Springtime in Flintown: Disappointment,Affront,and Failure

Introduction

Bill Lawson helpfully outlines the concept of social disappointment that describes the history of Flint quite well. I wish to claim that my experience in and of Flint, and my understanding of the water crisis, however, cannot be fully captured by the concept. In turn, I will offer the concept of an “affront” to help me try to explain situations that social disappointment does not quite capture. I will then outline a number of political consequences for our concepts.

Discussion

It is hard to explain to people who have had no stake in Flint how terribly desperate the situation before the crisis seemed. In terms of violence, we were (and are) worse than Detroit and without the glitz of the beautiful architecture from the days of glory. Our main university, a satellite campus of the University of Michigan, is not nearly as powerful or prestigious as the main campus in Ann Arbor. “Blight” surrounds much of the city. However, this common type of narrative did (and does) not fully reflect my experience of the city. As poet and UM-Flint professor emeritus Jan Worth-Nelson writes, “The Flint River, unfairly maligned as part of the water crisis…is as beautiful sometimes as an Impressionist painting. Abused by industry from the lumber trades through to General Motors’ casual dumping, the river has been coming back. Those of us who've witnessed its transformation and reclamation deeply love it.” ¹ Yet today, with Flint again making national headlines, the city is often reduced to a mere punch line.

If we wish to understand best the history of the water crisis, we need to look into history a long way. Flint has had a long, slow trajectory of economic and racial injustice, and this history helped set the stage for the crisis. When I began my undergraduate career at The University of Michigan—Flint in Fall of 2010, the signs of 50 years of economic neglect were clearly visible. Surrounding the city, like the rings of Saturn, empty buildings littered blocks upon blocks of once-full neighborhoods. As I soon learned, as a student in Flint, the name of the city itself became a moniker of automatic disadvantage. As Flint writer James O'Dea wrote a few years ago, the “hyphen Flint” after The University of Michigan became a cross to bear and, as he writes, a professor once told him: “It's tough to get out of Flint…You know it is.” ² If Flint was where you came from, nobody wanted you.

In 1960, Flint was one of the most prosperous cities in the United States. The poverty rate was below 15%, jobs were widely available and well-paying, and the population had boomed to 200,000 people. ³ Such prosperity continued throughout the 1960s, and when the 1970 census results came, the poverty rate had shrunk to an impressive 8.5%; lower than the state and national averages. The southern black population had begun to move into Flint for jobs as well. In 1960, blacks comprised just over 17.5% of the population; by 1970, it had risen to 28%. ⁴ During the 1970s and 1980s, automakers made the economic decision to leave the city and with it, the unemployment and poverty rates rose significantly. ⁵ Today, the median household income hovers around $24,600. An astounding 41.6% of people live below the poverty line; the average in the United States today is 14.6%. ⁶ In fact, Flint's poverty level has been far above the national average since at least 1980. ⁷

Economic disparity was not alone. The wealth of the city, however ephemeral, did not come without racist practices. As Flint historian Andrew R. Highsmith recently notes, anti-black discrimination began more than 50 years ago, too, when “discriminatory real estate practices—particularly redlining—had trapped people in the North End.” ⁸ For those unfamiliar with the city today, “North Flint” is the place—more than any other—where locals tell visitors not to go. ⁹ A result of discriminatory housing policies, black people, many of whom worked for Buick or other automobile companies, were trapped in North Flint and were often unable to leave regardless of their financial situation. When the companies left to seek higher profits elsewhere, these neighborhoods were hit the hardest. And it was with wanton disregard that the government consistently failed to protect their rights over the next 50 years. ¹⁰

It should also not be forgotten that the year before the switch, Detroit, too, faced a water crisis in which residents were faced with the city turning off their water if they were not fully caught up on payments. This prompted the United Nations to release an astonishing statement, saying, “Disconnection of water services because of failure to pay due to lack of means constitutes a violation of the human right to water and other international human rights…Because of a high poverty rate and a high unemployment rate, relatively expensive water bills in Detroit are unaffordable for a significant portion of the population.” ¹¹ It is in these historical and localized contexts that we should consider the crisis.

I believe we can fruitfully interpret Flint's history as one that, as Bill Lawson has described, is a history of social disappointment. What is social disappointment? And how does it relate to the history of Flint? First, it is quite important to see that the history (for me) includes the economic, social, and political elements of the city, which I have tried to outline above. It does not include the type of day-to-day disappointment one may experience—the bus running late when it is expected to be on time, for example, or any kind of banal failure to “satisfy the hopes, desires, or expectations of someone.” ¹² These types of disappointments are indeed quite common, but are not necessarily condemnable or endemic in the way that social disappointments are.

Social disappointment, on the contrary, is “the experience of disappointment that comes from the failure of the government to satisfy the expectations of the majority of Blacks.” ¹³ Lawson says: “I take social disappointment to be the failure of the government to do its duty to protect the rights of a group and the experience of disappointment that follows.” ¹⁴ It is important to note that for Lawson, (1) to experience a sense of disappointment, one must also have some kind of expectation for some (positive) result and (2) Lawson is primarily talking about disappointment for blacks in the United States who still have some kind of expectation that the government will act in a positive way toward them. ¹⁵ I would like to include both (1) and (2) into my description of the situation in Flint, but include everyone affected. ¹⁶ Since Flint is a primarily black city, my expansion of social disappointment is in truth aimed to also include the 41.6% who are under the poverty line, whatever racial demographic it makes up. What makes social disappointment social, finally, is that the state (and the citizens of the state) is/are implicated in a certain way. Namely, a Liberal state, which has as its main tenet respect for individual rights. As members of the state, most citizens have a certain expectation for their rights to be respected by a state which claims that those rights exist and ought to be respected on their own account. Lawson emphasizes the black community because of the divergence between the regard for rights the state is supposed to have for all of its citizens and the manifest lack of regard the American government has shown for its black citizens. As Lawson writes, “When a state…fails to protect and respect individuals because of their membership in a racial group, the state is failing to live up to its political responsibilities.” ¹⁷

My claim is this: social disappointment enables us to look at this history in a more complete way. From redlining and economic exoduses to the implantation of antidemocratic city managers, all of which fundamentally disrespected the rights of individuals, especially those in racially (and economically) disadvantaged positions. However, I do not believe that social disappointment fully describes the water crisis. And for this reason, I have called the water crisis an “affront” to the people of Flint. Protecting residents’ rights was part of the problem, to be sure, but the reaction was not disappointment but rather shock, frustration, anger, and a total dissolution of trust in the state and local governments. If this is the case, namely, that the failure of the government was not only failure to protect residents’ formal rights and recognize them as citizens, and that the reaction was not of disappointment but largely ¹⁸ of a different kind altogether, then we cannot say that the water crisis in Flint was a particular case of social disappointment only, but something beyond or additional to it. I contend that in this case, the Flint water crisis should be seen as an affront within the context of larger historical social disappointment. ¹⁹

I may seem to be implying that an “affront” is in some way worse than a social disappointment, but I wish to remain agnostic on this. The reason is this: if we take the government's historical response to lynchings as another example of social disappointment (in which the government failed to protect the rights of citizenship—life, liberty—of its black citizens), I simply do not want to, as many have in other fields examining historical atrocities, compare one terrible episode with another and—through some arbitrary calculus—determine which was “worse.” Such an endeavor seems impossible and irresponsible. My intention is to show that social disappointment, as I understand it, does not adequately describe the crisis, which forces me to explain it in other terms, that is, an affront. What seems to be essential, from the point of view in either case, is the government's (e.g., active or passive) role.

How should we come to conceive of an affront? Here are a hazard number of conditions required for an affront, which have been obtained for the water crisis. First, it occurs (although perhaps not necessarily) within the context of social disappointment (i.e., to disadvantaged communities who are, as it were, “used” to being disappointed by the government). Second, governments (although not necessarily only governments) actively participate in harming the community, which leads to some sense of betrayal. In other words, governments are not only failing to protect rights but are also themselves participants in the act. Finally, there is a mass outpouring of anger, frustration, shock, and perhaps most importantly, a dissolution of trust in the offending parties. ²⁰ Sometimes—perhaps quite often—the difference between social disappointment and an affront is not clear, and that only in retrospect can we see what was really “going on.” ²¹ Certainly the Flint water crisis seemed like yet another disappointing policy to “cut costs and balance budgets” in an already crumbling city, and the consequences (like a disregard for rights) that follow from austerity. ²² Only when more details were revealed, far too late, did the residents realize otherwise.

Concluding Remarks

How important is it that we get the distinction between, for example, a “strong social disappointment” and an affront right? In most cases, perhaps it isn't important. But perhaps it is significantly important politically. Disappointment may be a feeling that is unifying for a certain group of people and a feeling that multiple disappointed groups can rally behind. But it does not seem to adequately capture the urgency with which we should act politically, in which the government is directly involved in racist and classist policies that hugely affect those communities more than others.

However, we may also draw some other, stranger, political conclusions. First, I am still not convinced that replacing Snyder is the most politically salient maneuver, even if he is the leader of the affront. The reasons are hopelessly utilitarian and pragmatic, but still, I think, necessary to consider: what will the outcome be of a Snyder resignation? Would this be a decision that significantly improves the lot of Flint residents? If a Democrat were elected instead, would this yield significantly positive results? So far, with the media spotlight dimming, the pressure on all political parties to take real, serious, sustained action has been assuaged. All those well-meaning liberals who seemed to believe that the crisis occurred seemingly without cause or history have moved on to their next tragedy. Candidates have scored their political points. Media outlets have made their money on the spectacle. All that will be left, yet again, are the people themselves: those the government attacked.

Lawson is right to point to social disappointment as a phenomenon that is common, historical, draining, and particular to a specific community. Social disappointment is intimately connected with the state's disregard to uphold the respect it should have for its citizens. He is right to say that some in the disaffected community no longer feel disappointed, having become too numb or have simply come to expect the government to act in a negative, that is, negligent, way. But in Flint, something happened in the Spring of 2014 that was and is not exactly a case of social disappointment. The near total dissolution of trust, the popular outrage, the sense of utter betrayal, and the active effort to harm (and then consciously ignore) a city with no economic, political, or social power signals, an event that manages to go beyond social disappointment. The people of Flint cannot rely on either the government or well-meaning (although decontextualizing) liberals to alleviate the problems the city faces. They must demand it. Since we are—and, in an unfortunate way should be—stuck with him, it is Snyder's responsibility, as the head of a Liberal (generally democratic) state, to regain the trust of the Flint residents by listening to them and by respecting them; it is the residents’ responsibility to outline their own terms as best as they can, and, if not listened to, to take what they deserve.