Would the scandal surrounding the lead-contaminated water in Flint, Michigan, happen if the residents were rich white people?
Democratic presidential hopefuls Hillary Rodham Clinton and US Senator Bernie Sanders raised this sensitive question on Sunday as they highlighted the health daisaster blamed on penny-pinching political decisions in a city that once relied heavily on the auto industry.
The political rivals found common cause in their criticism of Republican Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, calling for him to resign and condemning his cost-cutting measures, which led to more than 8,000 children ingesting lead each day.
“The governor should resign or be recalled and we should support the efforts of citizens attempting to achieve that,” Clinton said, adding that federal funds should be released to help Flint residents.
Both candidates agree that Flint’s neglected water distribution network, eaten away by corrosion, needs an overhaul.
“What I heard and what I saw literally shattered me, and it is beyond belief that children in Flint, Michigan, in the United States of America in the year 2016 are being poisoned, That is clearly not what this country should be about,” Sanders said at a CNN debate.
He called for rebuilding the US’ “crumbling infrastructure,” water systems, wastewater plants, roads and bridges.
Sanders said that Snyder “should understand that his dereliction of duty was irresponsible.”
However, Snyder, writing on Twitter, blamed the crisis on “a failure of government and all levels that could be described as a massive error of bureaucracy.”
The two presidential contenders are also targeting their strongest messages at Flint’s black community and, beyond, at African Americans suffering economic and social injustices elsewhere in the US.
Some are calling the Flint scandal an example of environmental racism. The expression has been used in recent decades to describe how African Americans are disproportionately exposed to pollutants in air, water and the ground.
“African American communities across the nation have always been disproportionately representative of the toxic areas,” Laura MacIntyre of the University of Michigan-Flint said. “Most of the people that bear the brunt of living in the polluted areas or next to incinerators or factories or all sorts of places that have toxic or hazards as waste are communities of color and Flint is no exception. It is a racial issue in terms of the fact that we have to deal with it disproportionately.”
Those inequalities were similarly illustrated in the aftermath of the devastation Hurricane Katrina brought on New Orleans in 2005.
After losing about half its population and nearly all of its auto industry, Flint now has about 100,000 inhabitants — 57 percent of them African Americans, and nearly half of residents in poverty.
A recent study found that the percentage of children with elevated levels of lead in their blood increased “particularly in socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods.”
It said that aging infrastructure was to blame for more children being exposed to lead through tap water.
“You see how the water situation was ignored... This wouldn’t have happened in a white neighborhood,” said Charles Marion, a father of three.
That is a theme Clinton, who has a strong African American voter base, has repeated recently.
“If the same thing that’s happening in Flint had happened in Grosse Pointe or Bloomfield Hills, I think we all know that we would’ve had a solution yesterday,” she said, referring to wealthy suburbs of Detroit.
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