-Dr. Seuss, The Lorax
Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, the doctor who brought attention to the impact that Flint’s water was having on children, opens her book with these lines from Dr. Seuss.
In What the Eyes Don’t See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City, Dr. Hanna-Attisha reveals how her inquiries—as a pediatrician looking for answers about the ailments she was seeing in children—turned to horror as she discovered that what had seemed improbable was proven to be true: the water in Flint contained dangerous amounts of lead that were severely damaging those who were drinking it.
The water in Flint contained dangerous amounts of lead that were severely damaging those who were drinking it.
A few ideas are central to the story that Dr. Hanna-Attisha tells about Flint. First, the Flint water crisis did not happen overnight. To illustrate this point, she connects the dots between the water crisis and the generations of racism that contributed to making it possible.
She tells the story of Father Charles Coughlin, a Canadian priest whose Royal Oak, Michigan-based radio program once broadcast ideals of racism and nationalism around the United States in the 1930s. She shares about the emergency manager who effectually destroyed any semblance of democracy in Flint. And she concludes that there were larger systems at work in Flint.
She connects the dots between the water crisis and the generations of racism that contributed to making it possible.
Hanna-Attisha writes,
We don’t think enough about what lies beneath the veneer of the places where we grew up, as if childhood innocence lingers inside us, filtering out anything too complex or complicated or too dark to consider. We step over complex systems every day, walking through history and pretending the darkness isn’t there.
Another central idea that Dr. Hanna-Attisha conveys in the book is the notion that the eyes don’t see what the mind doesn’t understand. Human beings are in many ways limited to only comprehending what we already know to be true, asserts Hanna-Attisha. She further explains that, much like lead in water, racism in the United States often goes unrecognized by people who don’t know it’s there.
Dr. Hanna-Attisha concludes that there is not one single culprit that we can point to as the source of the Flint water crisis. Rather, a perfect storm of pieces needed to fall into place, pieces rooted in racism and ignorance, oppression, and neglect. In a June 18 interview with Chelsea Clinton, Dr. Hanna-Attisha said, “The real villains are harder to see because they are the ongoing effects of racism and deindustrialization and corporate greed which really put lead in our plumbing in the first place.”
Much like lead in water, racism in the United States often goes unrecognized.
An important takeaway from this book for me is that the water crisis in Flint is a reflection of a larger crisis in this country. Eyes are not seeing, they are failing to recognize, the ways that racism is at work--determining where people live, how people live, and even, who lives and who dies.
Are we, as the Church, seeing it? Are we recognizing the ways that racism is destroying lives and communities that God intends to flourish?
What do we really believe about God and about the people he creates and sustains?
What do we really believe about God and about the people he creates and sustains? Do we put our faith in a prosperity gospel that says our material blessings are given in proportion to our faith? Is it an American dream that says that people are poor because they are lazy? Or is it something else?
God is calling us to look for what the eyes don’t see, not only to examine our hearts and minds and intentions, but also our behavior. What we do and what we don’t do impacts the lives of others. When racism is, in many ways, the water we swim in, we can fail to see it. But the gospel that calls us to take sin seriously. That is what this book is calling us to do as well.
[Image: Flickr user Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, under Creative Commons license]
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