Marian Ronan

BlackBrainsMatter

On Monday, my esteemed partner, Keith Russell and I, began teaching a course on the church and environmental justice at New York Theological Seminary in Manhattan. (Frequently, when I say I teach at NYTS, people respond, “Oh, Union. That’s a great place.” Just so you know, Union is an Ivy League, ferociously expensive, liberal Protestant seminary. NYTS is the Black/Latinx/Asian night school a few blocks away).

One of the things I love about NYTS (where I myself did an M.Div. in the 1980s) is that the students are almost all real people, coming in to their 6 PM classes from jobs as teachers, MTA workers, or pastors of storefront churches. And they are often really excited about and grateful for the things they learn.

Monday and Tuesday night I taught about environmental racism and the history of the environmental justice movement, as well as the ways in which people of color and the poor comprise the “ground zero” of climate change. During the rest of the course Keith will be working with the students on how to preach and teach about environmental justice in the congregations in which they now minister or will soon.

The students were amazed by what they learned in the first two sessions, explaining at the end of Tuesday’s class that they had always thought that racial justice and civil rights were one thing, and that environmentalism was something else entirely. Among the statistics that they were unaware of is that Black children in the United States are twice as likely as white children to have asthma, and that the single greatest threat to the health of all American children is lead poisoning.

Which brings us to the recent scandal in Flint Michigan. I suppose you know the details. In spring of 2014, the city, in order to save money, switched from the supply of Lake Huron water it had long purchased from Detroit and started drawing water from the Flint River, treating it locally. Residents immediately began complaining about the smell, taste, and appearance of the water; by the summer, three water boil advisories had been declared. City officials repeatedly claimed that the water was fine.

In February of 2015 a water advisory commission was formed to address concerns.  In September, a group of doctors at a Flint hospital called for a return to the Detroit water source after finding high levels of lead in the blood of Flint children. The state then stepped in, and in October the legislature approved $6 million dollars to help switch the water supply back to its earlier source and deal with the damaged pipes. Yesterday, President Obama declared the water contamination in Flint a Federal emergency.

The main problem, according to the New York Times, is that the water from the Flint River was corrosive, due to inadequate treatment by the city, and caused lead to leach from old pipes in homes and schools. Even small amounts of lead can cause serious health problems, while the mental and psychical development of children under six is especially at risk.

What many news sources fail to mention in their coverage of this story (though Hillary Clinton did mention it in last night’s debate), is that Flint is a majority Black city. Fifty-seven percent of the population is Black, with another three percent plus Latinx. What we all should remember, especially on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, is that there is a very big overlap between racial injustice and the environmental crisis.