersecting, cumulative harms without recourse in communities of color. Centered on racially veridical analyses, EJ scholarship can more precisely analyze the recalcitrance of dominant group interests. Ultimately, this enables theorization of the distinct landscape of exposure and recourse in subaltern versus favored bodies and space.
Article
The fiscal crisis faced by municipalities is the product of a range of structural and political factors that leave communities unable to meet their obligations. To deal with this crisis, the State of Michigan turned to a program of Emergency Managers who were given the power to overrule locally elected officials, abrogate existing contracts and arrangements, sell public property, and in short do whatever they wished to address the problem. Emergency Managers imposed austerity-based neoliberal policies with little regard for underlying structural forces that left communities impoverished, and which in the end protected bond holders. As the case of Flint, Michigan, demonstrates, these actions did little to alter the long-term prospects of cities, and inflicted real harm on Flint’s residents when the EM embarked on a ‘money saving’ plan to terminate an agreement to use safe Detroit water. In the interim, Flint began drawing drinking water from the Flint River, resulting in high levels of lead in their water, producing a health crisis. At the end of the day, cities where Emergency Managers were in charge were left in unsustainable positions, burdened by new long-term debt, with every likelihood they would find themselves in another fiscal crisis in the coming decades.
Article
Environmental justice (EJ) scholars have argued that agencies’ EJ efforts have done little to accomplish core goals of the EJ movement: democratizing decision-making and reducing environmental inequalities. Scholars explain that agencies’ EJ efforts are undermined by industry and political elites hostile to environmental regulations, shortcomings of existing EJ policy, and limited technical tools. I augment these explanations by taking a constructionist approach, identifying interactions through which bureaucrats – with each other and with me – defend or contest their agency’s EJ reform efforts. Drawing on interviews with agency staff and observations of agency meetings, I show that EJ staff – those tasked with leading their agencies’ EJ efforts but wielding little authority over their colleagues – experience working in an environment in which colleagues can challenge and dismiss EJ and those who promote it. I thus argue that scholars aiming to explain why agencies’ EJ efforts have failed to meet EJ advocates’ expectations must attend not only to factors other scholars have rightly noted but also to interactions among staff through which some define EJ as anathema to agency practice and hence stifle proposed EJ reforms.
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The consequences of neoliberal colorblind policies concerning environmental justice in Michigan are explored using critical race theorist Alan Freeman’s victim and perpetrator perspectives on legal decision-making. The victim perspective allows evidence of disparate impact to be proof of unequal protection under the law. The dominant perpetrator perspective requires proof of the intent to discriminate for a racial discrimination claim to be valid. Michigan’s environmental legal history is examined through the lens of these two perspectives, tracing how Michigan as a state, with the aid of the federal government, has institutionalized a racialized caste system of ‘worthiness’ for environmental protection through strict adherence to the perpetrator perspective. Specific attention is paid to the water crisis in Flint and a Marathon Oil refinery in Detroit. The injustices occurring at these locations are less the result of racist individuals than the product of decades of neoliberal colorblind policymaking supported and upheld in our court rooms.
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We examined the relationship between perceptions of household tap water quality and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms during the Flint, Michigan, water crisis in 2015–2016. The Speak to Your Health Community Survey is a community-based participatory component of the health surveillance system in Genesee County, Michigan. Perceptions of household tap water quality was added to the 2015–2016 survey wave after inadequate official response to concerns over water quality after a change in Flint's municipal water supply. Respondents (N = 786) also completed a brief PTSD screening tool. We examined the relationships of perceived household tap water quality to PTSD symptomatology and positive screening criteria for PTSD, controlling for sociodemographics. Perceived tap water quality predicted PTSD symptomatology and positive screening criteria for PTSD, independent of sociodemographics. The adverse mental health impact of municipal toxic contamination may generalize to other similar environmental contamination incidents.
Article
In April 2014, the city of Flint, Michigan, began using water from the Flint River. The official reason to break Flint’s long time contract with the Detroit Water and Sewage Department was financial efficiency; it was presented as a cost-cutting measure. Flint residents began immediately complaining about their water, complaints that were ignored. Thanks to the local activists, it was eventually discovered that the water was indeed corrosive, the city failed to treat it, and lead leached from the pipes into the water drunk by the city’s children and families. By September 2015, the city was acknowledging the size of the health crisis this entailed, and in October 2015, Flint switched back to Detroit water. It was too late: the damage was done, and Flint’s children have shown persistently high levels of lead—poisoned by a series of decisions that would never have been made in a majority white city. It is also now clear that relevant officials knew that the switch to the Flint River was in fact more expensive, both in the short term and the long term, than remaining with the Detroit Water and Sewage Department. Using Vesla Weaver’s concept of frontlash, I argue that a technocratic ideology combined with a certain version of racism, resembling settler colonialism, is the cause of the tragedy.
Article
The Flint River is a variable water source and thus a challenge to treat; oversights and missteps combined with inherent chemical conditions set the stage for the historic water crisis in Flint, Mich.
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Accumulation under capitalism is necessarily the expropriation of labor, land, and resources. But it is also something else: we need a more apposite language to think about capital as a system of expropriating violence on collective life itself. To this end, one way to strengthen racial capitalism as an activist hermeneutic is to use it to name and analyze the production of social separateness—the disjoining or deactiving of relations between human beings (and humans and nature)—needed for capitalist expropriation to work. Considering racial capitalism as a technology of antirelationality reveals its weakness as much as its strength; for acts of racialized violence that would partition people from other senses and practices of social being (noncapitalist, nonstate) are as futile as they are constant.
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Sociologists have long been interested in collective representations of the past, as well as the processes through which individuals, groups, or events have been excluded from those representations. Despite this rich body of literature, few studies have examined the processes through which long-silenced countermemory becomes integrated within “official” public memory. This study examines two instances of silence breaking in Philadelphia, Mississippi—the town notorious for the silence, denial, and collective obstruction of justice surrounding the 1964 “Mississippi Burning” murders. By reconstructing and comparing the event structure of the twenty-fifth and fortieth anniversary commemorations—both interracial community-wide events unique for having punctuated Philadelphia's prevailing silence on the murders—this article finds that commemorability and mnemonic capacity are necessary but insufficient factors for “silence breaking” commemorations to emerge. This study identifies two additional criteria necessary for commemorations that publicly acknowledged long-silenced pasts: pressure from external forces, and the convergence of interests between those previously opposed to and those in favor of acknowledgment.2
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Several case-control studies have demonstrated positive associations between parental occupational exposures and childhood cancer. However, an overestimation of risk estimates due to recall bias is of concern. The magnitude and nature of this bias were explored using data from a German case-control study on childhood leukemia conducted between 1992 and 1997. A moderate overreporting of occupational exposures by fathers was observed, particularly for the prenatal period. Overreporting was most apparent when the time between exposure and interview was short. It was also found that job titles were no satisfactory substitute for information on specific occupational exposures. The results of this analysis emphasize the need for more sophisticated exposure assessment methods in epidemiologic studies of childhood cancer. However, because future case-control studies will at least partially rely on questionnaire data, improvements including probing questions, better interview techniques, and validation studies are indicated.