Justice
Resolving the Racism at the Heart of Flint's Water Crisis
A state task force report calls the water situation in the city an environmental injustice. What does that really mean?
Last week, the Flint Water Advisory Task Force delivered to Michigan Governor Rick Snyder its final report, a comprehensive treatise on what went wrong in the city’s water crisis and who deserves blame. Though The New York Times’ editorial board quickly called out the racism at the heart of the disaster, the task force ties itself up in knots parsing that particular conclusion in its report.
Indeed, the report’s executive summary notes up front that, “Given the demographics of Flint, the implications for environmental injustice cannot be ignored or dismissed.”