Establishing Justice
This week the Flint Water Crisis Task Force released its final report. The report makes critical contributions to the public discussion of what happened in Flint, where the responsibility rests, and what should be done about it. Most importantly, the report makes clear that state authorities treated the people of Flint with contempt, disrespect, and disregard for their health and lives. At the core of the State’s actions was deep-seated racism. The report invokes the concept of Environmental Justice, opening important perspectives for us to consider as we decide how to move forward.
The report falls short in calling for the repeal of emergency management legislation. It acknowledges that it was unable to investigate the Karegnondi Water Authority and issues surrounding its creation. However, it cuts through some of the lies Governor Snyder has been pushing to avoid responsibility.
First, the Task Force places blame squarely on the State. In response to the Governor’s strategy of blaming everyone, they say, “Though it may be technically true that all levels of government failed, the state’s responsibilities should not be deflected. The causes of the crisis lie primarily at the feet of the state by virtue of its agencies’ failures and its appointed emergency managers’ misjudgments.
Second, the report highlights the role Emergency Managers played in the key decisions surrounding the water crisis. It emphasizes the consequences of legislation that concentrates power in the hands of a single individual without democratic checks and balances. The Task force concluded, “The Flint water crisis occurred when state-appointed emergency managers replaced local representative decision-making in Flint, removing the checks and balances and public accountability that come with public decision-making. Emergency managers made key decisions that contributed to the crisis, from the use of the Flint River to delays in reconnecting to DWSD once water quality problems were encountered.”
Third, the Task Force addresses openly the environmental injustice embedded in the chain of choices made by the Governor and his appointees. As the New York Times commented, the report “makes clear the principal cause of the water crisis in Flint, Mich.: the state government’s blatant disregard for the lives and health of poor and black residents of a distressed city.”
The Times editorial goes on to say of the report, “While it avoids using the word “racism,” it clearly identifies the central role that race and poverty play in this story.”
This report should be read along with the Principles of Environmental Justice. They offer a standard for us to judge how we are meeting our responsibilities to Flint, to one another and to the earth.
These Principles were crafted at the People of Color Environmental leadership Summit in 1991 “to build a national and international movement of all peoples of color to fight the destruction and taking of our lands and communities,” and to “re-establish our spiritual interdependence to the sacredness of our Mother Earth.”
Among the 17 principles are these:
● Environmental justice demands that public policy be based on mutual respect and justice for all peoples, free from any form of discrimination or bias.
● Environmental justice affirms the fundamental right to political, economic, cultural and environmental self-determination of all peoples.
● Environmental justice demands the right to participate as equal partners at every level of decision-making including needs assessment, planning, implementation, enforcement and evaluation.
● Environmental justice protects the right of victims of environmental injustice to receive full compensation and reparations for damages as well as quality health care.
● Environmental justice considers governmental acts of environmental injustice a violation of international law, the Universal Declaration On Human Rights, and the United Nations Convention on Genocide.
● Environmental justice calls for the education of present and future generations which emphasizes social and environmental issues, based on our experience and an appreciation of our diverse cultural perspectives.
Governor Snyder, his appointed administrators, and the State Legislature violated these core principles. We have a long way to go to establish justice.
Visioning a World Beyond Struggle
Tawana "Honeycomb" Petty
Last week, I had the honor of attending an incredible celebration series honoring the legacy of Grace Lee Boggs in Oakland, California. I traveled to California with comrades Shea Howell and Ill “invincible” Weaver to present and contribute to the week’s events. The series of events started with a study group on The Next American Revolution (TNAR) at Eastwind Books, and included an Art as Revolution: Theater of the Oppressed Workshop with brilliant facilitator Jiwon Chung, a film screening of American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs with Q&A, a Growing Our Souls, Building Our Soil: day of vision and action workday with Urban Tilth and Movement Generation and ended with Celebrating Grace Lee Boggs: A Century of Love & Struggle at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center, over the course of 4 days. Learn more about the organizers and the events at inloveandstruggle.org.
Participants included decades long comrades of Grace and James “Jimmy” Boggs who participated in the National Organization for an American Revolution (NOAR) and the ADVOCATORS, students, educators and organizers who had recently come to learn about Grace, organizers who had been studying Grace’s work, members of the community, longtime friends, and historian, author, theoretician, educator Robin D.G. Kelley who had a longstanding political relationship with Grace. One of his recent brilliant pieces, Thinking Dialectically: What Grace Lee Taught Me, was penned just following Grace’s transition last October.
Mental preparation for my trip to Oakland, the experiences I had while in Oakland and the subsequent work that followed back home in Detroit inspired the write-up below. I shared some of these thoughts at Grace’s memorial, but they are ever evolving.
In the film American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs, Grace Boggs challenges film watchers with the quote, “I don’t know what the Next American Revolution will be like, but we might be able to imagine it, if our imaginations were rich enough.”
In a way that only Grace can, she breathes life into us with this quote. She leaves us with both a challenge and an opportunity to realize our full potential as human beings.
Just months before I met Grace, I had walked off a 70K per year job in corporate America and leaped into a world of uncertainty. Most people in my life at the time thought I was stupid and losing my mind. I know this because they told me so.
But what they didn’t see, and neither did I at the time, was that my clock was ticking towards my humanity and although I was raising a young child in uncertainty, my world could no longer revolve around a paycheck. I was beginning to realize that I had to become a greater contributor in society.
My meeting comrades at the Boggs Center and ultimately being challenged and strengthened by interactions with Grace was not a fluke. I didn’t seek out the revolutionary struggle, it sought me out. The clock on my world was spinning recklessly and political struggle with Grace and my comrades at the center was preparing me to understand that we could stand on the points of the clock of the world that are right at least twice a day.
Grace pushed us to vision when the rest of the world appeared chaotic. She pushed us to study when many in the world would deem that passive. Grace pushed us to connect in love and struggle and to create our paths by walking them. She pushed us to turn to one another when the pain and trauma of the world was tearing us apart. If Grace were sitting in this room right now, she would tell us that we are living in dangerous times, a time of both crises and opportunity. She would tell us that these are the times to grow our souls and that it is not only a time to imagine what the Next American Revolution could be like, but that we should imagine what this country’s revolution could create for the rest of the world.
Grace believed, like we believe, that Detroit could be the center for the world’s transformation and she pushed and guided us to take leadership in that regard and to nurture others to do the same.
The brief moment of jubilation one feels when they are protest organizing cannot be lingered upon. Although it is imperative that we celebrate the small victories in order to achieve moments of relief, we must challenge ourselves to move past the joyful moments and warm feelings that keep us celebrating for too long and into the moments that challenge us to ask ourselves what’s next? What time is it on our individual clocks? What time is it on the clocks of our blocks? What time is it in on the clocks of our cities, on the clock of the world, on the clock of our humanity?
What changes need to take place in each of us in order to challenge the status quo, the notion that a city must be poisoned in order for us to fight for its poor to have clean and affordable water. The notion that a people who cannot pay their bills are disposable. The notion that those who are undocumented, or are immigrants to a city are unworthy of clean air and the protection of their language, culture and identity. That the fratricide we see happening most prominently in Black and Brown communities is disconnected from racism and capitalism.
If Grace were sitting here, she would be telling us to listen to our young people and telling the young people to utilize the marbles of our elders. She would be asking us what we are going to do differently, not tomorrow, but today in terms of what it means to be a human being and she would blink and stare at you until you answered.
So when asked what time it is on the clock of the world, on the clock of our souls and our humanity, let us keep in mind that we hold the hands that move the clock and we have a responsibility to move the world.
I recently heard a wise person say that we must move from the “if I do this then this will happen” into the “who do I want to be” and that the doing will come after we decide “who we want to be.”
And the having will come as we create from our new found humanity.
Let us dispel the myth of privilege that places hierarchy on a deeper investment into capitalism and white supremacy. Let us move beyond the arrogance and disconnect that would have us prefer commoditized bottled water over tap water if we still have the luxury of clean water while hundreds of thousands suffer. Let us recognize that our liberation from capitalism must be a collective struggle and that we must move from solidarity to co-liberation in order to reach our full potential as human beings.
In the new world that we want to create, let us recognize art and healing as necessary forms of resistance and less as an afterthought in the struggle, and let us move from defensiveness to vision, from vision to creation and from creation to sustainability.
Fredric Jameson has a quote that says, “it has become easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.”
I say that imagining a world beyond capitalism is nothing to a visionary.