Flint’s Toxic Narratives: Tales of Uplift and Athletes Who Resist Them

Abstract

This article considers the narratives of sports-based uplift, which have followed in the wake of Flint, Michigan’s lead-poisoned water crisis. It provides context for the sports culture of Flint, the corrupted educational system that fostered it, and the consequential sense of identity sports teams provide. Examining the water crisis via the off-the-field charitable efforts of (mostly Black) athletes in Flint and the preformed narratives in which they are figured by the media, the article demonstrates the means by which sports narratives have served the White American public’s interest in forgetting or minimizing the suffering of mostly Black Flint. These media narratives celebrate Black athletes for “giving back” as if it is their responsibility or duty to so, in large part so that White audiences do not have to confront the failures of neoliberal capitalism. The article also examines what it means that these redemptive narratives are premised on athletes’ off-the-field labor, rather than on-the-field triumph. Finally, it asserts that the athletes who write back against narratives that would co-opt their efforts in service of forgetting importantly complicate linear narratives of progress.

Keywords

Flint narrative sports race labor inequality popular culture

In the wake of the Flint water crisis that first attracted media attention in 2014, athletes quickly and prominently stepped into the spotlight: donating supplies and participating in charitable events, which raise funds to help the people of Flint cope with the ongoing crisis. Such efforts fall into the broad category of athletes “giving back” to the community, and these efforts are often celebrated in national and regional journalism. In these contexts, athletes are applauded for intervening in public life because they participate in a narrative Americans enjoy reading: the conquering hero returns to his or her roots to help lift up a downtrodden people. But the case of Flint also complicates this paradigm by providing competing narratives: not only the usual type of soothing stories, often appearing in national media outlets, that assure the reader that the worst is over and that progress is being made, but also complicating narratives, authored by the athletes themselves, which assert that the problem persists and remind Americans of the structural inequalities that go deeper than the water crisis itself.

Examining athletes’ efforts to try and mitigate the water crisis might prompt us to consider more broadly how we perceive those who participate in the public sphere. For when they participate, athletes cross an imaginary boundary between sports and civic life, a boundary that they are only rarely encouraged to cross, and then only in limited contexts. Athletes’ charitable efforts are lauded, but the expression of their political opinions is often criticized. In February of 2018, for instance, LeBron James criticized President Trump saying, “he doesn’t understand the people. He don’t [sic] give a f– about the people.” Calling his statements “barely intelligible,” “ungrammatical,” and “ignorant,” conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham advised James to “shut up and dribble” (M. Johnson, 2018). Although the long history of activism in American sports presents many cases in which athletes and sports journalists have spoken out about off-the-field injustice and inequality,¹ very frequently these efforts have been met by a popular refrain: “stick to sports,” an order aimed at pushing political expression out of the public discourse surrounding American sports. But of course sports are political, and always have been.² What those who urge athletes to “stick to sports” really want out of sports spectatorship is to assert their presumed authority to control the messaging of the media member or athlete who espouses a politics that disrupts or questions the status quo.³ The belief that one can put up barriers between sports and politics is an implicit statement of power—an assertion of control over when and how athletes can and should speak. To wit, these same “stick to sports” types tend to embrace politically oriented sports narratives when they can be construed to make fans feel good about themselves: when Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali have been deradicalized, rendered objects of nostalgia, commissioned as memorials of American “progress” never fully made.⁴ “On a certain level,” writes Gerald Early (2011) in A Level Playing Field, “athletes are a special sort of socially-constructed mirror that reflects a romanticized version of cultural honor and cultural virtue” (p. 2). The necessary but considerable distortions required to maintain such an image and belief that it reflects reality remain implicit in Early’s metaphor. Yet, whatever fans may think or desire, Early writes, “athletes bring to the sports they perform their temperaments, their politics, their beliefs, their values, and their psychological and emotional needs,” and to hope “that sports could be divorced politically and socially from the society that brings it into being, [is] a view that itself is culturally driven” (p. 2).⁵ Thus, in expressing their desire to keep their athletic entertainment apolitical, many fans seek to both escape reality and rely on it: to forget or romanticize their troubled world and still thrill to the unscripted narratives that sporting bodies produce through competitive performance.

Never is this palliative power more evident than when disaster strikes: when natural phenomena, large-scale violence, or general human malfeasance affect a broad swath of people. Sports narratives hold special appeal in these times of crisis because they can point to the possibility of normalcy—of healing and joy in the face of difficulty and pain that supposedly transcend differences in politics and ideology. In his analysis of the media coverage surrounding New Orleans’ professional football team in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Michael Serazio (2010) considers the means by which sports journalists disseminated simplistic “collective memory narrative[s]” (p. 157), like the one that painted the Saints’ success as redemptive for the city. Despite the excitement of the Saints’ Super Bowl win, Serazio concluded, the triumphant narratives that emerged papered over the city’s persistent environmental traumas and social inequities: “when complex, even intractable problems that follow in the wake of traumatic chaos are scripted in this way, we tend to ‘move on’ without properly accounting for conditions that remain” (p. 171). For many fans and the sports media who serve them, it seems, sports and politics belong together only when the former is seen as a salve for healing and, consequently, a means of forgetting inconvenient traumas.

Crucially, this desire for sports-based amnesia often turns on a racial fulcrum. When the New Orleans Saints football players (mostly Black men) and their triumph supposedly healed the wounds incurred by Hurricane Katrina upon New Orleans (which most devastatingly affected African Americans), White America—if it hadn’t already—believed it could “retreat. . . into the cocoon of entertainment that helps us cope by forgetting” (p. 170). Never mind that, as Nicole Fleetwood (2015) puts it, “the fundamental roots of racial capital are interwoven into the seemingly meritocratic and voluntary market of athletics” (p. 81). By mental sleight of hand, the needs of those who ascribe to the “stick to sports” mentality were satisfied by recognizing and purportedly resolving a politics of disaster via a mostly Black athletic accomplishment; adumbrated like the popular historical memory of Jackie Robinson or Muhammad Ali, the city of New Orleans and its deep roots of racism, environmental destruction, and White political malfeasance were wrapped up in a narrative of sporting triumph and tied with a bow of good feelings.

More recently, the disastrous story of Flint, Michigan, provides an urgent example. As if the decades of job and population decline, school closings, union busting, and political and economic corruption were not harmful enough, Flint’s drinking water became poisonous in April of 2014, the result of a cost-saving measure designed to relieve pressure on the city’s budget.⁶ The physiological effects of drinking the water from the Flint River were immediate, and many Flint residents began to suffer from headaches, dizziness, and rashes on their body, yet government officials ignored or minimized the complaints both from residents and administrators about the contaminated water supply, repeatedly offering alternate reasons for or outright denying the symptoms. Not until October of 2015 did officials advise residents of Flint to avoid the city’s drinking water, after independent researchers from Virginia Tech confirmed the high levels of lead in Flint’s drinking water supply (“Events that led to Flint water crisis, 2016”). Searching for answers as to why it took so long to respond to the crisis, the Michigan Civil Rights Commission concluded that “structural and systemic racism combined with implicit bias led to decisions, actions, and consequences in Flint would not have allowed to happen in primarily white communities such as Birmingham, Ann Arbor, or East Grand Rapids” (J. Johnson, 2017).

Responding to and reporting on this depressing condition, local and national media sought out narratives of redemption or uplift, and sporting cultures were a popular place to find them. As it is for the nation, this messaging is nothing new for the region. Prior to the 1967 riots in Detroit, citizens of “the Motor City” could look to the presence of Black players on the Detroit Tigers baseball team and console themselves about the state of race relations. But, as Louis Moore (2017) points out,

This was a lie Detroiters, Black and White, told themselves. For Whites, integrated sports allowed for a moral evasion of the ills of the city and what plagued most Black Detroiters. Police brutality, joblessness, and slum conditions were after thoughts as long as [black players] Brown, Horton, Green, and Wilson played well.

Almost 40 years later, when the Tigers made the World Series in 2006, the popular media narrative was remarkably similar, if less overtly racialized: the city may have fallen on hard economic times but the pennant-winning Tigers had provided Detroiters with a ray of hope, something to help them forget about their troubles (Huffstutter, 2006). Flint may not have any real professional sports teams, but similar narratives involving the redemptive power of sports surfaced, involving local sports heroes returning home or nearby college teams showing up to donate their time. And sports very well may offer a bit of psychological comfort for the residents of Flint to forget about the government that abandoned and criminally neglected them. But in telling such stories, writers construct narratives that exist to palliate not the people who suffer and must labor to rebuild their lives but the rest of us. As Barbara Ehrenreich (2015) reminds us, the very act of writing about poverty and trauma is itself a luxury—and a problematic one at that.⁷ As a result, the coverage of all the charitable efforts and donations depict the citizens of Flint as objects of pity, dependent upon the kindness and or noblesse oblige of others. These narratives serve to relieve and assure a largely White audience, made up of those who do not have to suffer the short- and long-term consequences of a poisoned water supply.⁸ Those of us who do not live in Flint want to believe that the people will eventually be okay so we can go on with our lives, and using the narratives of sports as an escape allows us to do exactly that. The sports-as-a-means-of-forgetting-about-trauma impulse is a seductive one; it is also a dangerous one when we stop and consider just whom these narratives ultimately serve.

The charitable efforts of athletes and local activists and the measures taken to redress the contaminated water supply began to fit conspicuously into a narrative of improvement. In January of 2017, Governor Rick Snyder declared, “The remarkable improvement in water quality over the past year is a testament to all levels of government working together and the resilient people of Flint helping us help them” (Almasy, 2017). Snyder’s statement provides a tidy reciprocity of “help” in which Flint residents enable government aid efforts, a seamless process. Although the governor notes that work still needs to be done, his claim helps reassure people that all the charitable, civil, and political efforts are achieving success. As such, the wider news media picked up this story and began to report on the improvements in Flint. The Chicago Tribune, for example, quoted Robert Kaplan, the acting EPA regional administrator, who claimed, “What was a crisis [in Flint] is now looking much like other cities” (EPA Official, 2017). As such, the narrative being constructed allows outsiders to believe in a narrative of linear progress; what was once a problem is no longer so severe and, in fact, is almost fixed. The supposed return to normalcy puts a capstone on a public health crisis, assuring readers that the people of Flint can now drink their water, without taking time to consider whether the people of Flint have actually returned to “normal” or to consider the damage inflicted by the crisis and the long-term health impacts to the bodies of Flint citizens.

In this article, we will first provide context for the sports culture of Flint, the corrupted educational system that fostered it, and the consequential sense of identity sports teams provide. Next, we will examine the water crisis via the off-the-field charitable efforts of (mostly Black) athletes in Flint and the preformed narratives in which they are figured by the media. By examining sports journalism in national outlets such as ESPN and Bleacher Report and in regional newspapers, we seek to build on the work of Serazio (2010) and others, to demonstrate the means by which sports narratives have served the White American public’s interest in forgetting or minimizing the suffering of mostly Black Flint. We find that these media narratives celebrate Black athletes for “giving back” as if it is their responsibility or duty to so, in large part so that White audiences do not have to confront the failures of neoliberal capitalism. Crucially, we will also examine what it means that these redemptive narratives are premised on athletes’ off-the-field labor, rather than on-the-field triumph. Finally, we will assert that the athletes who write back against narratives that would co-opt their efforts in service of forgetting importantly complicate linear narratives of progress. By speaking up as they help out, these athletes transform their actions from “charity” that does not challenge the logistics of neoliberal capital and its attendant racist frameworks, to activism that forces observers to question their own privilege and reflect upon their justifications for personal inaction. Although less immediately practical to the residents of Flint than the clean water the athletes also provide, these antipalliative enunciations provide meaningful critiques of both neoliberal politics on the city level and the 24-hr news cycle that under-represent or fail to represent Flint’s water crisis amid the assumption that conditions have improved. These athletes’ writings become especially important within a Trump-ian American media landscape in which sports serves as one of the last mass-mediated cultural spheres to which Americans of all demographics and political ideologies pay attention.

What emerges from this analysis, then, is a larger awareness of the way in which traditional journalistic narratives covering the Flint water crisis conflict with those authored by athletes working in Flint to combat that crisis. The systematic inequality, reflecting decades of de facto segregation, calls us to critique the manner in which sports stories have been traditionally expected to palliate the deep unease felt in impoverished communities and soothe systemic, environmental racism; these narratives call on us to believe that things will be alright so long as athletes and celebrities are returning to Flint to “give back.” But while we might appreciate such efforts to “give back,” we must also amplify the voices of those who do the work of telling the full story, in which the Flint water crisis is both a tragic event on its own and a symptom of a larger neoliberal system of inequality and oppression. We find that while many sports media accounts are intended to work on a surface level, to cover up the deeper wounds of communities like Flint, there is always also the potential that sports narratives can reach beyond such superficial tropes and operate on deeper level: exposing the continuing conditions of systemic inequality under which communities in crisis suffer, in Flint and beyond.

Sport, Education, and Identity in Flint

Flint’s story of economic decline has been told many times and has been made to fit a dominant narrative: that of a working-class town dependent largely on an automotive plant. When Flint’s General Motors plant began to downsize and eventually shutter its operation, the town of 200,000 began a decline so precipitous it eventually became fodder for Donald J. Trump. During a visit to Flint’s Bethel United Methodist Church in 2016, the then-presidential candidate tactlessly connected the city’s economic struggles to its poisoned water supply: “It used to be cars were made in Flint,” he remarked “and you couldn’t drink the water in Mexico. Now the cars are made in Mexico, and you can’t drink the water in Flint” (“Report: Trump Gives,” 2016). Trump’s implication was clear: Flint had accrued the stigmas Americans usually ascribe to the “third world,” and the demagogic candidate’s leadership was purportedly the only thing that could fix it. In eliding the distinctions between poverty, poison, and politics, Trump (unsurprisingly) maliciously oversimplified the situation in much the same mode as the sports fan who equates sporting glory with the end of suffering. If only a “winner” represented them, both rationales suggest, the people of Flint would be made whole again.⁹

To avoid a similar error of elision in reading the stories of sports-based solutions that followed the lead-based intoxication of Flint’s water supply, we must first seek to better understand the larger context in which Flint’s “winners” are manifested via athletic competition—secondary education. Because high school athletics figure so prominently in the city’s image of itself, it is worth examining how high school athletics became so central to Flint’s civic identity. The Flint public school system has mirrored the city’s decline: two of the city’s oldest and most prominent high schools, Flint Central and Flint Northern, have ceased operations. Twenty-nine public schools (elementary, middle, and high schools) have been closed or demolished since 2002. The destruction of this infrastructure reveals a rotten core: Flint’s public school system was built on the Flint Board of Education’s long-standing resistance to desegregation, a shameful legacy that reaches back long before General Motors began downsizing. Although the Supreme Court declared de jure segregation in public school systems to be unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), cities where economic and housing inequalities led to de facto segregation became difficult to integrate in the wake of Milliken v. Bradley (1974). In Demolition Means Progress: Flint, Michigan and the Fate of the American Metropolis, Andrew R. Highsmith (2015) details the continued resistance from Flint’s Board of Education to years of litigation efforts that would distribute students and resources more equitably throughout the city. Activists from the NAACP and the Black Teachers Caucus (among other local groups) attempted to challenge the racial disparities that plagued Flint’s public school system. But time and again, the city’s officials were able to argue that racial disparities were not a result of segregation policies but the natural outgrowth of “neighborhood schools” (p. 229), despite obvious gerrymandering along racial lines. Even still, the threat of legislated desegregation meant that many White families opted for the racial homogeneity of the suburbs or enrolled their children in private schools; by 1980, Black students comprised 59% of those enrolled in Flint public schools.

Once Flint’s educational segregation became apparent, the Mott Foundation—a charitable arm of GM that had donated millions of dollars annually to the Flint Board of Education in the name of fostering “community education”—pulled its funding and called on community leaders to take on more leadership in the community. As Highsmith notes, the Mott Foundation pulled its funding in 1977, “the precise moment [at which] the Flint Public Schools faced its most intractable crisis” (p. 235). Millage tax funding proposals continually failed, with votes separated along racial lines: many White voters refused to pay for tax increases to help schools that their children would not attend. Flint’s public schools thus became grossly underfunded and perniciously segregated. Given these circumstances, it is easy to see not only why so many Black residents of Flint felt abandoned and betrayed by civic leadership but also why these “neighborhood schools,” and especially their sports teams and players, became a tremendous source of pride and hope. As Michael Harris, who is both a United Auto Workers member and president of the Greater Flint Afro-American Sports Hall of Fame proclaims, “We make automobiles and athletes” (Blackistone, 2016).¹⁰ And those athletes, both on the national and local level, become a means of community identification, a way of dispelling all-too-common narratives about Flint’s decline. Even the basketball team of the local community college became a source of pride on its way to the 2012 men’s junior college national championship. As one student wrote,

The Mott [Community College] basketball team [. . . ] has become a way for many in Flint to show the world that they are more than the statistics about murder and crime. The success of the Bears tells the nation that Flint has pride, that they seek to live the American dream, even if it has to start as an athlete. (Shafer, 2013)

For Flint residents, then, sports teams help form a counternarrative to the dominant media depictions of their city as a center of crime, poverty, and despair.

Flint’s local sports teams are also especially important for another reason: for too many residents, they operate as the only way out of a deficient and depressed educational system that has largely abandoned them. Many see athletic achievement as one of the few ways to escape the depressed local economy (with over 40% of its residents living below the poverty line) as well as one of the nation’s highest crime rates (Engel, Sterbenz, & Fuchs, 2016; J. Johnson, 2015). But of course the percentage of those athletes who move from high school athletics to college athletics and then to the professional levels are minute; that athletics would be conceived as a reasonable path to success underscores the level of economic despair in Flint and in similarly depressed American cities and towns.¹¹ Nevertheless, in his profile of boys’ and girls’ high school basketball players affected by the water crisis in Flint, Greg Couch (2016), writing for Bleacher Report, a national sports media website, interviews Charles Harris, Sr., who hopes his son can use basketball as a way out of Flint, permanently: “I hope Charlie will go to a good college, research it out, check out the area. And then I would like for him to stay there. I don’t want him coming back.” Basketball becomes not just a way out of poverty—as it is often figured by poor Black boys across the country—but in a depressing commentary on Flint’s localized trauma, a means of geographical relocation—of seeking refuge in a better place. Hamady High School boys’ basketball coach, Kenyada Dent, for instance, demonstrates how basketball becomes about more than competition: “I look at basketball as a tool for life. I had a great basketball coach in high school and in college. It’s a way to get an education. It’s a way out of Flint” (Couch, 2016) The economic conditions of Flint lead, then, to a distortion of values: The structural deficiencies due to continued segregation influence the quality of education such that extracurricular activities such as basketball become a way toward college, rather than the education itself. But getting out of Flint is only half the story. The successful athlete who leaves Flint must grapple with questions about whether or not to return, and Couch observes the unique and complex tension that the young Flint athlete faces: “This is the push and pull the community faces. It pushes its kids to get out and at the same time tries to pull its adults back.”

As a result, athletes from Flint who have attained some measure of national acclaim frequently become revered, forming a kind of honor roll. As Carl Banks (2016), himself a former Flint resident who went on to play linebacker for the New York Giants, remarks,

For a city of just under 100,000 people, Flint’s athletic legacy is nothing short of remarkable: Glen Rice, Trent Tucker, Jim Abbott, Rick Leach, Tim Thomas, Andre Rison, Morris Peterson, Mark Ingram (Sr. and Jr.). The list goes on, and in many ways rivals the output of Detroit itself, a city with a historic population nearly 10 times that of its neighbor to the north.

This strong association between the city and its rich tradition of athletic excellence was often rhetoricized as a consequence of Flint’s natural environs; “There must be something in the water” Banks rather ironically reports hearing frequently, and “we knew exactly what they were talking about.” Membership in the Flint litany of athletes, though, tends to come with more responsibilities than privileges. Because of the city’s impoverished conditions and with few resources for municipal revenue, Flint has become dependent on those who do escape to give back to Flint in the form of charitable donations or fundraisers. This connection between the city’s sports success stories and civic activism and engagement became especially apparent as “something in the water” became literalized as an insidious chemical source of Flint’s suffering.

The Athlete as Savior: Narratives of Purification

The story of Flint’s long-term decline and the often-correlated prominence of its athletic heroes provide context for the prominent public role athletes have played in supporting Flint in its time of crisis, raising money via charitable basketball tournaments and/or donating and distributing bottled water to Flint’s residents.¹² Most often, the narratives of athletic intervention in Flint are journalist-authored and follow a similar formula: They feature a Flint native, almost always African American and usually male, who returns to Flint and donates what seems like a large amount of bottled water along with other supplies. The stories tend to have three major components: the details of the donation or charitable contribution, the biography of the athlete, and quotations from the athlete attesting to their heartfelt connection to their hometown and their sense of obligation to give back. The three components work in concert to accomplish an implicit narrative goal of readerly reassurance by establishing that action is being taken, reconnecting sports fans to the entertainment context in which they might find this athlete’s identity relevant, and providing a sense that while the obstacles yet to be faced are still quite large, caring people of means who are from the community most affected are taking action such that there is reason for hope (and, implicitly, little need for action from those unaffected). The effect of these narrative components is to provide a specific, familiar, athletic context in which to ground the reader’s general unease regarding the political malfeasance and racism that led to Flint’s lead poisoning. Lacking the specifics of a championship-clinching play-off run in which fans could diffuse their discomfort and sense of passively accrued guilt—as in Serazio’s (2010) New Orleans example—the stories of Flint-ers off-the-field charitable efforts are nevertheless awash in sporting details that allow the reader to incrementally offload their sense of horror at what transpired to deprive Flint’s people of a resource that amounts to a human right.

Sports reporter Sheil Kapadia’s (2016) ESPN.com article, titled “Seahawks’ Thomas Rawls: ‘I want to be Superman to my city,’” provides a representative example. It opens with an immediate, statistically familiarized sporting context, citing Rawls’s “209-yard performance against the San Francisco 49ers back in Week 11” and attributing it to the running back’s “physical style and tough mind-set.” That toughness comes, in Rawls’s own words, “from Flint, Michigan, where you’ve got to be tough” (Kapadia, 2016). Thus, attributing Rawls’s effectiveness on the football field to an ascription of values associated with the city, Kapadia prepares the reader to grapple with the water crisis. Rawls is then quoted at length detailing the suffering of his family members and other city residents:

It’s kind of hard when you can’t even shower in your own shower, when you can’t drink your own water. It’s kind of upsetting to know that I’ve got nieces and nephews, and [their] skin’s breaking out. . . It’s already hard in the city just because. But just to add [the water crisis] on your plate, it’s kind of tough.

The quote establishes that the situation is dire—though Rawls’s reserved nature and careful word choice notably limits the potential for the inference of justifiable outrage—and also that Rawls is always intimately connected to it, whatever the fans may read into his physical abilities in a Seahawks uniform during a game. But, though Rawls does not publicize the precise nature of his charitable efforts in the article, he vows to further leverage the Flint-born toughness that allows him to excel on the gridiron to help heal his hometown, “to go back home and help out. . . I may even try to dig a well and try to connect it to another city or something. I want to be Superman to my city. I love my city” (Kapadia, 2016). This image of Rawls—which concludes the article—muscled body wrapped in red and blue and single-handedly digging a well, provides a triumphant fantasy in the face of grim reality. It allows the reader to imagine that athletes, who often seem superhuman on the field, can have the same superhuman effects off of it.

Significantly, such images of “toughness” abound in descriptions of athletes from Flint in both news media and in their own narratives, enabling one another. In referring to his own “toughness,” Rawls recalls the group of athletes who played for Michigan State in late 1990s and early 2000s collectively by another image of toughness, the “Flintstones.” The trope of “toughness” not only emphasizes the athlete’s suitability for the rigors of athletic competition, it also reassures the audience of non-Flint residents that those from Flint are inherently “tough” and well suited for the kinds of privation and destitution from which the city suffers. As such, the audience is spared from having to confront the reality of the malfeasance and corruption that have led to Flint’s disastrous condition as well as the failures of neoliberal capitalism. In other words, such narratives allow readers to entertain the illusion that residents of Flint can handle this most recent civic tragedy because of a supposed preternatural “toughness” that is really just a euphemism for having to survive in abject poverty. The fact that such “toughness” arises from deprivation implies that that deprivation is productive, that it provides the citizens, not just athletes, with the necessary coping mechanisms to survive economically depressed conditions.

The visible body, too, becomes identified with Flint’s toughness, but in doing so such a portrayal also overshadows the invisible, microscopic particles of lead that infect the body, damage nerves, and lead to permanent brain damage. The quality of being “tough,” then, sustains itself largely through “inspirational” news stories that, however well-intentioned, perpetuate the status quo and elide the very real and life-threatening vulnerability in which the residents of Flint find themselves, betrayed and abandoned by the very power structure that is supposed to protect and provide for them. Because of the considerable and continual failure of municipal, state, and national governance, athletes like Rawls admirably see themselves as “superhuman” able to provide for a city in ways that those with political power have failed to do. But by focusing on Rawls’ superhuman abilities we also become conditioned to look beyond or past the subhuman conditions in which Flint’s residents live.

Something similar happens in Eric Woodyard’s (2016) article for mlive.com (the website of a Grand Rapids-based Michigan newspaper conglomerate). Titled “Snoop Dogg, Morris Peterson celebrity hoops game keeps focus on Flint water crisis,” the article details the “Hoop 4 Water” charity basketball exhibition headlined by the hip hop star and the former NBA player and “Flintstone,”¹³ the proceeds of which went to “the Morris Peterson Jr. Foundation to assist with relief efforts amid the city’s water crisis.” Focusing up front on the on-court action—Snoop Dogg’s “first bucket on a fast break layup in old-school Showtime Los Angeles Lakers style” is highlighted—the article quickly transitions to focus on Peterson’s Flint heritage. “Being a Flintstone means the world to me,” Peterson remarks, “I’ve got this Flint tattoo on my arm for a reason. . . . Without this city, there would be no Morris Peterson. I feel like it’s my duty to come back and bring something” (Woodyard, 2016). Focusing the reader’s attention on the muscled (Black) body of the superstar athlete via the tattoo, and connecting the toughness of that body to Peterson’s dedication to his hometown, Woodyard’s piece, like Kapadia’s, both assures the reader that athletic Flinters remain committed to alleviating the suffering of their city, and implies that the athlete’s suffering is what made him a superstar in the first place. The effect is not only to suggest that charity basketball tournaments are the kind of band-aid the city needs, but also to imply that Flint’s lead poisoning crisis is just the latest flare up of the city-as-festering wound. Whatever the author’s intent, he naturalizes the Horatio Alger story fetishized in sports and neoliberal economics: the conditions of the depressed city create Phoenixes that rise from Flint without considering the drawbacks for the ashes that are left behind.

Woodyard’s article also includes interviews from the charity basketball game’s attendees, some of whom share remarkably incisive insights into the lasting effect of the event.

“I feel good because a lot of people don’t come here because they think it’s bad,” 13-year-old Flint resident Zahria Knapp said. “I’m just happy that somebody came to support to see how we feel about it.”

“I like all of the celebrities that are here for the water but it’s still not going to change nothing,” Flint Southwestern freshman Aireona Grear said. “It’s cool that we’re getting all the water and stuff.”

The two teenagers, unlike the event organizers, are remarkably realistic about what the game does and whom it serves. Zahria Knapp understands automatically that a prime driver of the city’s suffering is its reputation. That somebody wants “to see how we feel about” the city demonstrates that the game’s impact, such that there is one, will primarily be a matter of emotion: of city residents potentially affecting outsiders’ opinions such that they feel some empathy. Aireona Grear recognizes the superficiality of such an attempt at public relations—hip hop stars and basketball players being stereotypical manifestations of wealth borne from impoverished African American communities that White America can process with little surprise or empathy—and instead focuses on “the water and stuff.” In effect, Grear recognizes the material benefit that the donation of water supplies reaps but also recognizes, via her nonchalance, that this material benefit is a short-term gain and not something that can affect the systemic issue: the broader Michigan and national public’s relative lack of empathy for Flinters’ plights. Although a quote from Flint mayor Karen Weaver closes the article, intoning that “it’s very important to see our own giving back to the city,” these youth seem to understand that as long as “our own” celebrity athletes come to stand in for outrage and action on the part of the broader public, long-term relief is still a distant outcome (Woodyard, 2016). And, as it turns out, some high-profile athletes have come to realize something similar, and sought to provide something more than water and emotional uplift.

Athletes Write Back

If Thomas Rawls’ desire to be a superman for Flint sounds idealistic, it is worth remembering why the town might look to its athletes for financial and humanitarian aid. As Carl Banks (2016), former New York Giants linebacker and Flint Beecher high school standout, notes, “the city remains a hotbed of athletic talent. The difference is, for these kids, sports often are the only way out. Unlike when I was growing up, backup plans have become a luxury.” The problem is not that athletic talent provides a way out, it is that athletic talent is seen as practically the only kind of talent that affords Flint residents the possibility of leaving the city for greater opportunities, professional or otherwise. And, just as importantly, these athletic talents are tied, via popular myths of genetic advantage,¹⁴ to Blackness. As Banks continues, “Had [the water crisis] happened in Farmington Hills, or Troy, or Birmingham, or any number of other wealthier suburban enclaves, I guarantee different decisions would’ve been made.” The water crisis is terrible and tragic in and of itself, but what makes it especially disturbing is the way in which African Americans were made the unwitting subjects of a financial and social experiment and essentially treated as disposable people. If a city’s most viable labor is perceived as disposable—and athletic labor, despite its elevated social status and financial compensation, is disposable labor—then it seems less risky, politically speaking, for the state to switch the water supply without proper testing. Thus, the water crisis is symptomatic of much larger social and economic problems that would not be rectified when the water becomes safe to consume again: “Now the city needs something to bring it all together. And in a way that appreciates them not as the victims they’ve lately been, but the proud people they’ve always been” (original emphasis). For Banks, then, it is important to change the narrative so that Flint residents are not perceived as the—disposable, athletic, and above all pathologically Black—victims that, through no fault of their own, they have been automatically cast.

Although Banks strikes a hopeful tone, Rasheed Wallace’s (2016) short essay in The Players’ Tribune, “The Truth About Flint” strikes a more confrontational one. Wallace’s disrupts the tidy media narrative that because the story is not making headlines anymore, conditions in Flint are improving (i.e., no news is good news):

You probably think that, because they’re not all over your TV anymore, the problems of Flint are in the past.

Well, I’ve been visiting Flint for the past year, so let me tell you the truth.

Some of the folks in Flint can’t take showers because their water is still poisoned with lead.

They have to boil water, pour it into the sink and then wash in it.

Yeah, a grown-ass man has to take a bird bath. That shit ain’t right. It’s still going on today.

And it’s not going away anytime soon.

Wallace, like Banks and many others, points out how the outrage would be perceived if the crisis had happened in another place other than Flint and that the residents of Flint, amazingly, are still billed for their water—the contaminated water, or as Wallace more eloquently puts it: “That’s right. They still want those people to pay their motherfucking water bills.” Throughout his short piece, Wallace takes care to avoid coming off as an expert in water treatment,

You can read this and ignore it. You can say I don’t know what I’m talking about. Look, I’m not a water expert. I’m not a scientist. But I’ve been to Flint. I’ve seen what’s happening. We have a third-world situation still going on in the United States of America. That’s the truth. The cameras are gone, but the people are still there, and they still need our help.

That is, the narrative that we have been lead to believe—that that water was contaminated, but now that the problem has been identified, conditions are improving—is a false narrative that ignores the actual evidence of the people trying to live through this crisis.

In making it abundantly clear that he is not an expert when it comes to potable water, Wallace adopts more than a pose of humility; it is an attempt to establish ethos not just with the reader but also with the people of Flint. As Laura Sullivan, a professor of mechanical engineering at Kettering University in Flint asserts,

It’s difficult to convince people once they’re aware that it has been unsafe that it is now safe. The messenger that says the water is safe can’t come from the state government. They’ve already ruined their potential to be someone who can be trusted. (Bosman, 2016)

So, too, have many scientists, according to Siddhartha Roy (2017), a civil and environmental engineer among the team of scientists from Virginia Tech who uncovered and disclosed that Flint’s water source was contaminated. In his essay for American Scientist, “The Hand-in-Hand Spread of Mistrust and Misinformation in Flint,” Roy argues that the EPA scientists who initially found no fault with the water and current crop of cures and purification systems based in pseudoscience have left scientists and scientific discourse with a noticeable credibility gap among the residents of Flint. So Wallace’s claim that he is not a politician or scientist—only that he is “been to Flint”—is significant because the water crisis not only affects the health of Flint residents but also leads to a mistrust of outside narratives and authority figures, having been betrayed by them repeatedly. This condition leads to a fundamental tension in Flint: outside help is both needed and looked upon skeptically. As such, a primary source of trustworthy information and rhetoric comes from athletes returning home to Flint or visiting Flint to donate their time and money because the only ulterior motives for their actions are empathy and generosity. Paradoxically, then, the same athletes whose charitable labor helps outsiders defray the psychic burdens of trauma and malfeasance surrounding Flint’s suffering are also the ones whose motivations Flinters are most inclined to trust and value.

Trusted and socially prominent, the voice of the athlete becomes, then, a particularly important one in the fight against Flint becoming lost in the 24-hr-news cycle. A particular focus in Wallace’s article is the ongoing struggle of those in Flint and the conflict with those who may want to believe that the situation is progressing or has even been resolved. In his December 2016 op-ed for the Detroit Free Press, Detroit Lions linebacker DeAndre Levy, like Wallace, reminds us that the water crisis persists: “The frequency of headlines has fizzled some, but the issue remains: Many residents still don’t have access to clean drinking water. Still.” Levy also ventures into political territory by noting efforts of local government to discontinue door-to-door water bottle distribution. Echoing the rhetoric of Black Lives Matter, he wonders what such a political venture, which was overturned by a federal court of appeals (Egan, 2016), says about political leadership in Flint: “[W]hat is being said about the value of Flint lives? The people who are there today, and the children who will grow into adults that have been affected? Do they not matter?” (Levy, 2016). Levy references Wallace’s article, too, championing those who continue to “beat the drum” regarding the ongoing struggle to provide safe drinking water to Flint, a “basic human [right].” As Levy’s and Wallace’s articles make evident, the struggle is not merely political; it also involves keeping Flint in the media spotlight.

But the contributions made by Wallace and Levy also amount to more than a mere reminder that Flint is still suffering while the country has moved on. In contrast to those narratives of athletes responding to Flint’s crisis that were written by professional sports journalists, these first person exhortations actively resist the palliative frameworks so often found in narratives authored by media members who highlight the progress and improvements in Flint. The presence of familiar sports stars does not make things better in Flint, these familiar sports stars assert: It does not exonerate ordinary Americans from feeling shock and horror at what transpired, or empathy for the Flinters. If athletes’ charity, which exists outside the realm of profit and self-interest, helps provide relief to a community ravaged by corporate neglect and government malfeasance, then the articles written by Wallace and Levy also help contend with mainstream narratives that tend to gloss over, decontextualize, or outright deny¹⁵ the elements of race and inequality that were responsible for the water crisis in Flint. Governor Snyder and Flint’s emergency managers understood their decision to change the water supply as a purely economic one, which is to say: They understood it only through the ideological lens of neoliberal capitalism. They failed to recognize that Flint’s economic difficulties resulted from, among other things, the complex interplay between the breakdown of labor unions, the elimination of jobs, social inequality, and racial demographics. In effect, just as the “stick to sports” crowd believes it can separate sports from politics, Snyder and the supporters of neoliberalism believed they could “stick to money,” pushing aside labor, race, and gender concerns in the interest of purely budgetary economics. Whether one insists that athletes and the media “stick to” it or not, America’s obsession with sports thus functions as a meaningful object lesson: though high-profile athletic narratives are often used as a pleasant distraction from our ordinary lives or to help minimize our comprehension of large-scale trauma, they will not deliver us from evil. And they should not shield us from contemplating that evil, either.

The Flint water crisis has been devastating to an already devastated community. The change in water source that led to the poisoning—a measure designed to save the city potentially US$100 to US$300 million (over 25 years) now may cost the city, state, and federal government US$300 billion (Dolan, 2016). Such numbers often fail to factor in health care costs and the psychological damage done to a community treated as if the lives of citizens were not worth the cost of saving money in risky and poorly planned civic experiment. In June of 2017, Michigan Attorney General, Bill Schuette brought involuntary manslaughter charges against five state officials for their role in the design and cover-up of the Flint water crisis (Atkinson & Davey, 2017). In his statement outlining the charges, which include involuntary manslaughter, Schuette avowed,

Some may wish or worry that the story of Flint will be slowly absorbed by other world events or lost in the noise and clatter of the 24-hour news cycle and short attention span of posts and tweets. Not on our watch (“Department of Attorney General, n.d”).

In making such claims, Schuette seems to be responding to concerns, such as those voiced by Wallace and Levy, that the ongoing tragedy in Flint will recede from the national spotlight and allow for the misperception that the crisis is somehow improving. As such, we should recognize that the charitable efforts of athletes who “give back” may not be just to provide funding or resources for this community in dire need of both but also to help prolong a narrative that too many believe has already been resolved. Athletes may be told to “stick to sports,” but in cases like Flint—in which the malfeasance of officials has created a public health crisis—we should be grateful when they do not.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

An early inspiration for this piece was “Toxic Narratives,” co-author Matthew Nicholas’s March 2016 piece for The Modern Spectator, a sports and culture website.

Authors’ Note

This article is not currently under consideration elsewhere and is not being submitted elsewhere.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biographies

Matthew Nicholas is a Senior Language Lecturer in the Expository Writing Program at New York University. He also edits and contributes to The Modern Spectator, an online journal that examines sports and culture: .

Noah Cohan is a Lecturer in American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis and the founding coordinator of the Sports Studies Caucus of the American Studies Association. His book, “We Average Unbeautiful Watchers”: Fan Narratives and the Reading of American Sports, is forthcoming in 2019 from the University of Nebraska Press.

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