What the Eyes Don't See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City (One World Essentials)

by Mona Hanna-Attisha

Many cities turned from chlorination to chloramination. As a disinfectant, chloramine lasts longer than chlorine, is effective against crypto, and doesn’t create as many toxic by-products. By 1998, in order to comply with the new EPA regulations, an estimated 68 million Americans were drinking water disinfected with chloramine, and several major cities, including Washington, D.C., were using it.

Education was the religion of our family, embraced as a way to a better life but also to a richer, more intellectually alive existence. Doing schoolwork and getting good grades were expected by my Arab tiger mom. But in addition to what we learned in school, my parents urged us to read and learn independently about geography, history, literature, international affairs, and current events.

Mark and I, while growing up there, rarely talked or obsessed about being called “camel jockeys” and other ethnic slurs. Though these incidents were infrequent, they did seem to coincide with U.S. military actions against Arab countries, usually Iraq, that kids were hearing about in the news.

I’m sure my parents had no idea, before they settled in Royal Oak, about the working-class suburb’s dark history as a base of operations for Monsignor Charles Coughlin, usually shortened to Father Coughlin, and his angry, hate-spewing, anti-Semitic radio program, broadcast on Sunday afternoons throughout the 1930s—first on WJR, then nationally on CBS. At the time, with tens of millions of weekly listeners, he was one of the most influential voices in America.

After the outbreak of World War II, FDR’s administration declared his hate-filled broadcast “enemy propaganda” and created new broadcasting restrictions specifically to force him off the air.

It was a mecca for angsty punk teenagers with red Mohawks who hung out downtown near the Noir Leather fetish store, where I bought my first pair of Doc Martens. It was where indie coffee shops and grunge first arrived in Metro Detroit.

I was stunned to discover that the large post office in downtown Royal Oak—where our family mail was sorted, and where I dealt with bulk mailings for the political campaigns of John Freeman and my high school friend Dave Woodward—had been built to process the crazy amounts of fan letters Coughlin received. According to historian Alan Brinkley, in 1934 Coughlin received more than ten thousand pieces of mail a day.

We don’t think enough about what lies beneath the veneer of the places where we grew up, as if childhood innocence lingers inside us, filtering out anything too complicated or too dark to consider. We step over complex systems every day, walking through history and pretending the darkness isn’t there. But the older I get, the more I want to really understand the world I’m in and how it came to be. I learned that from my parents—to dig deeper and not be afraid of what I might find.

A letter might tell her that her brother or brother-in-law was being deployed to the front during the Iran-Iraq war, a senseless and drawn-out conflict that killed more than one million people between 1980 and 1988.

My mom would read and reread these letters, sometimes for hours, crying. There was still homemade food in the kitchen, ready for us. But her mind had traveled elsewhere.

After five or six years at his job, my dad was promoted to the highest research position, “technical fellow,” at the GM Tech Center in Warren, a space-age building designed by architect Eero Saarinen.

What was good for GM was certainly good for our family. The company was still a vibrant innovation machine, much like Bell Labs, IBM, and Kodak used to be, and gave my dad the freedom that a creative scientist and inventor can usually only dream about, along with financial stability, a pension, and health benefits.

Eventually my mom returned to college to validate her chemistry degree from Baghdad University, getting a master’s in chemistry and a teaching certificate at the same time.

Once certified, she thrived as an ESL teacher, tapping into her own experiences as a reluctant immigrant. She worked for years helping young students, mostly from Japan and the Middle East, including refugees from war-torn Iraq.

As it had for so many immigrants over the centuries, the promise of America worked for my family. We’d left a country that was broken, unsafe, unpredictable, and oppressing its own people for a country that allowed us to thrive.

The American Dream—buoyed, backed, and underwritten by the choices of the American people, expressed through their democratically elected government— worked for us in so many ways that it no longer works for my kids in Flint—and maybe was never meant to.

American dream and democratic system questioned.

MY MOM NEEDED A LOT of convincing before she retired. She finally took a buyout from the school district, which was a big relief to me. She did it just in time, right before the state legislature began limiting pensions and benefits for teachers who had retired during the Great Recession, which started earlier, hurt more, and lasted longer in Michigan than in the rest of the country.

And the jobs I wanted were intense and required a significant time commitment. From our point of view, the more time Nina and Layla spend with my mom, the better.

After I took the job at Hurley, Elliott and I bought a house just ten minutes away from my parents—halfway between Flint, where I worked, and Detroit, where Elliott did. This was, I recognized, another privilege our family enjoyed.

The economic crisis in 2008 began waves of layoffs. In one day, hundreds of engineers and scientists were fired—instructed to empty their desks and leave the building where they’d worked their entire lives.

He believed in GM, perhaps too much. As the stock price went down, he bought more GM stock. With the company bankruptcy in 2008, the “old GM” stock literally disappeared, and so did quite a bit of his 401(k). Yet he continued to have faith in the company that had put food on our table.

What did Daddy have on GM? Why was he still there? Finally, just a few months back, after thirty-one years, he retired and began a new life with new kinds of work, from obsessively researching our ancestral history to indulging Nina and Layla as well as Mark’s two boys, Theodore and Zachary, with expressions of love and affection that had been largely absent during my own childhood. I chalked it up to the softening that comes with age and time, the ability of love to heal, and the mysteries of being a grandparent.

His view shifted. He embraced what was in front of him—his love of his family, his realized dreams for Mark and me, his hopes for our kids—rather than holding on to what was behind him or across the sea.

The fact that Elin’s dad and mine had both worked at the GM Tech Center for years created even more shared history.

I was careful to say nothing about the Flint water. I have always kept pretty quiet about my work, wanting to savor my family time, focus on the girls, and maintain boundaries. My parents and Elliott are used to it. My dad was the same way about his job at GM.

She never sheltered Mark and me from the bad news coming from Baghdad when we were little, yet in many ways she was the prototypically overprotective immigrant mom.

I got better at protecting Bebe once I was an adult. She is anxious about the unknowns, the hundred things that can consume a woman who has lost everything of her youth and has decided she is not going to risk losing anything more.

He had recently come to Genesee from a nearby county’s health department, he said, with twice as much funding and only half the population. That was annoying to hear. As soon as we started talking, he complained about how few resources he had for lead remediation in Genesee.

Funding for public health is inconsistent in Michigan, which has a weird system that just doesn’t make sense.

It made no sense that communities with the most struggles and most poverty—and therefore the most health issues—were always allocated the least amount of money, but that was how it worked, since the property tax revenue was smaller in poor counties. A similar dynamic affected school funding in Michigan, allowing the richest school districts to spend more per student, especially on capital improvement or school buildings.

When a city doesn’t generate enough tax revenue because property taxes don’t bring in enough money, the poor people who live there are punished with higher utility bills.

In 2014 the city pipes were leaking between 20 and 40 percent of their load, which meant residents and business owners had to pay for those water losses. The average annual Flint residential water bill in 2015 was $864—about $300 more than in any other city in Michigan. In fact, it was the highest in the nation.

The history of public health is loaded with incredible stories and puzzles, which is why so many books are written about contagions and outbreaks. Even zombie stories are metaphors for epidemics.

A century ago the biggest threat to life wasn’t cancer or heart attacks—it was infectious disease. Nothing surpassed his obsession with preventing cholera.

Working parallel tracks, they conducted parallel investigations and the two men created a “ghost map” where each black square or bar (later modified to dots) represented a cholera case in London.

Ghost Map

If it weren’t for Snow’s science, stubbornness, persistence, and passion for the truth, cholera might have raged on for another decade or more, taking thousands or even millions of lives. When I think about Snow and his accomplishment, what has always grabbed me most—and impressed me—is the way he insinuated himself into the epidemic. Nobody hired or paid him—or even asked him—to solve this epidemic. But he had a crucial tool at his disposal, epidemiology, and a problem right in front of him, in his own neighborhood, and that was enough for him to get started.

It may have been his humble background that drove him. He never blamed the less fortunate for their predicaments; instead, he understood and studied the way that their environment—whether it was poor light or lack of running water—contributed to their condition.

His work wasn’t about abstract scientific discovery alone. It was about people and community. That’s what science is supposed to be about—not an academic exercise for the ivory tower, or racking up publications, grants, and offers of tenure. It’s about using the tools and technology available to make lives better, no matter what articles of faith obstruct the path.

Snow was so far ahead of his time, his work wasn’t totally vindicated until years after his own premature death.

The person at the center of it isn’t famous like John Snow, but a distant cousin of mine, a bacteriologist named Paul Shekwana. He was one of the first public health scientists from the Middle East, from present-day Iraq, to work in America. He was a “bacteriologist” back in 1904, which is—I’m pretty sure—what we would call a microbiologist, epidemiologist, or infectious disease expert today.

Almost immediately after he got to America, he was called to Iowa City, where a deadly outbreak of typhoid fever had struck. Shekwana was brought in to work with the Iowa State Board of Health bacteriology lab—an entire floor of the new Iowa City Medical Building was given over to his lab team. There Shekwana investigated, among other things, the tie between unpasteurized milk and typhoid. But he didn’t stop there; he promoted new public health regulations in Iowa and beyond.

Iowa

His most important contribution may have been an article published in the New York Medical Society Journal in 1906 (which was excerpted in the Journal of the American Medical Association), urging all doctors to wash and disinfect their hands throughout the day, particularly before and after seeing patients. It’s almost impossible to imagine how much this simple practice improved patient care, prevented the spread of infection, and saved lives, lots of them.

He wrote articles about sanitation, food safety, and even drinking water. Amazingly, my family has a letter in which Shekwana urges residents not to use a certain well because of the “variations in quality” of the water.

One hundred years later, the mayor of Iowa City honored him with an official proclamation for his work in public health. Was he murdered? Was it a suicide? The Paul Shekwana story has mesmerized my family for years. At the time, his friends and colleagues described him as cheerful and excited about returning to England. Perhaps he had a love interest they never knew about. Perhaps his heart was broken. Or maybe he had caused too much trouble with all his bad news about germs, the spread of infectious disease, and water quality. As with all things, there is so much more to know.

“In the little world in which children have their existence,” he wrote in Great Expectations (1861), “there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice. It may be only small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child is small, and its world is small.”

In 1842 the average life span of an upper-class “gentleman” in London was forty-five years, the average tradesman lived to be twenty-five, and an average member of the working poor died at sixteen. Among the recorded deaths of the same year, 62 percent were children under the age of five.

What we ingest or experience or inhale will make a difference to our health—literally the number of minutes allotted us to live.

It was like we were reenacting the error of Edwin Chadwick’s mission to clean up London’s air by draining all the human waste into the drinking water of the Thames. But in this case, the mistake had been made in an attempt to save not lives but dollars.

Marc Edwards was a world expert on pipe corrosion and recipient of a “genius grant” for his visionary work and doggedness. As a scientist, he had been willing to stake his own retirement money to save kids from lead poisoning when the D.C. utility, the D.C. government, the EPA, and the CDC all denied there was a problem. Was MDEQ really going to totally dismiss his findings?

In my mind, it wasn’t a coincidence that D.C. and Flint are both places, in different ways, that lack adequate political representation—places where democracy is far from complete.