The Flint Water Crisis, the Karegnondi Water Authority and Strategic–Structural Racism

Abstract

Everyone knows that what happened in Flint is connected to race, but we lack the necessary frameworks to fully understand the multiple ways that race and racism contributed to the Flint Water Crisis. This article introduces the notion of Strategic–Structural racism, the manipulation of the forces of intentional racism, structural racism and unconscious bias for economic or political gain. This construct is applied to critical aspects of the Flint Water Crisis: the imposition of emergency management, the approval of the Karegnondi Water Authority (KWA) pipeline, the decision to use the Flint River as an interim source of drinking water and how municipal finance rules were manipulated to obtain financing for the KWA pipeline but not to fund necessary upgrades to the Flint Water Treatment Plant (WTP). Tragically, the strategic racism embedded in the KWA approval process created an environment of denial, cover-up and complicity as aspects of the public health crisis began to emerge.