Theoretical Framework and Definitions

Dennis Rodgers and Bruce O’Neill discuss the condition of “infrastructural violence” that often plagues financially struggling municipalities and thus the residents who cannot escape deteriorating or dangerous conditions. The authors share, “Infrastructure shapes how people relate to the city and to each other, affecting where and how people and things move across time and space. At the same time, infrastructure is also completely caught up within the workings of social, cultural, economic and political arrangements, structures and technologies”. The authors describe infrastructure (such as a city’s water system) as an aspect of a community to which all residents have access and depend on for proper functioning. For that reason, when a government fails to maintain infrastructure or makes decisions that are not in its residents’ best interests, it constitutes such a devastating breach of trust between the two that it represents a form of violence. The Flint water crisis represents such a condition because city officials made short-sighted decisions based on the city’s financial needs, without considering the impact on its residents, and in doing so imposed harm on those residents which ultimately broke the implicit trust between the two.

Nikhil Anand describes a water crisis that represents infrastructural violence that occurred in Premnagar, an impoverished neighborhood of Mumbai, India but which parallels the one in Flint. As in Flint, Anand believes that in Premnagar the poor Muslim residents were denied safe drinking water due to their abject poverty. He refers to their denial of such basic necessities as “abjection,” which occurred due to “tenuous and contentious infrastructural connections between the government and the governed”. This condition occurs when local governments find cheaper means of serving residents of low socioeconomic status. In Premnagar, the residents had to contend with the contaminated water of untreated wells because the Mumbai Municipal Corporation failed to connect the neighborhood to their monitored, treated lines or to maintain the lines that existed. In Flint, the residents faced contamination when their local government switched from a safe water source to a contaminated one to save money. In accordance with Anand’s presentation, both situations exemplify abjection because “it is a social and political process through which particular populations are pushed beyond the biopolitical care of the state or other institutions”. In both communities, the local government failed to adequately serve its impoverished population, distinguishing the service from that offered to more affluent residents in nearby areas. 

Anand believes that infrastructural inconsistencies, such as different quality water for different residents, stem from deeply rooted discrimination. He writes, “abjection is a dialectical process produced out of deeply situated discursive relationships and material practices, where difference is constantly reproduced, enacted and foregrounded between people that have deep overlapping social histories”. The problems that Anand describes in Premnagar resemble those that occurred in Flint, once the municipal government switched their water source to the Flint River without adequate testing or monitoring. Although the discrimination appears far more blatant for the Muslims of Premnagar, the ultimate outcome proves similar in Flint, where impoverished citizens did not receive safe drinking water, or even a response to their concerns, for more than a year after they reported concerns. Anand refers to the “processes and practices by which [underserved citizens] are being constituted as abject citizens of the city”. Innocent victims in both communities had to contend with faulty pipes and contaminated water because their respective governments neglected their basic needs instead of protecting them and offering a most basic municipal service.

Rob Nixon defines slow violence as “...a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all”. Thom Davies adds that slow violence involves “a slower, stealthier, and less obvious form of brutality” than an intense visible attack. It often occurs among economically vulnerable groups, creating “a highly racialized dimension”. Davies focuses his discussion on residents exposed to harmful petrochemicals in neighborhoods of Mississippi; however, the conditions and population resemble those of Flint. At the time of the water crisis, Flint also was an economically depressed area, with a larger percentage of African-American residents because the white population had left years earlier. Davies describes how “...certain places, polluted through the slow violence of environmental denigrations, are rendered death worlds”. Just as the Mississippi residents were exposed to toxic air pollutants, the Flint residents faced harmful water contaminants. In both communities, vulnerable people were harmed over time in communities from which they could not escape, creating blatant examples of environmental injustice. Both Nixon and Davies suggest that until such slow violence is exposed, it will continue without correction. In Flint, it took a full eighteen months of toxic exposure until officials were forced to begin to correct the injustice in meaningful ways.

Personal Stories

Jake May curated a project called “Still Standing: Flint Residents Tell Their Stories about Living with Poisoned Water” that includes the experiences of 100 Flint residents. In describing his project May states, “These are the stories of my neighbors. We are more than a sound bite. We are human beings who want a basic human right, who want clean water running through our taps.” Taken together, these stories present a powerful and moving account of the human toll of the crisis. Carlos Young says he has “had rashes from the water and that [his] six little cousins have high levels of lead. It's crazy. It's like a Third World country.” Young says the crisis “is also mentally damaging and is causing anxiety for residents who can't do basic, everyday water-related tasks without feeling paranoid.” Melissa May states that her family has “experienced rashes, upper respiratory infections, brain fog, polyps in stomach and colon, nausea for months, fatigue and muscle pain.” Sixteen-year old William Wiggins shares his story of the Flint water causing terrible rashes and black marks on his body. Deborah Clark tells the story of all her 5-year-old grandson’s teeth having rotted due to lead exposure. Milly Arbor says her “hair started falling out around the time the city started using the Flint River as its municipal water source” and that she “started getting uncomfortable rashes - itchy red spots - all over her body.” Without using the term “slow violence,” Diane Thornton describes her view of the Flint crisis as being just that. She says, “We're suffering a blind disaster…if we would have had a tornado or hurricane, they would have rushed in to help us. Politicians seem to be holding up the funds necessary to pick Flint back up because they can't see how big of a disaster it really is.” These personal anecdotes underline the life-changing nature of the crisis for so many of Flint’s residents, and make the initial non-responsiveness of officials seem that much worse.