Mascarenhas, M. Toxic water, toxic system: Environmental racism and Michigan’s water war. University of California Press. ISBN: 9780520343870. $85.00 / £71.00 (hardcover) $27.95 / £24.00 (paperback and e-book)
(URL: https://www.ucpress.edu/books/toxic-water-toxic-system/paper)
Brian F. O'Neill
University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA.
To cite this review: O'Neill, B.F. (2024). Review of “Toxic water, toxic system: Environmental racism and Michigan’s water war". University of California Press by Michael Mascarenhas, Water Alternatives, https://www.water-alternatives.org/index.php/boh/item/377-toxic
Michael Mascarenhas’ 2024 book, Toxic Water, Toxic System: Environmental Racism and Michigan’s Water War details the systemic injustice surrounding the water system of Flint Michigan, USA. “The Flint Crisis,” as it is often called, came to national attention in 2014 as a result of water poisoning from lead and Legionella, with news coverage reaching a peak between 2016 and 2018 as then-president Barack Obama declared a state of emergency after the city transitioned its water supply from the Detroit system connected to Lake Huron to the Flint River.
Flint, a majority black city, is sometimes read as a cipher for understanding the decline of American industrial prowess and post-war prosperity – the subject of historian Andrew Highsmith’s Demolition means Progress (2019) – and the water crisis in particular has already been the subject of several monographs (e.g., Pauli, 2019; Katrinell, 2021) and films, such as Flint: Who can you Trust? However, as Mascarenhas carefully documents the history of the crisis and its aftermath, he shows that whatever “fate” overtook the city was not the result of “mis-management”, per se, but “state-sanctioned racism” (p. xii) resulting from “the mundane and taken-for-granted workings of austerity policies that use colorblind administrative mechanisms, such as the state’s emergency manager law, to strip away Black assets and democratic autonomy for the benefit of white political and economic elites” (p. xi). Mascarenhas uniquely ties together a social structural critique of the workings of racism, political economy, and environmental injustice. Among the accounts of the events surrounding Flint, Mascarenhas’ work is in a league of its own, transcending the insights that have come before it, while presenting the history of the struggle in a way that is accessible without sacrificing theorization or empirical rigor.
The initial chapters (1-4) largely deal with the history and decisions leading to the crisis. Mascarenhas makes use of archival materials and the literature on redlining to show how racialized home ownership patterns and the White flight of the 1960s and 70s are connected to the trends that gave rise to the later water issues. An entire chapter is also devoted to the much-reported emergency manager system. But, Mascarenhas’ focus here is not on adjudicating the decisions that were made and the transition to the Karegondi water pipeline (which supplied untreated water from the Flint River); rather he highlights how this governance system is contiguous with the racialization of the city. In so doing, the strong point of these chapters is Mascarenhas’ turn to a reading of this situation that has been lacking in the larger environmental justice literature in general, and the Flint crisis in particular, homing in on financial logics. For example, the emergency manager’s commitments to the project finance of the Karegondi pipeline prioritized the decision-making power of white counties, and the payment of fees (a now well-known feature of financialization) extracted from black majority counties. Mascarenhas pulls on his expertise on non-profits (Mascarenhas, 2017), showing how the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, ostensibly an arts institution, was implicated as well: “the fact that critical taxing and spending decisions have and continue to be controlled by unelected bodies that shift the tax burden of their reforms to those least likely to benefit or afford such white privileges” has been fundamental to Flint city government (p. 115). Therefore the first half of the book convincingly extends Eduardo Bonilla Silva’s pathbreaking color-blind racism thesis (the overt racism of Jim Crow America gave way to a more subtle racism derived from ideas about economic liberalism, claiming aspects of racial hierarchy are part of a natural social order, and most notably, the minimization of racism itself in popular discourse and the public realm; Bonilla-Silva and Dietrich, 2011), bringing it into an environmental sociological frame of understanding.
Chapter five largely concludes the discussion of the role of finance in this history, as Mascarenhas details the connection to Detroit’s bankruptcy proceedings. This was an important moment, especially for the fact that white decision-makers allowed for the Michigan constitution and Detroit city charter to be largely ignored paving the way for the privatization of treated water without voter consent. Then Chapters 6 through 8 move into more of what one might expect from a book about environmental injustice, covering the twin distributional and procedural inequalities that lead to the dispossession and harm of black residents. Finally, chapter 9 “We charge genocide” is a novel approach to the more common “policy recommendations” chapter of many monographs. Continuous with the critical analysis of the entire book, Mascarenhas focuses on the story of Monica Lewis Patrick, of the organization We the People of Detroit, and the civil rights struggle that is ongoing. In so doing, the chapter captures the larger stakes of the issue, highlighting how Flint is not some aberration or exceptional instance, but rather how it reveals the rationalization of capitalist governance and shows “how ethically blind our highly advanced and rational, civilized society has become…austerity policies in Michigan formed the necessary condition that resulted in the Flint water crisis and rationalized Detroit’s water shutoffs…to balance the budgets of ‘problemed’ cities” (p. 214). Mascarenhas’ work therefore contributes to our understanding of water infrastructure politics, but also makes important contributions to environmental sociology, and the race and racism literature that highlights how “whiteness is reproduced as default Americanness, [with] institutional practices said to serve American or community interests are truly designed to serve white interests” (Schneider, 2022: 560).
Toxic Water, Toxic System: Environmental Racism and Michigan’s Water War will appeal to a wide range of scholars, as well as activists, NGO workers, and more. Scholars who frequently read in Water Alternatives will undoubtedly find much to like here, as Mascarenhas levels a critique of racist, classist, and gendered policies for water management, while displaying his commitment to qualitative research. The book maintains a critical perspective while taking seriously material histories of water, also weaving together complex topics like infrastructure finance and local struggles too. Furthermore, and this is perhaps the book’s strongest point, Mascarenhas has pushed the bounds of what environmental justice research looks like – a field that is, at times, staid in its approach (p. 2 and 6). Too often, articles and books in this subfield remain within a strongly empiricist framework that recalls the basic premise of first-generation distributional concerns, which does little to illuminate political economies informing injustice (for more on these topics, see for example O’Neill, 2023). This is not to say there is not a place for what essentially amount policy analytics that document crises. But here, Mascarenhas shows us how the often-loathed term “neoliberalism” is functioning in the lives of real people and how racism weaves its tendrils around policy through years of (mis)management (see also Boelens, Perreault, and Vos, 2018). Indeed, throughout the book, Mascarenhas works through, rather than abandoning critiques of inequality, political economy, and neoliberalism in a reformist mode that engages with prior bodies of work in original and insightful ways (see also Mascarenhas, 2012). And as such, this should be essential reading for environmental sociology courses, especially at the graduate level. Mascarenhas’s background is in sociology, but much of the apparatus of the book will be familiar to critical human geography, political ecology, anthropology, and planning as well. Indeed, Mascarenhas displays a true interdisciplinary commitment – articulating the work of scholars in other fields with his own, rather than a smorgasbord of “frameworks” or the seemingly now ever-present discourse about “transformation” “sustainability” and the like (Kirchherr, 2023) that at worst ignore, and at best, undertheorize race, class, privilege, justice, and the state (Harrison, 2023; O’Neill, Schneider, and Lozano, 2024).
Interdisciplinary masters and PhD students working in programs like human geography, urban planning, environmental management and more, will see a great deal of value to be had in Toxic Water Toxic system for both the methodological and epistemological approach Mascarenhas’ takes. Mascarenhas brings a unique and important sociological imagination to the water sector. Toxic Waters, Toxic System is a robust scholastic achievement. The Flint Crisis has a theoretically and methodologically rigorous sociological treatment that it has long deserved.
References
Boelens, R., Perreault, T., and Vos, J. eds. (2017) Water justice. Cambridge University Press.
Bonilla-Silva, E., and Dietrich, D. (2011). The sweet enchantment of color-blind racism in Obamerica. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 634(1): 190-206.
Davis, Katrinell M. (2021) Tainted Tap: Flint's Journey from Crisis to Recovery. Univeristy of North Carolina Press.
Harrison, J.L., (2023). Environmental justice and the state. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 6(4): 2740-2760.
Highsmith, A.R. 2019). Demolition means progress: Flint, Michigan, and the fate of the American metropolis. University of Chicago Press.
Kirchherr, J. (2023). Bullshit in the sustainability and transitions literature: a provocation. Circular Economy and Sustainability 3(1): 167-172.
O’Neill, B.F. (2023). Water for whom? Desalination and the cooptation of the environmental justice frame in Southern California. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 6(2) (2023): 1366-1390.
O’Neill, B.F., Schneider, M.J., and Lozano, A.G. (2024). Toward a critical environmental justice approach to ocean equity. Environmental Justice. https://doi.org/10.1089/env.2023.006.
Pauli, B.J. (2019). Flint fights back: Environmental justice and democracy in the Flint water crisis. MIT Press.
Schneider, M.J. (2022). “I don’t know what’s racist”: White invisibility among explicitly color-conscious volunteers." Qualitative Sociology 45(4): 557-589.
