Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in What the Eyes Don’t See, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Racism and Environmental Injustice
Truth vs. Corruption
Community Values and Collective Duty
The American Dream
Family, Tradition, and Strength
Summary
Analysis
In Flint, the name “Kettering” is famous—everyone knows the legend of Charles “Boss” Kettering, the head of GM’s research department from 1920 to 1947. An engineer and inventor, Kettering founded the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York with Alfred Sloan, the president of GM. But in spite of his achievements and fame in Flint, Mona believes there is “no greater public health villain.”
By diving deeper into Flint’s history, the book provides a holistic view of how environmental injustice and corruption have shaped modern-day Flint. Through her book, Mona is seeking to overturn some of the biggest myths about the people American culture deems significant and revolutionary, exposing the truths about their legacies.
Themes
Lead is a powerful neurotoxin, but it’s also a metal that humans have been using for thousands of years. The word “plumbing” is even derived from plumbum, the Latin word for lead, due to lead’s ubiquity in the ancient world. The Romans used it to line aqueducts and to make wine and paint; they even sprinkled it like salt atop their food. Even though lead was known to be poisonous even then, it was hard to quantify its slow-burning effects on the human body—especially when its benefits as a building material were quantifiable.
Even though lead is powerful—and though the damage it does to the human body is irreversible—its effects are often so slow to appear that they aren’t noticed. When they are, they’re often attributed to other factors. Lead has, for a long time, been a useful building material—and because lead was so useful in the short-term, its long-term effects were ignored. This is a classic example of how industry, greed, and ignorance win out over facts, public health, and common sense.
Themes
Lead paint wasn’t banned in the United States until 1922—but even after it was prohibited, lead was added to gasoline to stop engine knocking, an idea pioneered by none other than Kettering. Even though leaded gasoline was known to be a toxic nerve gas, it was marketed across the nation until 1924, when noxious fumes poisoned and killed workers in an oil refinery in New Jersey where the gas was being made.
This passage shows that while Kettering knew about the effects of lead, he still pushed it as a necessary solution to an annoying problem. People like Kettering were more concerned with money and fame than with public health—and the decisions these individuals made would have devastating effects for decades to come.
Themes
As the public health debate over leaded gasoline began to rage, Alice Hamilton—a social justice pioneer, medical doctor, and professor who specialized in lead toxicology cases—urged GM to stop using lead in their gasoline. She publicly warned people of the dangers, but even as the foremost American authority on lead poisoning, many called her pleas for change “hysterical.”
Alice Hamilton was a female public health advocate who used her voice against a Flint institution and was ultimately deemed irrational and unworthy of attention. This is significant because Mona, who was familiar with Hamilton’s story and looked to her as a hero, knew that as a woman she too might be cast aside and considered “hysterical” or untrustworthy. Sexism and corruption are powerful parallel forces in both Hamilton and Mona’s stories.
Themes
Get the entire What the Eyes Don’t See LitChart as a printable PDF.
GM’s own in-house toxicologist, whose name was Dr. Robert Kehoe, extolled the benefits of leaded gasoline and claimed it was safe. At a conference called by the surgeon general in 1926, Kehoe said GM would discontinue leaded gasoline—if it could be proven harmful. This precedent would be used by the tobacco and asbestos industries throughout the 20th century to justify the continued production and dissemination of harmful products. “Safe until proven dangerous” became known as Kehoe’s Paradigm. At the end of a seven-month-long study, the surgeon general’s office couldn’t quantify any visible damage in their subjects due to lead, and leaded gasoline remained on the market. By 1960, about 90 percent of all gasoline contained lead.
This passage illustrates how greed and corruption can have a major, long-lasting influence on public policy. This is an especially dangerous precedent when it comes to something like lead—just because people couldn’t see lead’s effects doesn’t mean they weren’t there. This passage also underscores the importance of the old adage Mona teaches her students: “The eyes can’t see what the mind doesn’t know.” While it’s tough to visualize and thus quantify the effects of lead, they’re all too real. But because officials wouldn’t listen to people like Alice Hamilton, policy was shaped around harmful and ignorant tenets like “safe until proven dangerous.”
Themes
Over the course of the 20th century, lead poisoning began to be seen as a problem that affected only uneducated people living in “slums”—an inaccurate, racist assessment of a problem that today may be responsible for nearly 500,000 annual deaths in the U.S. alone, as well as 12.4 percent of the global burden of developmental disabilities and about 2 percent of the global burdens of heart disease and stroke. This, Mona writes, is Kettering’s true legacy.
This passage encapsulates the central idea of environmental injustice. People living in low-income areas often have governments that are less invested in their success—and more quickly to blame them for their own problems rather than acknowledge the slow, systemic accumulation of environmental and public health issues due to policy failure and inequality. Because of Kettering’s insistence on the safety of leaded gasoline, there’s now lead in the soil all across America—but places with fewer resources to clean up their surroundings are, of course, disproportionately affected by environmental toxins. So while it might seem that environmental issues like lead poisoning only affect “slums,” the reality is that disadvantaged areas are the proverbial canaries in the coal mine in many places throughout America.
Themes
The government began phasing out the use of lead in paint in 1970s. Lead was restricted in plumbing and leaded gasoline was taken off the market in the United States in the mid-1980s—but some Middle Eastern countries still use leaded gasoline, and lead is still allowed in airplane fuel. Environmentalists and public health officials have linked lead exposure to almost every kind of developmental and behavioral problem there is today, even correlating cities’ “lead curve[s]” and “crime curve[s].” There has been a significant decrease in blood-lead levels throughout the last several decades—but the battle against lead, Mona writes, still hasn’t been won.
Because lead poisoning affects brain development and often causes lowered IQs, behavioral disorders, and other cognitive and emotional delays, it often seems from the outside like cities with high crime rates are inherently violent places. But in reality, the people in those communities have often been poisoned by policy and neglect. When it comes to neurotoxins like lead, it’s no wonder that communities with histories of high exposure are suffering:
Themes
Lead paint is still a serious problem: particles of lead make their way into the air, and young children may eat lead paint chips, which taste sweet. Over the course of the last 150 years, there have been many instances of lead-contaminated water in major U.S. cities like Chicago, New York, and D.C. Even the legislation the U.S. government has in place as part of the Safe Drinking Water Act is inadequate. There are still between six and 10 million lead service lines in the country, many of them in low-income, minority-populated urban areas. Moreover, the SDWA still allows for a minimal “safe” level of lead in U.S. drinking water, when, in truth, no level of lead is safe.
This passage further underscores how neglectful policy affects America’s most vulnerable communities. Cities whose budgets don’t allow for an overhaul of outdated, toxic lead infrastructure are left to fend for themselves. Meanwhile, U.S. legislation ultimately protects those in power from facing consequences for ignoring these communities rather than adequately protecting people from one of the most toxic substances known to man.
Themes
While Mona and her colleagues are well-educated in how to treat children who have ingested lead paint chips, their education barely covers the possibility of lead in a drinking water supply. This fact reminds Mona of a familiar D.H. Lawrence quote: “The eyes don’t see what the mind doesn’t know.” For many of Mona’s patients who are affected by lead poisoning at a young age—be it through paint chips, water, or bullet wounds—“life isn’t long enough to recover from [such ] a childhood.”
One of the most profound barriers to change is a lack of awareness. This makes Mona’s fascination with the D.H. Lawrence quote all the more poignant: people all across America can’t understand what’s happening in communities like Flint if they don’t have any context about its history, or the larger history of lead usage in the U.S. But there’s not enough time to slowly educate people about all of these factors, wait for them to make the connections, and wait some more for them to decide to take action. People like Flint’s residents need change now.
Themes
