Introduction: Flint and the Racialized Geography of Indifference

Invisible Walls

In 2014, L. Brooks Patterson, the chief executive of Oakland County, Michigan, gave an interview to the New Yorker magazine. Oakland is an affluent, largely white, and largely suburban county, sandwiched between Genesee and Wayne counties, the home of Flint and Detroit respectively. When the reporter asked about Detroit’s “financial problems,” Patterson responded:

I made a prediction a long time ago, and it’s come to pass. I said, “What we’re gonna do is turn Detroit into an Indian reservation, where we herd all the Indians into the city, build a fence around it, and then throw in the blankets and corn.” (Williams, 2014: n.p.)

This notion that “we” need to fence or wall “them” in reappears often on the comment pages of local newspapers in the Metro Detroit area. “Them” usually refers to the residents of majority black cities like Detroit, Pontiac, and Flint. And while not every white resident of the suburban counties shares these racial attitudes, enough do to re-elect L. Brooks Patterson to another term as Oakland County chief executive in November, 2016.

A city is more than a set of geographical coordinates. It is a semiotic assemblage; a cluster of meanings. For inhabitants, those meanings may take certain forms, while for strangers, visitors, tourists, and outside observers the city presents a different set of forms. These semiotic forms are not simple abstractions. Even if they are based upon myth, prejudice, and ideology, such forms are never simple fictions. They are socially constructed realities that produce effects. Patterson’s words provide evidence for such effects. By constructing Detroit as an “Indian reservation,” he builds an invisible fence that is probably more effective than any corporeal wall made of concrete and iron. This imaginary barrier is maintained and enforced through a web of words and everyday social practices. As Patterson puts it in the same interview:

I used to say to my kids, “First of all, there’s no reason for you to go to Detroit. We’ve got restaurants out here.” They don’t even have movie theatres in Detroit—not one… I can’t imagine finding something in Detroit that we don’t have in spades here. Except for live sports. We don’t have baseball, football. For that, fine—get in and get out. But park right next to the venue—spend the extra twenty or thirty bucks. And, before you go to Detroit, you get your gas out here. You do not, do not, under any circumstances, stop in Detroit at a gas station! That’s just a call for a carjacking. (Williams, 2014: n.p., emphasis in original)

Patterson’s parenting practices are reproduced in scores of white suburban homes in Michigan and throughout the United States. Cities like Flint and Detroit are racialized and symbolically transformed into walled reservations through coded racial appeals (Haney Lopez, 2014) that allow parents to circumvent direct racial terminology.

The Flint water crisis was not simply the result of the deindustrialization of a company town, government incompetence, neoliberal state and urban policies, outright corruption, and the attempted disenfranchisement of citizens through emergency management. All of these factors mattered immensely. But just as important, the malign neglect of Flint for so long, and the consequent governmental inaction when residents first became alarmed about their water supply, were also important results of white supremacy, and its legacy in the form of distorted perceptions of cities and urban residents. At least this seems to be the conclusion drawn by Michigan Governor Rick Snyder’s official task force charged with investigating the lead contamination and its aftermath. In their final report, the bi-partisan commission wrote:

Flint residents, who are majority black or African-American and among the most impoverished of any metropolitan area in the United States, did not enjoy the same degree of protection from environmental and health hazards as that provided to other communities, … [leading] to the inescapable conclusion that this is a case of environmental injustice. (quoted in Campbell et al., 2016: 254)

The “inescapable conclusion” the commission identifies is the fact that Flint’s residents were first poisoned, then ignored and silenced, in part, because they were [seen as] poor, and, in part, because they were [seen as] black.

Decline and “Renewal”

Andrew Highsmith’s (2015) recent history of Flint, Demolition Means Progress, provides much needed context for the current water crisis. Highsmith’s narrative unfolds as a dialectic of perpetual economic decline and failed neoliberal attempts at renewal during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The decline of Flint results from some familiar factors: first, the impact of recession and deindustrialization upon a company town; second, the hyper-segregation of neighborhoods and communities as the result of federal lending policies and local zoning codes and covenants. To these familiar forces, Highsmith adds several other elements that have received less attention from historians and social scientists. In particular, he uncovers the administrative measures through which school segregation was maintained, even after the open housing movement ended rigid racial neighborhood boundaries inside Flint’s city limits. And he studies the tensions between the city and its surrounding suburbs as the local governments fought over tax revenue and land distribution. As industry left Flint, residents inevitably followed, leaving the city with less revenue and no room for expansion. The suburbs were largely the beneficiaries of Flint’s population and industrial losses. In various efforts to reverse this economic decline, city planners and private foundations (especially the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation) made various attempts at “renewal.” But these attempts at restructuring and resurgence invariably ended in failure, including some spectacular disasters, like “Autoworld,” the indoor theme park and shopping mall. Meant to be the center piece of the “Great Leap Forward” in Flint, funded by the Mott Foundation in partnership with public and other private institutions, the park was open for less than a year in 1984, and finally demolished in the late 1990s (Highsmith, 2015: 259–61).

Highsmith calls the epilogue to his book “America is a thousand Flints.” And in many respects this is undoubtedly a valuable metaphor. Most importantly, what Flint has in common with urban centers all over the United States is the history of enforced residential segregation. As Thomas Sugrue (2014) has done for Detroit, Highsmith excavates the public regulations and the private decisions that enforced the color line in Flint. Like urban centers in much of the rest of the country, early 20th century Flint was mapped out by racially restrictive covenants enforced by realtors and homeowners. Even as General Motors built relatively low-cost housing for their blue and white collar workers, “the homes were not available to all buyers”:

Specifically, GM mandated that only single-family homes could be built in its new subdivisions and that occupants could not keep livestock, sell liquor, or construct outdoor cesspools or privies on their property. The covenants also required racial segregation, stipulating that homes “could not be leased to or occupied by any person or persons not wholly of the white or Caucasian race.” (Highsmith, 2015: 32)

Even after such covenants were declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1948’s Shelley v. Kraemer, rigid racial segregation was maintained by the legacy of Federal and local red-lining policies. The Federal Home Owner’s Loan Corporation was established in 1933 in order to stabilize the mortgage markets and make home ownership available to working-class and middle-class Americans. But from the beginning,

HOLC’s policies also hardened the color line by enshrining a racially and socioeconomically biased calculus for measuring risk, value, and stability in residential neighborhoods. As part of its operations, the HOLC created “residential security maps” for Flint and 238 other American cities. (Highsmith, 2015: 38)

These maps infamously graded neighborhoods from A to D, with the least desirable areas graded C and D. On these maps, D-graded neighborhoods were often shaded in red, hence the term “red-lining.” Highsmith continues:

To measure the favorability of an area’s social characteristics, the HOLC asked its agents to list the percentage of Negroes, foreign-born residents, and families on relief in each neighborhood and to assess the risk of “infiltration” by these undesirable social groups. By the government’s explicit standards, then, racial, ethnic, and class segregation were essential components of neighborhood stability. (2015: 40)

While the HOLC ended its loan acquisition programs in 1936 (Highsmith, 2015: 38), these residential security maps, now utilized by the Federal Housing Administration, continued to shape the geography of race in America. By 1947, even the FHA removed explicit references to race from its Underwriting Manual (Highsmith, 2015: 52). As Highsmith shows, however, real estate professionals, urban planners, and policy-makers maintained rigid racial residential boundaries well into the late 20th century (see also Sugrue, 2014).

But this emphasis upon the real estate market and the racial geography of Flint, as important as it is, can lead to the mistaken impression that school segregation in the city was the result of these residential boundaries. Highsmith, however, demolishes the myth of de facto school segregation. Or, put more correctly, he deconstructs the opposition between de jure and de facto segregation. Into the late 20th century, “the language of de facto segregation distorted analyses of the color line in Flint and many other American cities” (2015: 225). Indeed, Highsmith shows that Flint city officials and school board members used a wide variety of administrative mechanisms to maintain rigid school segregation, even as city neighborhoods became increasing integrated as a result of the “open housing movement.” These mechanisms included separate classrooms for white and black students, a rigid tracking system that sent white students toward professional jobs and black students into the trades, and transfer policies that generally allowed white students to transfer out of majority black schools, but rarely if ever allowed black students to transfer to majority white schools. But school district “gerrymandering was […] the most common and effective of all the methods used to maintain administrative segregation in Flint and other urban school systems” (2015: 69). As the racial constituency of neighborhoods changed, the school board redrew district boundaries:

In several cases, the board’s districting decisions left neighbors from the same street attending different “neighborhood schools.” “They drew boundaries around houses,” Ruth Scott remembered, “down the middle of the street […] When blacks moved onto a street, they would change the boundaries.” (2015: 69)

Thus Highsmith documents the forces of residential and educational segregation in Flint, but these same practices structured industrial cities across the United States. In this sense, America is indeed a thousand Flints. At the same time, Highsmith notes particular characteristics that set Flint apart from some other cities like Chicago, or even Detroit. While Detroit may have been an industry town, Flint was much more a company town, and General Motors, along with its informally affiliated Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, helped shape Flint’s development policies, its educational system, and helped enforce neighborhood segregation. In fact, between the 1930s and the 1970s, the partnership between the Mott Foundation and the Flint school system turned that system into something of a testing ground for proto-neoliberal social engineering.

Already in the 1940s, the Mott Foundation, named for and largely run by the former GM CEO, Charles Stewart Mott, used the Flint school system as a an ideological weapon against the recently founded United Auto Workers (UAW). Together with his educational advisor, Frank Manley, Mott planned and funded a system of community schools that were open to the public during the evening, provided recreation, adult education, and community-building programs. Most importantly, perhaps, for Mott, these programs would emphasize personal responsibility, worker efficiency, and a sense of community independent of the union movement. “Like Manley, Mott looked to community schools as a means to undermine the UAW’s newfound political power while simultaneously restoring a sense of personal responsibility and civic solidarity among residents.” This early experiment in neoliberal social engineering effectively abolished “all but the most trivial distinctions between private interests and public policies” (Highsmith, 2015: 60).

As General Motors shuttered and relocated plants throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, residents left the city, and Flint accordingly lost a significant portion of its former tax base. During this period, the school system became increasingly dependent upon the Mott Foundation’s contributions to its operating costs. However, in the late 1970s, after civil rights lawyers and community activists began to show signs of success in desegregating the Flint school system, the Mott Foundation severed official ties with the Flint Board of Education (Highsmith, 2015: 234):

As Flint inched towards a seemingly permanent black majority and schools that were only nominally desegregated, foundation officials jettisoned their education-based approach to urban development in favor of a new bricks-and-mortar revitalization campaign designed to lure businesses, shoppers, and white suburbanites back to the city. Inherent in that policy shift was yet another ethos of urban renewal—one that emphasized place over people. (Highsmith, 2015: 241)

The result of this new shift in strategy and foundation money was, of course, the ill-fated Autoworld. And, as if to underscore the weight of place over people, Autoworld itself featured a full-size replica of turn-of-the-century downtown Flint. “‘Visit Autoworld,’ one advertisement urged, ‘and leave the world behind’” (2015: 259).

As the designers of Autoworld seemed to understand, a city is more than a set of geographic coordinates. It is a semiotic assemblage. Autoworld attempted to capture nostalgia, but in doing so, it openly acknowledged the passing away of the life it attempted to represent. It became a symbol of perceived ruin. Flint called itself the Vehicle City. Metaphorically, Autoworld was its gravestone.

Yet a city is more than a semiotic assemblage. It is an administrative body. It regulates, controls, distributes, counts, and taxes. These two forms, administrative and semiotic, are not independent. They interpenetrate and shape each other’s possibilities. Autoworld was built as Flint entered the prolonged period of industrial job loss and consequent population loss documented by Michael Moore in Roger and Me (1989). As the city lost its white population, and much of its middle-class black population, foundation money disappeared, state aide dried up, and Flint spiraled into bankruptcy. By 2011, with a deficit of $25.7 million, the Michigan governor disempowered Flint’s locally elected representatives, and put in their place an Emergency Manager to supervise both financial and policy decisions in the city (Campbell et al., 2016: 26–27). In 2014, under Emergency Manager Ed Kurtz, Flint switched from Lake Huron (Detroit) water to water from the Flint River. When this change was made, it was made without chemical corrosion controls being added to Flint River water. As a result, the polluted, acidic river water leeched lead from galvanized pipes in the city water system, in schools water systems, and in private homes.

Flint is not a cautionary tale. Flint isn’t a warning. But since 2015, when news of the crisis began to emerge, that crisis itself has served as a reminder. A city is not simply a semiotic assemblage, nor only an administrative body, it is thousands of children, women, and men, who stand against power and demand that their voices be heard. Before the water crisis, Flint was forgotten by the state, a hidden scar across the industrial landscape. And that scar may have remained hidden, were it not for the protests that emerged as residents became aware of the poison running through their children’s veins.

The authors who have contributed to this symposium share a common perspective on the Flint crisis. They understand it as a crisis of neoliberal governance, but equally they recognize the forces of active citizens resisting their oppression by the state. Each essay examines a different aspect of the Flint crisis and collectively they map a geography of racialized indifference.

The Crisis of Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism remains intentionally and formally colorblind. Despite this formal color blindness, neoliberalism and racism are inseparable. It is the neoliberal obsession with individual choice, responsibility, and merit, devoid of any consideration of context or structural disadvantage, which drives much contemporary racism; a laissez-faire racism felt most keenly in urban rust-belt cities like Flint, which have been all but abandoned by their states in the name of austerity. By imagining poverty as the consequence of poor choices or an individual’s moral failings, we are released from any responsibility to aid that individual. Translated into state policy this means a complete withdrawal of the social supports cities vitally need in the wake of deindustrialization. The contributions to this symposium explore this laissez-faire racism through an examination of neoliberal policy-making, and its consequences, in Michigan.

In “A Neoliberal Response to an Urban Crisis: Emergency Management in Flint, MI”, David Fasenfest examines the fiscal crises and social struggle of cities like Flint as the product of a range of structural and political factors that leave these municipalities ill-equipped to meet their obligations. Fasenfest’s critique centers on Michigan’s attempted solution for urban fiscal crisis, that of Emergency Management, which imposed neoliberal austerity measures without regard for the structural forces that contribute to community impoverishment in the first place. Through careful analysis, Fasenfest uses this understanding of emergency management to peel back the layers of the Flint water crisis and makes sense of intersecting histories of systemic racism, neoliberal policy, and its attendant scapegoating of the urban poor. In the case of Flint, these cost-cutting, pro-business measures had devastating consequences in terms of lead-contaminated drinking water and the resultant health crisis. Terressa A. Benz’s “Toxic Cities: Neoliberalism and Environmental Racism in Flint and Detroit Michigan” expands the scope of inquiry by examining the impact of neoliberalism on legal decision making and the resultant failure of Michigan, in particular, to achieve environmental justice. Using two case studies, the Flint water crisis and a home buyout program in southwest Detroit, she applies a socio-legal lens and critical race theory to examine how the situations at these two sites were created, at a legislative and legal level. The vast injustice occurring at both locations is understood as the result of neoliberal colorblind policy-making which emphasizes individual responsibility with little regard for the long-lasting consequences of systemic racism such as red-lining and educational segregation.

While the pieces in this special issue tend towards an examination of the consequences of neoliberalism on the postindustrial city, in “Detroit to Flint and Back Again: Solidarity Forever,” Sharon Howell, Michael D. Doan, and Ami Harbin give us insight into the boots-on-the-ground contestation of this agenda. They explore the role played by grassroots organizations and everyday people in undermining the legitimacy of state officials, including Emergency Managers. They demonstrate how, through the use of shared narrative, these community groups and individuals were able to “counter the dehumanizing logic of neoliberalism, which casts non-experts as lacking credibility,” and citizen activists were able to begin to shift public consciousness toward the understanding that water is a human right. While Howell, Doan, and Harbin explore the contestation of neoliberalism, and emphasize the possibilities for collective change through movements from the ground up, Jacob Lederman, in “The Peoples Plan?: Participation and Post-Politics in Flint’s Master Planning Process” uncovers the ideological use of citizen “participation” rhetoric in order to legitimate neoliberalism’s economic and social project. He examines the paradox of neoliberal governance—that it requires governing in accordance with market principles yet also draws on an ethic of civic participation as a source of legitimacy—in terms of Flint’s recent master city plan, “Imagine Flint.” Neoliberal market-led investment is oft lauded as the boon needed to halt urban decline (think Autoworld), while supposed community engagement has increasingly become the source of legitimacy behind these investments. Lederman argues that this process of civic engagement is largely symbolic. He demonstrates that the rules, or “best practices,” under which citizen participants must function are predefined by local business interests, outside consultants, and city administrators in accordance with neoliberal mandates. How this translates is that in resource-depleted cities like Flint, urban governance is increasingly based upon investment and real estate potential, rather than the needs of citizens and residents.

In “The Flint Water Crisis, the Karegnondi Water Authority, and Strategic–Structural Racism,” Peter J. Hammer, through an abridged version of testimony he gave for the Michigan Civil Rights Commission, explores the Flint water crisis in terms of what he calls strategic–structural racism, or the exploitation of existing racism and bias for economic and political gain. This work follows the money to the root of the crisis and explores the neoliberal discourse used to justify emergency management, financing of the Karegnondi Water Authority (KWA), and the switch to the Flint River—a discourse reliant on racist stereotypes that cast urban black folk as incapable of governing themselves, a discourse that necessarily conceals the more accurate narrative of a city suffering financial ruin as a result of decades of structural racism and disinvestment.

While the authors come from a diverse range of disciplinary and theoretical backgrounds, the contributions to this symposium share some common features: they all examine the crises in Flint and Detroit from the perspective of class conflict; each essay explores possibilities of working-class agency; and, taken as a whole, they serve as a collective indictment against the Michigan state apparatus, against the social and economic apartheid that continues to characterize Michigan communities, and against the racialized underdevelopment (Rodney, 1981) of Michigan’s urban centers over the course of the last 30 years. The purpose of this special issue is to move the terms of the discussion of the Flint water crisis, beyond “who’s at fault,” in order to uncover the structural and systemic roots of this crisis in neoliberal misgovernment. Collectively, these articles encourage readers to look past official explanations and examine the causes and consequences of the politics of austerity. It is a call to rethink the Flint water crisis in terms of the consequences of neoliberalism on real lives. Taken together these five essays suggest not just a narrative for Flint, or even Michigan, but are a testament to the future of all cities if neoliberalism remains unchecked.