In April 2014, the city of Flint, Michigan, changed municipal water providers from the Detroit Water and Sewage Department, that had supplied it with water since 1967, to a new enterprise called the Karegnondi Water Authority, which planned to build a new pipeline to the same source: Lake Huron. This was a shady deal in many ways, entered into by an unelected emergency financial manager, that placed all of the financial risk of building the new pipeline onto the heavily indebted city. While that pipeline was being built, the city would switch to using water from the Flint River.
Almost immediately, Flint’s human residents complained about the look and smell of the water from the new source, but these complaints were dismissed and ignored by city managers for years.
Representatives of the most prominent corporate resident of Flint—the car company General Motors—complained about the water quickly too: within the first few months, they noticed that the new water supply was corroding the machinery at their Flint engine plant.1 In October 2014, the GM plant reached an agreement with a nearby township to buy water from the old water supplier and switched its source.2
Flint’s human population of 102,000 residents would not start getting any relief whatsoever for another year after the GM plant switched back. By that time, thousands of the city’s children had been exposed to demonstrably brain-damaging levels of lead.3 In January 2016, Michigan governor Rick Snyder and U.S. president Barack Obama declared a state of emergency, mobilizing Michigan National Guard troops to distribute bottled water and Federal Emergency Management Agency funds.4 The water source for the people was finally switched back in October 2015. But the root of the problem was not the toxicity of the water in the Flint River but rather that the water was corrosive to metal, and so it drew toxic metals out of the pipes in which it was being transported.5 Thus, by that time, these pipelines were already so corroded by inadequately treated water from the Flint River that any water that subsequently flowed through them remained toxic.6 Some of the pipes have finally been replaced such that some homes now have access to safe water, and some of the children have started to receive compensatory educational services, but the crisis for human health is still ongoing.7
In this chapter, I argue that the differential protection of the material integrity of GM’s machines over the bodily integrity of the people of Flint provides a window into racialized biopolitics. I frame the contrasts between the machines that were protected and the pipes and humans that were disregarded in terms of access to citizenship: who can make successful claims—especially but not only against the state—for access to safe water and, with it, material and bodily integrity? The chapter follows such disparate nonhuman objects as fiscal bonds, machines, and pipes to track the intertwined flows of capital, labor, and water, in order to illuminate crucial stratification within both human and nonhuman categories. In Flint, the city’s creditors and GM’s machines received quick care, while the vulnerabilities of the pipes and the population were initially disregarded. The protection of finance and machines over pipes and people illustrates the devaluation of groups of humans considered to be surplus in the service of the interests of capital. This small event within the broader Flint water crisis illustrates a fundamental element of racial disparities in health in the United States: differential protection of financial capital and racialized human life. To contest environmental racism, we need a more-than-human politics that critically centers those people who have been framed as being outside of “the society that must be defended.”8 Infrastructures and environments do connect us all, but paying attention to how they do so in ways that are stratified is an essential part of understanding how they shape contemporary inequalities in citizenship and health.
As with each of the twenty-first-century cases explored in this book, the preferential treatment of GM’s machines over Flint’s people emerges out of a much longer history. General Motors was founded in Flint in 1908, and the journeys of the company and of the city have been deeply intertwined. This history, in turn, has also been one about race.
The jobs offered by companies like General Motors were among those that catalyzed the “Great Migration” of African Americans from the southern states. In 1910, 90 percent of African Americans lived in southern states; by the end of the Great Migration, in 1970, 47 percent of African Americans lived outside the South.9 Of course, industrialization drew many groups to cities like Flint, including white immigrants. When the city’s population peaked at two hundred thousand in 1960, Flint was majority white. However, like most deindustrializing cities in the United States, Flint has experienced “white flight,” in which the white population of cities migrates out disproportionately—archetypally to the suburbs, but also beyond, including to rural areas and to other states. As of the 2010 census, the population had declined by half and was 56.6 percent Black.10
Before its water crisis, Flint was brought to mainstream attention beyond the borders of Michigan by Michael Moore’s breakout film Roger and Me, in which the city is figured as an emblematic site of corporate abandonment and deindustrialization.11 In that 1989 film, Moore pursues the CEO of General Motors, Roger Smith, to confront him about the closure of several auto plants in Flint. Despite record profits, GM had decided to move a great deal of production to Mexico to lower labor costs. Flint’s organized workers had reached the middle class by the late 1970s, when eighty thousand people were employed at GM plants there. This broad-based prosperity emerged out of a long labor history: the Flint Sit-Down Strike of 1936–37 was a foundational event of the United Auto Workers labor union.12 The film attends to the tremendous impact the 1980s plant closures had on the city of Flint. GM’s disinvestment in Flint continued after Roger and Me: there are now just eight thousand people working at GM plants in the area; that is, compared with its peak, 90 percent of the car-manufacturing jobs in Flint are gone. Even as GM remains a dominant force in Flint—politically, economically, culturally—the extent of the company’s abandonment of the city and its people is profound.
The fateful 2014 change in water source was made under the authority of an unelected political leadership: emergency managers appointed by the state governor to impose fiscal austerity on the city. Since 1988, the state of Michigan has passed a series of legislation that allows the state to take control of local governments that are in financial distress—defined as failing to pay their payroll or debts. The laws allow the state government to replace local elected officials with emergency financial managers selected by and answerable to the governor.
The mechanism of emergency financial management has allowed a state government dominated by white Republicans to take over Black-majority school systems and Black-majority cities.13 The eight cities that have been put under emergency management are home to less than 10 percent of the total population of Michigan, but they are home to half of the Black population of Michigan.14 This makes the power of emergency management in Michigan starkly resonant with colonialism in the sense of the practice of taking control over another country or territory. In that familiar model, colonial authorities might make promises to improve the conditions of local populations through ordered management, but the political structure overwhelmingly serves the ends of economic exploitation by the colonizers.15
In the wake of the Flint water crisis, some commentators dismissed the claim that racism played a role by pointing out that one of the two emergency managers who signed off on the fateful decision to switch water sources is African American.16 But this ignores a fundamental question of the location of political power: whose interests was that person appointed to serve? The selection of Black emergency managers is part of the neocolonial emergency management process, not an exception to it.17
The subversion of democratic processes facilitated by “emergency management” imposed by the state of Michigan was a key source of the water crisis. In theory, the emergency managers could be imagined to be the ones responsible for looking out for the people of Flint. They were, after all, appointed to replace the elected officials with that charge. For complicated reasons to which I will return, it is the case that the people of Flint were suffering under onerous water bills, some of the highest in the country. There is an absurdity even to that baseline situation: an economically struggling population in the middle of a state surrounded by fresh water was paying more than those living elsewhere in the state, in other major cities, or in desert cities like Phoenix. But rather than providing the population with relief from their burdens, the emergency managers exacerbated their suffering.
The emergency managers had a far narrower task than looking out for the people of Flint: they were responsible for looking out for the finances of Flint. Even this they arguably did not do, as they favored a risky investment in a new water source that has certainly not turned out to be financially sound. There was the promise of eventual cost savings with the new water provider, though the risks were high enough and the savings marginal enough that it’s not clear why the state was so enthusiastic about the switch.18 Yes, Flint residents’ high water bills precrisis put them in a position of high rates of delinquency, which was part of the justification for the emergency need to change to a water supplier who would charge lower rates. But there were other, far less risky ways of addressing the problems of high water bills faced by residents if the emergency managers had truly had the needs of residents as their top priority.19 Instead, city managers saw an opportunity to invest public capital in a new pipeline and took it.20 The difficulty that residents had in paying their water bills did not seem to be the motivation for the change—and in the wake of the crisis, Flint residents have faced tax liens and foreclosures on their homes over unpaid water bills, while the city’s debt to the Karegnondi Water Authority continues to accrue.21
Indeed, there is something even more fundamental at stake here that has particular relevance for those interested in health: in Flint’s economic model, with its high unemployment, care for city finances does not align with care for the city’s pipes or population. “Care” here is a question not of affect or feeling but of practical work undertaken in an emergent situation.22 The emergency managers’ disregard for Flint’s people contrasts with the care that GM took for its machines: the company’s care for corporate finances does align with looking out for the well-being of its corporate assets—its machines. In a city and economy characterized by abandonment, the machines have value for their owners that ensures their care. In the process, public finances become extricated from investment in public goods—infrastructure for the population—and servicing private actors takes precedence.
Emergency managers were empowered to break almost any contracts—including with, for example, unions and pensioners—but not empowered to break contracts with bond holders.23 That is, obligations to citizens were subject to renegotiation, but obligations to financial institutions were nonnegotiable—even agreements signed during the scourge of pernicious banking practices that would lead to the financial crisis of 2007. Moreover, the emergency managers had the authority to enter into new contracts with bond holders. As such, the provision of funding for a new pipeline to be built by a new water authority was treated with extraordinary urgency, whereas the provision of safe water to the people of Flint was not.
In the discursive frame of emergency management, the city of Flint is denigrated as a fiscally irresponsible individual, while the abandonment that caused its financial duress is obscured.24 Honoring obligations to pensioners and unions is framed as “financial irresponsibility” while honoring obligations to banks is framed as “financial responsibility”—a technocratic ideology that only pretends not to be ideological.25 As activist Claire McClinton points out in the ACLU documentary Here’s to Flint, “it’s interesting to note, in Public Act 436, the Emergency Manager cannot void a contract with bond holders. That’s off limits. Bond holders are sacred. They cannot be touched. People are not sacred.”26 Even in the wake of the crisis, during which time Flint has signed a contract to stay with the Detroit water supplier for thirty years (now reorganized after its own bankruptcy process and called the Great Lakes Water Authority), the city remains liable for the debts to which its emergency managers agreed in order to build the pipeline from which it now never plans to draw water.27
Decisions about when more debt is tolerable and when it isn’t are always political decisions—something that came to the fore frequently in national U.S. politics during the Obama administration, for example, in the sovereign debt crisis provoked by congressional Republicans in an effort to repeal Obamacare.28 There is a parallel here with structural adjustment in poor countries: state spending on health is a common target for austerity measures, whereas taking on debt for infrastructure projects of dubious value provokes fewer questions from financial sectors. In Flint, assuming an onerous bond to pay for a new pipeline was presented as debt that the city of Flint could afford, while maintaining the status quo or seeking a better deal with the existing water provider was presented as unsustainable.29 From a financial perspective, one might say that debt is figured as sustainable if it is capable of generating a return—and managers were operating on the assumption that investing in the people of Flint cannot generate a return, whereas investing in a pipeline can.
The conditions of poverty and dispossession in which the people of Flint found themselves prior to the water crisis, and the inaction in the face of need during the crisis, both exemplify institutionalized racism, as outlined by epidemiologist Camara Jones. For Jones, “institutionalized racism” manifests in both “material conditions” and “access to power.”30 Relevant aspects of material conditions in this case include disparate access to “sound housing” and “a clean environment.” The role of unequal access to power is exhibited in the unchecked actions of the emergency manager. In a wealthier, whiter city, those seeking to profit from water provision would not have had the ability to disregard citizens’ concerns so completely.31 Finally, what Jones characterizes as “inaction in the face of need” was fundamental both to the baseline situation and to the management of the crisis.32 While there is an identifiable perpetrator (the emergency manager), as in many instances of institutionalized racism, he is not an isolated villain but an element of much larger structures of dispossession.
The roots of emergency management lay in the same late-1980s economic conditions underlying Roger and Me: an economic structure of massive unemployment for the population, while the owners of capital continued to prosper. Racial capitalism in Flint epitomizes a politics of abandonment: no longer figured as surplus labor “reserve” for capital, the people of Flint are figured as incapable of contributing anything to wealth accumulation and so are abandoned by capital and the state.33
There are resonances between the emergency management approach used in Flint and structural adjustment policies imposed on postcolonial countries by global financial institutions in the wake of World War II and especially since the 1980s.34 Structural adjustment policies require that countries follow neoliberal policies of “free markets” over social services. They move fundamental decisions about economic priorities out of the local sphere and onto outside organizations—the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in the case of postcolonial countries, the emergency managers appointed by the state in Michigan’s deindustrializing cities.
In this context, the ability of GM to intervene on behalf of its machines shows that the market is not simply “free.” Not just any company owner can call the governor of Michigan and make a successful plea for the protection of the company’s machines. But GM plays an especially important role in Michigan, historically and today. This is not to say that GM always looks out for its machines—it has abandoned plenty, sold off others for a pittance. Yet machines can be and often are figured as ahead of humans in the line for resources. In the classic anticapitalist short film Island of Flowers, pigs are ahead of ragpickers in the line for organic waste repurposed as food, because pigs have an owner who has money, whereas the impoverished people in this part of Porto Alegre, Brazil, have neither an owner nor money.35 The people of Flint might once have been “owned” by GM—initially in a sense of “wage slavery” that, because of union organizing, gave way to better working conditions even as a profound power imbalance continued between capital and labor—but the company no longer needs them and so no longer lays claim to them. But the company does look out for its machines.
GM can even make a claim that looking out for machines is looking out for humans—the eight thousand remaining jobs, the economy of the city and the state on which many more humans rely. But this is perverse. The experiences of those in Flint reveal that the increasing shift from human labor to machines is not the techno-utopia that it pretends to be. Although automation is supposed to render only human labor obsolete, rather than the human itself obsolete, the perceived value of people of color and of their labor is never fully extricable in the logics of capitalism—and obsolescence follows racialized lines.36 Automation is often argued to enhance human safety: rather than humans doing the hard and dangerous labor, machines would do it, and so the humans’ bodily integrity would be protected. But exclusion from labor does not lead to bodily safety, because racialized bodies rendered economically surplus are also bodies rendered disposable.
It could conceivably have been the case that the damage to the engines at the GM engine plant would have acted as a red flag, providing evidence that the worries that the people of Flint had about the new water were well grounded.37 However, that is not what happened: the knowledge generated by the corrosion of the machines did not translate into actionable knowledge to be applied to the humans. The machine corrosion was addressed promptly, while the flesh corrosion that was continuous with a long history of violence against racialized populations remained unseen—or, perhaps more precisely, denied or dissembled.38 The machines were protected, while the humans were met with inaction in the face of need.
There might be something evocative about the detail that the most dangerous impact of the toxic water is on humans under construction (i.e., children) and cars still under construction (both the preassembled parts and the machines that assemble them). But children and machines need water differently. How might we reorder the prioritization of their needs?
Water is a vital part of our material and social world, and attending to its quality and distribution offers a distinctive entry point for consideration of access to citizenship and health. For feminist theorists interested in “thinking with water,” water’s fluid nature provides an opportunity to consider the interconnectedness of two very different imaginations of “currency”—flows of capital and of the seas39—and water should be understood as relation rather than resource.40 Engaging and extending this scholarship, I am interested in what forms of citizenship relations we can see in the preference for machines over people in the Flint water crisis.
When President Obama addressed the people of Flint, he framed access to safe water as a basic right of citizenship: “I will not rest . . . until every drop of water that flows to your homes is safe to drink, and safe to cook with, and safe to bathe in, because that’s part of the basic responsibility of a government in the United States of America.”41 The specificity of the patriotism mattered: as many observers noted, the people of Flint were relegated to treatment “like a third world country.” GM’s machines, however, maintained full U.S. citizenship.
Indeed, the privileging of privately owned nonliving machines in Flint is emblematic of political recognition in the context of late capitalism. In the United States, corporations are legally treated as “persons,” and, as legal theorists Marc de Leeuw and Sonja van Wichelen argue, our period is characterized as “a time when legal personhood is dominated by global capital, one where corporate personhood is profiting more from naturalized forms of legal personality than any human being is able to do.”42 Do the natural human persons resident in Flint have the standing to make human rights or citizenship claims?
Because water is essential, people have to pay whatever is charged for it, and if only toxic water is on tap, that’s what they have to buy. Of the five hundred largest water systems in the United States, Flint charged its residents the highest rates, and residents were not in a position to demand either affordability or quality.43 GM is large and powerful enough that it can negotiate rates—or seek out an alternative supplier—but individual people cannot. In a narrow technical sense, GM’s switch to the previous water provider was possible because the GM plant was adjacent to another township (a spatialization that is itself the product of a complicated history of corporate strategy of suburbanization of manufacturing).44 However, similarly positioned individuals would not be able to make that kind of choice on their own. Moreover, if individuals are not able to have their collective interests advocated for because their governments can’t or won’t negotiate on their behalf, they are trapped.
We might understand the differential treatment of GM’s machines and Flint’s humans as illustrative of differential “hydraulic citizenship,” in the terms of anthropologist Nikhil Anand. In his ethnographic account of the water infrastructure in Mumbai, Anand argues that “the ability of residents to be recognized by city agencies through legitimate water services is an intermittent, partial, and multiply constituted social and material process.”45 In Flint, we can see that GM has a privileged form of citizenship relative to the population and can extend that privilege to machines that it owns.
In suggesting that GM has a privileged form of citizenship, I am specifically not referring to what has become known as “corporate citizenship.” This is a neoliberal trope of “corporate social responsibility” that praises small, environmentally sound or community-minded endeavors, often as a means of concealing more fundamental exploitation.46 In contrast, the form of citizenship that I am talking about is the form that can make demands for services from government. There is something obscene about the fact that while GM claims to be a good citizen of Flint, when it came to the emerging Flint water crisis, it used its citizenship rights only to claim resources for itself, not to be a good neighbor to those who are supposedly fellow citizens.
One of the central insights of science and technology studies (STS) is that power is not located in human relations alone but in a complex network of relationships among human and nonhuman actors. This has been part of the growing appeal of STS, as more academic fields become interested in the “nonhuman,” “posthuman,” and “more-than-human.” As long as stratification among humans is not ignored amid the analytical elevation of these other domains, this move has a great deal to reveal about contemporary biopolitics.
Foregrounding the role of water in fostering the material and bodily integrity of nonhumans who share our environments can be invoked to mobilize a sense of common cause between humans and other organisms. In STS, much interest in the nonhuman looks to the organic: animals, most prominently, but also bacteria, plants, and nonorganismic forms of life grown in laboratories. One of the impulses that this scholarship often foregrounds is common cause between human and nonhuman life, in the face of deadly capital. Looking out for nonhuman organisms is not essentially discontinuous with looking out for ourselves as human organisms. However, it certainly can be discontinuous, if care for nonhuman life comes at the expense of consideration of the stratification of environmental racism.
As anthropologists have argued, contestation over whether water is a natural resource, a right of citizenship, or a market good is a characteristic of the neoliberal context of many parts of the world.47 The cruel conditions that the people of Flint have faced raise this question: should water be treated as a right of citizenship, rather than as a market good? Or perhaps the stakes are even more fundamental: should access to water be a human right? Posthumanist feminists have urged a move beyond a “human right” to water, because of its anthropocentrism: all life depends on water, not just human life.48 This would suggest that nonhumans, too, have some form of citizenship rights—but how to square that with the fact that not all humans have such rights fulfilled?
Importantly, because it is often rooted in explicitly intersectional feminism, a great deal of posthumanist feminist scholarship foregrounds the racial stratification among humans produced through these processes of capital accumulation and the distribution of toxic water. For example, feminist historian and technoscience scholar Michelle Murphy’s work on a place not far from Flint—the nearby waterway of the St. Clair river—highlights the impact of pollution on both Indigenous people and fish.49 There is occasionally a somewhat mystical quality to her mode of storytelling, as it locates the chemical industry spills of the past as shaping the human and nonhuman reproductive potentials of the future. In the bigness of the story, and especially the timeline, the unbearable present of chemical violence and its racialized impacts risks receding from focus.50
Thinking with water is most useful if we pay attention to the profound unevenness of its flows, in Flint and beyond. Doing so has the potential to contribute to another intertwined strain of scholarship attentive to the nonhuman: one that looks to infrastructure. The most celebrated example is Jane Bennett, whose book on “vibrant matter” includes a chapter on the failure of the electrical grid on the East Coast of the United States.51 One might analyze the Flint water crisis itself as a failure of infrastructure; it was the infrastructure itself that poisoned the water of Flint. As I noted at the start of the chapter, the issue was not a toxic water source but inadequately treated water that drew the toxic metals out of the pipes in which it was being transported.52 And in the face of that infrastructural failure, humans and nonhumans were in some sense brought together: we often think of machinery as less vulnerable than humans, but both are subject to the corrosive impacts of water—and bottled water is an even more implausible alternative for a manufacturing plant. However, the differential protection of GM machines versus human Flint residents shows how the infrastructure’s failure is not universal but instead stratified.
Any critique of anthropocentrism that loses sight of the most marginalized in society risks creating an abstraction that ignores the way in which capital itself gives a preferential option to the machines, as long as those machines have owners and generate returns. Hierarchies follow lines not only of non/human bifurcation but also of ownership and, with it, obsolescence.
Tellingly, Flint activists hearkened to Black Lives Matter to lay claim to the mattering of their own lives with the slogan “Flint Lives Matter.”53 Even as the slogan is mobilized by a multiracial coalition of activists, it is importantly distinct from the insidious right-wing response to Black Lives Matter that seeks to minimize the centrality of racism in the organization of protection of bodily integrity with the claim that “All Lives Matter.” It is a racialized process of dispossession that has rendered Flint lives disposable—from General Motor’s disinvestment to the state’s imposition of emergency financial management—and this is highlighted rather than obscured in Flint Lives Matter activism.
The concept of the “preferential option for the poor”—an idea drawn from Catholic liberation theology that has also been influential in medical anthropology54—is useful for understanding the power of both the demand that “Black Lives Matter” and the overlapping demand that “Flint Lives Matter.” Standing with and advocating for the most marginalized in society is both worthy on its own terms and a vital part of advocacy of the common good.55 This kind of commitment can seem a bit old-fashioned amid the posthumanist turn, on one hand, and the attention to climate on a global scale, on the other, but the Flint water crisis can illuminate the ongoing salience and even urgency of specificity.
A great deal of environmentalist activism emphasizes the shared burdens of environmental risk: we are all in this together, in that we all live in the same environment. There is a problematic potential for environmental activism to contribute to the All Lives Matter evasion, rendering the vulnerability of Black lives even more analytically marginalized by bringing flattened imaginaries of “humanity” or even “life” to the center of the scope. Both posthuman scholarship and environmental activism should analytically foreground those who are structurally most vulnerable to environmental harms. Yes, we are all connected through infrastructures and environments. However, they connect us in ways that are stratified and stratifying and recognizing this interplay is vital to understand how they shape contemporary inequalities in citizenship and health.
The Flint water crisis broadly and the ability of GM to shift water sources while the people continued to suffer offer an unusual opportunity to explore through the lens of an event the kind of environmental racism that usually operates slowly and insidiously. Most environmental racism operates in a way that is unspectacular—what Rob Nixon has called “slow violence”:
By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all. Violence is customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility. We need, I believe, to engage a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales.56
As Nixon highlights, the slowness and relative invisibility of these kinds of harms pose challenges for contestation. Flash points like the Flint water crisis provide an opportunity for contestation insofar as they are instantiations of, rather than exceptions to, slow violence.
In Flint, as with all of the cases in this book, the ethics of the event should not be separated from the ethics of the uneventful. As we saw in the chapter on the spike in chronic disease in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, urban infrastructure and its failure are sites of biopolitics, in which the lack of protection of Black lives constitutes societal exclusions. Even in a terrain of more-than-human politics, stratification among humans in relationship to capital and political power is fundamental. Demands for access to safe water are inextricable from demands for social and political inclusion—indeed, they point to the urgent necessity of the dismantling of institutionalized racism.