What the Eyes Don’t See chronicles the water crisis that seized Flint, Michigan from 2014–2019 after the city switched its water source from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department to the Flint River. When the switch occurred, officials neglected to add anti-corrosive chemicals to the water, and 100,000 citizens of Flint to were exposed to high levels of lead as a result. Local and federal public health institutions, however, denied that the water supply was to blame for the health issues that Flint residents began to experience. In the memoir, Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha explores how Flint’s long history of anti-Black racism makes what happened in Flint a matter of environmental justice (a movement concerned with how environmental and public health issues disproportionately affect poor people and racial minorities). By comparing state and federal officials’ neglect of the crisis to an act of “genocide” against Flint’s predominantly Black residents, the book suggests that environmental injustice is rooted in racism. Therefore, to secure environmental justice for all, the U.S. must take steps to provide funding, education, and other resources that will begin to repair the country’s history of racism against its Black citizens.
The book gives an account of Flint’s long history of racism and corporate greed, illustrating why Flint is a prime example of environmental injustice at work. In the first half of the 20th century, Flint was the epicenter of the automotive industry, home to companies like General Motors and Chevrolet. Between 1915 and 1960—at the height of Flint’s prosperity—more than six million Black Americans fled the violence of the Jim Crow (racially segregated) South and landed in Flint, where they hoped to secure well-paying jobs and bright futures. But these Black workers were slotted into the lowest-paying, lowest-skilled positions. Between the racist hiring practices at the big auto plants and discriminatory housing policies in the Flint area, Black Americans were essentially shut out of the same opportunities their white coworkers and neighbors were able to enjoy. After World War II, the Supreme Court began to desegregate schools and housing. As Black families found themselves free at last to move into whichever neighborhoods they chose to, the phenomenon of “white flight”—white families moving out as Black families moved in, fearing that the presence of Black neighbors would drive housing prices down—took over Flint. As the home bases of the automotive industry shifted away from Flint, some city entities backed a 1869 referendum to tie Flint to a regional government. But the residents in Flint’s new, overwhelmingly white suburbs voted against the referendum. Flint was left “isolated and abandoned.”
Because Flint’s history left its Black residents vulnerable and unprotected by the end of the 20th century, the book suggests that Flint was uniquely vulnerable to environmental racism and the water crisis that ensued in 2014. Flint was already vulnerable to environmental injustice at this time, having fewer resources than the affluent suburbs surrounding it and a population that had been disadvantaged by decades of racial discrimination. Flint residents also didn’t have anyone looking out for their well-being or investing in changes to renew the city’s prosperity: by 2014, the mayor of Flint had been essentially replaced by a state-appointed emergency manager, whose sole directive was to cut costs in the city’s budget. “Racial minorities and low-income communities,” the book states, “face a disproportionate share of environmental and public health burdens.” In other words, poor and predominately non-white areas are subject to neglect, poor funding, and racist housing and employment policies that make them more vulnerable to environmental injustice. This was certainly the case for Flint, and their already-crumbling infrastructure was decimated even further by the 2014 water supply switch. But in spite of residents’ complaints after the switch, no one paid attention to them or investigated the quality of the water. In fact, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality actively tried to cover up the results of routine tests showing that the water had dangerous levels of lead in it. Once the water crisis was underway, the “disproportionate” disadvantages that Flint’s citizens had long faced made their local and state government less willing to help them rather than more so. Indeed, every level of government turned a blind eye to Flint’s problems. With this, the book suggests that Flint residents suffered specifically because they were largely poor and non-white. Their vulnerability made those in charge of overseeing the city’s well-being see it as a lost cause.
To ensure that tragedies like the Flint water crisis don’t happen again, the book suggests that the U.S. needs to enact policies that will help repair the damages done by years of racial discrimination, neglect, and environmental injustice. The Flint water crisis was proof of how environmental injustice goes all the way to the top. In other words, populations that have been discriminated against and neglected by their governments cannot rebuild without significant help and attention to the root of their problems. Toward the end of the book, author Mona Hanna-Attisha outlines some of the demands she and her colleagues made on behalf of Flint. She advocated for public health initiatives, enhanced school lunches, expanded access to pediatric behavioral services, and more—programs that would be costly but would help to start leveling the playing field for a new generation of Flint children. In a city that was abandoned by industry and forgotten by its government, the only solution was structural change that would begin to remedy the city’s decades-long lack of attention, advocacy, and reform.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Racism and Environmental Injustice ThemeTracker
Racism and Environmental Injustice Quotes in What the Eyes Don’t See
This is the story of the most important and emblematic environmental and public health disaster of this young century. More bluntly, it is the story of a government poisoning its own citizens, and then lying about it. It is a story about what happens when the very people responsible for keeping us safe care more about money and power than they care about us, or our children.
There’s an expression I have always liked, a D. H. Lawrence distillation: The eyes don’t see what the mind doesn’t know.
“If Miguel’s right that Flint is not using corrosion control, that means there’s lead in Flint's water.”
“Lead in the water?”
[…] “And based on Miguel’s memo,” she went on, “the lead levels in the Flint water are really, really high. He suspects that MDEQ isn’t testing correctly. That’s why he leaked the memo.”
“Are you kidding me?” I shook my head. “Why would anybody at the EPA need to leak their own memo?”
Elin cocked her head and just stared at me, deadpan. She was waiting for me to catch up.
Being a pediatrician—perhaps more than any other kind of doctor—means being an advocate for your patient. It means using your voice to speak up for kids. We are charged with the duty of keeping these kids healthy.
We took an oath.
Where had we been?
Where had I been?
Urban poverty is less lethal now, but in some respects, nothing has really changed. The environments of the cities we live in—their dirt and air, their violence and hopelessness and stress, their water—can still predict how long a life we will have.
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.
No single bad decision or unfortunate event created modern Flint. The greatest forces working against the city were racism and the corporate greed of GM, which pulled out of Flint, the city that birthed and nurtured it, to satisfy financial problems caused by a lack of imagination.
It was real, something that was happening all around us, the blood of our own patients, and water that flowed in the pipes of our own city where we sat. The residents were engaged in a way I’d rarely seen before, vibrating with a weird new energy, tense but invigorated by the feeling that we were finally doing something. And our results weren’t going to be stuffed away in a digital archive and forgotten. Our results could change our world.
I thought about everything he’d been through, largely preventable, all the toxic stresses: violence, fear, bullet wounds, hospital visits, surgeries, and PTSD, and then the effects of lead poisoning. For many people, life isn’t long enough to recover from a childhood like that.
A sea of red tape lay between me and an official health advisory which would hopefully free up resources and qualify the city for bottled water, filters, and other aid.
For the hundredth time, I wondered: Is the official indifference because these are Flint kids? Poor kids? Black kids? Kids who already have every adversity in the world piled up against them?
A central tenet of [environmental justice] is that local communities must have control over their environments—and decide whether a pipeline gets a permit, or a wind turbine gets built instead of a natural gas plant. When people have a say, smarter decisions are made—both for the environment and for public health.
Now, as the press conference loomed, I was beginning to see that my family’s saga of loss and dislocation had given me my fight—my passion and urgency. […] I grew up with dismay and knew how wrong leaders could be, how cruel and negligent. They have to be held accountable, have to be challenged, because power corrupts, and our moral sensibility can be so dulled that we let atrocities happen right around us, unless we manage to stay constantly vigilant, sensitive, aroused, and ready to take a stand.
Again and again, the state and federal officials’ disdain for Flint was shocking.
At the EPA, when asked about using federal money to buy water filters for city residents, the Region 5 Water Division chief […] wrote to the regional administrator and others, “I’m not so sure Flint is the community we want to go out on a limb for.”
The pointed cruelty. The arrogance and inhumanity.
Sometimes it is called racism. Sometimes it is called callousness. And sometimes […] it can be called manslaughter.
Flint falls right into the American narrative of cheapening black life. White America may not have seen the common thread between Flint history and these tragedies, but black America saw it immediately. That the blood of African-American children was unnecessarily and callously laced with lead speaks in the same rhythm as Black Lives Matter, a movement also born from the blood of innocent African Americans.
I was just the last piece. The state wouldn’t stop lying until somebody came along to prove that real harm was being done to kids. Then the house of cards fell.
Mv family came to the United States basically as refugees fleeing oppression, in search of a peaceful and prosperous place for my brother and me to grow up. The American Dream worked for us. […]
Yes, people are still running to America, or at least trying to. It remains the epitome of prosperity for the entire world, the richest country that ever was. But there really are two Americas, aren’t there? The America I was lucky to grow up in, and the other America—the one I see in my clinic every dry.
