Wow, the non-partisan background where Peter Hammer, economist, law professor and the head of the Wayne State DJK Center for Civil Rights and advisor to the ACLU, found that racism unequivocally played a major roll in the crisis. And if that's not enough non-partisan evidence, the Michigan Civil Rights Commission also found racism to be a key factor.
I particularly like this piece of verbal diarrhea from Hammer:
"Nothing about what happened in Flint was accidental, Flint needs to be understood as a morality play illustrating the dangers of emergency management and fiscal austerity. Flint needs to stand as a profound multi-generational testimony to the dangers of strategic-structural racism in the same manner as the Tuskegee tragedy forever shames medical science."
This guy is an economist, and he calls emergency management and fiscal austerity "dangerous" - classic. So what do we do with chronically failing, bankrupt cities? Bail them out and let them do it all over again? So if I understand this totally unbiased assessment, fiscal austerity is racist and that caused Flint's water crisis and structural racism is the root cause of municipal distress, not decades of irresponsible, corrupt and inept city management. I guess we can add austerity and fiscal responsibility to the list of dog whistles to white supremacists.
Thanks for that highly enlightening, totally unsurprising, "non-partisan" and I'll add not remotely biased or moronic (that's sarcasm, except the bit about it being unsurprising) background read.
I'll look later, but I think when we originally discussed this topic, the new water source deal had already been negotiated by the City Council or the Mayor before the emergency manager was appointed by Snyder - all of those people are black, by the way so I don't think the change was motivated by racism. I guess it could be considered negligent on the part of the emergency manager to rely on the report and recommendation to approve the deal given to him by the City Council, but I have a really hard time seeing how that is racist - what if the Emergency Manager went against the Council's recommendation and shot it down, would that be racist?