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

by Mona Hanna-Attisha

Politics is about how we treat one another, how we sustain and share our common spaces and our environment. When people are excluded from politics, they have no say in the common space, no sharing of common resources. People may think of this as benign neglect, but it isn’t benign. It is malignant—and intentional.

We always see a lot of kids with ADHD, but lead exposure can increase its likelihood. Maybe Brandon was going to have ADHD no matter what—it has so many causes.

What the eyes don’t see. That is precisely why public health surveillance programs are crucial. They regularly monitor population-wide trends that individual doctors can’t detect on their own—whether it is the flu, HIV, cancer, or blood-lead levels. This is what government public health people are charged to do. It is an invaluable way of discovering paradigms. It’s Epidemiology 101.

Exposure to environmental toxins usually doesn’t come with glaring symptoms, like purple spots or even a rash. The symptoms are things like learning disabilities that have a time lag. Sometimes they don’t show themselves for years or even decades. For a pediatrician on the front lines, often the most you can hope for is establishing a correlation.

First, in October 2014, just six months after the switch, General Motors stopped using the water at its engine plant. The company got a waiver to go back to the Lake Huron water as its source. “You don’t want the higher chloride water (to result in) corrosion,” the GM spokesperson said. “We noticed it some time ago.”

If the water was corroding metal engine parts, what was it doing to the ancient lead pipes under the city? This happened almost a year ago, but mysteriously no alarms bells were ringing.

The man was a menace. If I could remove his microphone, the way John Snow got the Broad Street pump handle removed, I thought of all the people I could help.

He was also indulging in his other passion: researching how our religious ancestors, the Nestorians, branched into China in the seventh century. He wrote excitedly to Mark and me saying that he’d made arrangements to see a Nestorian stele from A.D. 635. The carved stone was inscribed in both Chinese and Aramaic, the ancient but dying language still spoken by Chaldeans, the language Jesus spoke.

And since my dad makes a PowerPoint about virtually anything he’s up to, I wrote back quickly: “Can’t wait to see your presentation.”

In the life of an overscheduled, privileged child, a little do-nothing time can be great.

These are responsible folks, I told myself. Why would anybody go into public health if they didn’t care deeply about something this important? The weekend hadn’t even been a “long” one. And wasn’t toxic water more important than playing golf or mowing the lawn?

“Lead-in-the-water bad. Leaching from the old pipes. The Flint River water is corrosive—and apparently no anticorrosive treatments were used.” “For how long?” “Months. Maybe eighteen months.”

I knew the switch happened in April 2014, but I needed the exact date. I’m sure I could have googled it, but I liked keeping Elin in the loop. I liked having my old friend beside me, and I could tell she found our collaboration gratifying.

Years ago the CDC recommended that all kids have their lead levels tested, but the public health victory that got lead out of gas and paint—and caused rates of lead exposure to go down steadily—also caused the recommendations to relax. That should never have happened. Because just as the CDC relaxed its recommendations, new research revealed that even the smallest levels of lead in a child’s blood were more damaging than we ever thought possible. We should have been doing more screening, not less.

All I cared or thought about was getting somebody to pay attention. But so many days had come and gone, I suspected that it wasn’t just laziness or distraction. I was starting to wonder if they were purposefully not getting back to me. What was really going on?

Now he had a gig at Michigan State University as our first associate dean of public health. This meant you could actually refer to him as “Dean Dean”—or at least I did, which always reminded me of Major Major in Catch-22, one of my favorite books. To give Dean Dean an idea of where I was heading, I forwarded my unanswered emails.

Maybe they were sipping from a drinking fountain at Kearsley, a fifty-seven-acre city park that had been completely resuscitated in the last ten years with the help of some grant money and a master gardener and theater lover, Kay Kelly, who brought Shakespeare productions and children’s plays there, along with a new bike path, a soccer field, and a new pavilion.

I had a sense that all my work was heading somewhere. It wasn’t just a passion for training new pediatricians. It felt bigger than that, almost as if the more I did, the more I worked, the more creative and efficient I was, the more chances I’d have to make children’s lives better.

From the perspective of the public health community, the threat of lead exposure was connected exclusively to lead paint and paint dust, which were thought to be the gravest and most common threats. But particulate chunks of lead that break off inside a water pipe and find their way into a drinking glass or baby bottle can be just as loaded with lead as a chip of paint. Unfortunately, the dismissals and distortions of the CDC during the D.C. water crisis—and its refusal for years to admit that lead in water caused harm to children—had misled Dean Dean and many others in public health, just as Edwin Chadwick had persuaded a posse of do-gooders in the nineteenth century that miasma was spreading cholera.

Y FIRST VISIT TO FLINT WAS on a childhood trip to AutoWorld, an amusement park that was one of the city’s many revitalization schemes. Flint had once been a shining example of America’s industrial prowess, a city known for the highest average income and lowest unemployment. But by the 1980s, Flint had fallen on hard times. Deindustrialization had hit, along with the oil crisis. The joblessness rate was the highest in the country, prompting the media to give Flint one of its awful but catchy monikers—the “unemployment capital of America.” So when AutoWorld opened in 1984, the promoters said it would draw one million visitors a year—and most important, employ 650 Flint residents.

But the exhibit completely ignored the darker tale of the Treaty of 1819 and subsequent treaties that forced Native Americans off their land and pushed them into Canada.

The sunny future was shown in an assembly line of robots, which should’ve been taken as a dire warning about the city’s future, not a vision of utopia.

By December of its first year, AutoWorld was open only on weekends. By January, it closed completely. Over the next decade, it flickered on and off, opened and closed sporadically, each revival more pathetic than the last.

THE NEXT THING I remember about Flint was Michael Moore’s career-making documentary, Roger and Me. It came out in 1989, when I was thirteen—just finishing eighth grade and living in Royal Oak. My family couldn’t wait to see it—and we rented it from a video store as soon as it came out on VHS.

At thirteen, I picked up on his mixed feelings about Roger and Me—and came away with my own. Other than the seriously disturbing scene where a very cute rabbit is slaughtered on camera—beaten by a lead pipe—the most memorable part of Roger and Me for me was Moore’s chronicling of AutoWorld: he showed how AutoWorld offered a rose-colored-glasses view of GM and the rise of the automobile. In so doing, he opened my eyes to how wishful thinking can be used to obscure the facts, leaving out inconvenient truths and lessons.

By the time I got to the University of Michigan and studied environmental science deeply, I knew more about the tragedies of the auto industry: traffic accidents and fatalities, air pollution, global lead poisoning, dependence on fossil fuels that caused conflict around the globe—and even the way cars often encouraged Americans toward a soulless suburban existence. And global warming.

I came to Flint for its hope, but also for its lessons, both terrible and beautiful. Flint from its beginnings has been a place of extremes, where greed meets solidarity, where bigotry meets fairness, and where the struggle for equality has played out. Flint is where many people have been pushed down and many have risen. And where many have fought the good fight—and won.

General Motors traces its roots to a carriage factory built in Flint in 1880—the Durant-Dort factory. It made its first successful foray into cars in 1908 with the opening of a Buick factory.

At one time, GM’s original Buick plant was the largest factory in the world.

Between 1915 and 1960, more than six million African Americans, hoping to escape Jim Crow in the South, came north for those expanding employment opportunities—and during this Great Migration many were drawn to Flint, even though the hiring practices and working conditions of the auto industry were unjust.

Antidiscrimination initiatives put in place by FDR and the UAW made it easier for black Americans to rise out of low-skilled jobs, despite fierce opposition by white workers, who felt threatened.

Ford Motor’s centralized hiring tried to be color-blind, which gave it the highest rate of African-American employment in the country. But at GM, decisions were made by individual plant managers, which resulted in many fewer African Americans in their plants.

Restrictive racial covenants were legal and common, encouraged by GM. These covenants explicitly stated that “homes could not be leased to or occupied by any person or persons not wholly of the white or Caucasian race.” A typical one said, “No negroes or persons of negro extraction (except while employed thereon as servants) shall occupy any of the land.”

Only two residential areas of Flint were “designated” for blacks. One had notorious industrial pollution—it was literally adjacent to the Buick plant, where the housing stock was poor.

The white riots of 1943—in reaction to the building of the Sojourner Truth Housing Project—left forty-three people dead. For blacks, the message was loud and clear: moving to a white neighborhood might endanger your life.

Mott conceived of and created a top-rate community school system that integrated public schools, recreation programming, health and dental care, and children’s camps. He envisioned a full-service one-stop system that cared for children in a comprehensive way.

The idea of a national union was a far-off dream until 1936. That’s when things changed—and led to “The Strike Heard Around the World,” or the epic Flint Sit-Down Strike.

The sit-down strike went on for a couple of relatively quiet weeks. Then on January 11, 1937, the guards at Fisher Body Plant No. 2 cut off the strikers’ access to their food supply—and then, with guns and tear gas, attempted to force them to leave. They refused and fought back, throwing two-pound hinges at the plant guards and drenching the Flint police with water from firehoses. The event was later called the “Battle of the Running Bulls.”

This expansion of the strike effectively shut down GM’s industrial output nationwide. Only after newly elected Michigan governor Frank Murphy refused to use force against the strikers—and even sent the National Guard to protect them—did President Franklin Roosevelt demand that GM recognize the UAW and end the forty-four-day strike.

After being blacklisted in Flint, Genora kept organizing in Detroit—where she was a victim of a lead pipe attack—went on to work with the Michigan ACLU, and later led marches against the Vietnam War and helped found Women for Peace. Her tenacity and her ability to rally support for the labor movement helped make generations of workers’ lives better.

What followed these labor victories was later called the Grand Bargain. In return for the workers’ labor and loyalty, the company would pay them living wages and provide decent benefits. This Grand Bargain went on to encourage growth and the rise of immense prosperity, allowing workers to share in the consumer economy they helped create. The result was a thriving new middle class who could afford to buy the products of American industry, especially its cars.

Painted as a villain by congressional conservatives, Murphy drew the attention of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which held one of its first meetings in Michigan to investigate the causes of the Sit-Down Strike. The committee blamed Murphy for Michigan’s “state of anarchy,” and Flint’s city manager accused him of treason.

In 1944, in his dissenting opinion in Falbo v. United States, he wrote lines that have inspired my belief in government as a force for good: “The law knows no finer hour than when it cuts through formal concepts and transitory emotions to protect unpopular citizens against discrimination and persecution.” On behalf of another group of “unpopular citizens,” he referred to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II as the “legalization of racism” in his dissenting opinion in Korematsu v. United States. The first justice to ever use the word racism in a Supreme Court opinion, he went on to employ it seven more times before it disappeared from court opinions for two decades.

A battle for justice was won, but the rest of the story isn’t so happy. Dr. Sweet’s notoriety led to the deaths of several family members and ended his career in medicine.

Together, these events left Flint reeling from the effects of extreme white flight: when an African-American family moved into a neighborhood—often in the face of intimidation and threats—white families moved out en masse, anxious that their property values would decrease.

Greedy real estate agents colluded to control neighborhoods in what came to be called “blockbusting.” Real estate agents would go door to door, frightening whites with warnings of plummeting home values—and offering to put their homes on the market quickly, often below market prices. The agents then sold the homes to African Americans at a large markup above market prices.

The upward mobility that white Americans took for granted in the second half of the twentieth century was denied to most blacks, but blockbusting—which continued int...

Attempts to desegregate Michigan’s public schools met with even more white voter anger—and violence—throughout the 1960s and ’70s. The school busing wars raged, culminating in the bombing of school buses in Pontiac in 1971. Finally in 1974 the Supreme Court issued a decision that kids couldn’t be bused across city lines.

Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote in his dissent to Milliken v. Bradley that the “Court’s refusal to remedy separate and unequal education” leaves “little hope that our people will learn to live together and understand each other.”

As an urban center, Flint has been in a man-made state of emergency for forty years.