To believe that Flint is an isolated event that only resulted from political inaction would be to undermine the real epidemic in America. Poor people of color across America are being poisoned with lead, and Flint is only the latest example. Worse yet, the government negligence after each separate crisis across the nation amplifies the injustice. According to the Detroit Free Press, emails show that Michigan’s governor was aware of the water quality since October 2014, although he publicly claims he wasn’t until March 2015. This is deliberate environmental racism at its worst, and it’s time our government and corporations were held accountable.
Throughout the 20th century, America was the world’s leading producer and consumer of lead. The Environmental Protection Agency writes that by 1980, the U.S. was consuming around 1.3 million tons of lead per year, which is roughly 40 percent of the world’s supply. This was despite knowing the harmful effects lead has on human health. Although uses for lead like paint or gas have decreased since the 1980s, recent news has demonstrated that America is still not safe.
While the water poisoning in Flint is well known, many are unaware of lead poisoning in states like Pennsylvania and even California. According to Vox News, there are at least 15 cities in Pennsylvania with higher percentages of lead-poisoned children than Flint. Allentown, Pennsylvania is the worse where 23 percent of children were found with dangerous levels of lead in their blood, seven-times higher than Flint’s percentage.
Pennsylvania has such rates because of the prevalence of homes built prior to the 1970s, when lead paint was widely used, according to the Morning Call. The fact that paint corporations knowingly put toxic lead into their products until the late twentieth century has only makes lead poisoning more widespread. Frustratingly enough, as Huffington Post reports, paint companies knew of the damages of lead paint but continued to sell the paint until it was banned in 1978. The result of such corporate greed are thousands of children across America becoming lead poisoned even 30 years after the ban.
To be clear, lead poisoning is an actual medical term that isn’t used lightly. The Center for Disease Control refers to a child being lead poisoned only if symptoms from lead presence in the body can be visibly noticed. For reference, being lead poisoned means having above the national threshold of 10 µg/dL of lead in the blood.
The worst part is of this epidemic is that it primarily harms America’s most vulnerable: our poor communities of color. According to Huffington Post, black children were 1.6 times more likely to test positive for lead in their blood than white children were. Similarly, citizens who were enrolled in Medicaid, a low-income status indicator, tested positive for lead presence more often than those who weren’t. Further evidence is seen in the cities aforementioned. Flint is 56 percent black, and 42 percent of its population lives below the poverty line, as reported by Huffington Post. Similarly, in Allentown, Pennsylvania, the median income is less than $37,000, which is only a few thousand shy of the poverty line.
We, in California, might brush the issue of lead poisoning off as something that wouldn’t happen to us, but we would only be lying to ourselves. According to a UCLA report, in 2008 the Los Angeles Unified School District had a string of elementary schools whose water fountains contained lead levels higher than the national threshold. The report continues by citing that the cases in LAUSD were clustered around regions where residents used Medicaid. Thus California takes its place within the group of states guilty of disproportionately poisoning its poor communities of color with lead.
Yet there’s something significant about California’s position that changes the game. Lead poisoning is one of those vicious poverty-driven cycles. Lead-poisoned cities like Flint, Allentown and Los Angeles desperately need money to improve the infrastructure so that the crisis can stop. Yet these cities are often the poorest with no money to invest to break the cycle.
California had the solution to hold corporations accountable. Just this year, 10 cities in California, including San Diego, won a $1.1 billion court case against several paint companies for selling lead paint despite being aware of its detriment to public health. The money from the settlement will cover the cost of removing lead paint from the many homes that were built when lead paint was common.
Up until this, the conversation around lead poisoning was bleak because cities didn’t have the money to invest. This is a great partial solution, and states around the U.S. should follow suit. Sadly, it won’t help cases like Flint that were purely due to government negligence. For that, governments will need to learn that all populations, even poor people of color, need their governance, not their negligence.
