Systemic Racism and Othering within Government Agencies: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Environmental Injustice in the Flint, Michigan Water Crisis

ABSTRACT

The severe water emergency in Flint, Michigan between 2014 and 2016 was inarguably caused by systemic organizational dysfunction. The Michigan Governor Snyders’ Flint Water Advisory Task Force, in their analysis of the severe water emergency in Flint, Michigan, emphasized the degree of systemic organizational dysfunction, providing evidence that the agencies involved demonstrated a disregard for the poor and black citizens of Flint and participated in environmental injustice. The author traces, through journalists’ reports, e-mails between and among officials, first-hand testimony and the timeline provided by the Task Force, that the performance of the involved agencies (the state Department of Environmental Quality and the Michigan Department of Health Services) was tainted by systemic racism, Othering and by the dehumanization of Flint citizens the majority of whom were African American, and poor. The scandal was finally made public when a pediatrician showed unequivocal data on the alarmingly high lead levels in children who ingested the water. An organizational analysis based on psychoanalytic principles (Freud, Bion, Hopper) further supplements her observations that systemic racism aided and abetted severe systemic dysfunction.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental injustice
• systemic racism
• Othering
• dehumanization
• unconscious social bias

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Ruble (2018).

2. These charges were dropped in June, 2019.

3. Associated Press (2019).

4. Flint Water Advisory Task Force (2016).

5. Ruble, Kayla. Ibid.

6. This summary of Flint’s history is taken largely from Anne Clark’s excellent summary in her Poisoned City: (Flint’s Water and the American Urban Tragedy 2018).

7. Highsmith (2016, 1).

8. This timeline is assembled using three sources: Anne Clark’s Poisoned City: Flint’s Water and the American Urban Tragedy (2018), Campbell, (editor): Poison on Tap, How Government Failed Flint, and the Heroes Who Fought Back. A Bridge Magazine analysis (2016, and from the Flint Water Advisory Task Force’s Final Report (2016).

9. Bob Campbell, ed. Poison on Tap, How Government Failed Flint, and the Heroes Who Fought Back. IA Bridge Magazine analysis), Kindle, 576.

10. Diangelo (2018, 92–97) and Coates (2015).

11. Diangelo (2018, 91, 94, 95).

12. Dalal (2006, 158).

13. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930, 114).

14. Clark (2018, 81).

15. Witness the 1964 murders of Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, white Civil Rights Movement activists killed along with African- Americanactivist James Chaney in Mississippi, and the Ku Klux Klan cross burnings on the lawns of white citizens who supported the Civil Rights Movement, such as Alabama ACLU attorney Chuck Morgan in 1963. These men were not poor but were hated for their support of fellow citizens who were African-Americans.

16. Flint Water Advisory Task Force Final Report, March 2016, 33.

17. Ruble, Kayla, August 20, 2018.

18. Chan (2016).

19. Lynch (2016), published 11:59 pm ET, March 28, 2016, update March 29, 1;16 pm.

20. Finger (2015)

21. Campbell, B., Kindle edition, 1657-8; Roy (2015).

22. Bosman, Davey, and Smith (2016)

23. Clark, A. Ibid. 147

24. Samilton 2018.

25. Martin (1968).

26. Green (2019).

27. Green, Erica, Ibid.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marie G. Rudden

Marie G. Rudden, M.D., is Assistant Clinical Professor at Weill-Cornell School of Medicine, Training/Supervising Analyst at the Berkshire Psychoanalytic Institute, Assoc., and Editor of International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies.