Thinking with Flint
Racial Liberalism and the Roots of an American Water Tragedy
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4887112 |
|---|---|
| Authors | M Ranganathan (0000-0003-4787-1519, American University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2016 |
| Volume | 27 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 17-33 |
| Publication date | 2016-07-02 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Capitalism Nature Socialism (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1045-5752 • E-ISSN: 1548-3290 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/10455752.2016.1206583 |
| OpenAlex | W2463872193 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 146 |
| References cited | 42 |
The lead poisoning of Flint, Michigan's water is popularly framed as a case of "environmental racism" given that Flint's population is mostly black and lower income. In this essay I argue that we see the environmental racism that underlies Flint's water poisoning not as incidental to our political-economic order, nor even as stemming from racist intent, but as inseparable from liberalism, an organizing logic we take for granted in our modern age. I expand on the idea of "racial liberalism" here. While upholding the promise of individual freedoms and equality for all, racial liberalism—particularly as it was translated into urban renewal and property making in mid-20th-century urban America—drove dispossession. In Flint racialized property dispossession has been one major factor underlying the city's financial duress, abandonment, and poisoned infrastructure. Yet, through austerity discourse, Flint is disciplined as if it were a financially reckless individual while the structural and historical causes of its duress are masked. Tracing the history of property making and taking in Flint and the effects of austerity urbanism on its water infrastructure, my central argument is that our understanding of Flint's predicament—the disproportionate poisoning of young African-Americans—can be deepened if we read it as a case of racial liberalism's illiberal legacies
Environmental ethics · Liberalism · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Tragedy (event · American Environmental and Regional History · Environmental Justice and Health Disparities · Law · Philosophy · Water Governance and Infrastructure
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Variations in household water affordability and water insecurity
Moving beyond a climate politics of justice with no peace
US Higher education and fossil fuels
Infrastructure That Connects/Infrastructure That Divides
The Flint water crisis
Covid-19’s Cracks, Climate Crisis, and Academia’s Role in Bringing about an Ontological Shift
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Environmental justice organizing as commoning practice in groundwater reform
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Making repair reparative
Experiences of the Flint Water Crisis Among Reproductive-Age Michigan Women in Communities Outside of Flint
Can community-based participatory action research fulfill environmental justice principles in Newark, NJ
Splintering Urbanism @ 20
In the Excess of Splintering Urbanism
Racial and Ethnic Differences in Emotional Reactions to the Flint Water Crisis among Michigan Women in Communities Outside of Flint
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Households’ access and expenditure on water services
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Black Geographies and Trans-Corporeality
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Intersectional feminism for the environmental studies and sciences
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Infrastructure in the Jungle
Routine Dilapidation
Introducing infrastructural harm
Grappling with real property supremacy in US urban climate finance
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Thinking racial capitalism from the Inland Empire
Latent alliances
Institutional diversity and safe drinking water provision in the United States
Co-opting the rural
Reimagining geographies of public finance
Urban political ecology
Race and ethnicity I
Infrastructure as Territorial Stigma
The policing of Black debt
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Empire’s infrastructures
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Decline machines and economic development
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Financing Reparative Climate Infrastructures
Schooling in the University Town
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Flowing Capital‐Disrupted Homes
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Whiteness as Property
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Racial Liberalism
The Cold War and the Color Line
Liberalism in Empire
Black Is a Country
River of Dark Dreams
Golden Gulag
Racial Formation in the United States
Liberal Strategies of Exclusion
A Critical Review of the Methodology of Environmental Racism Research
Post-Liberalism
Geographies of race and ethnicity 1
Urban political ecology II
River of Dark Dreams
Defining Environmental Justice and Environmental Racism
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The Rule of Freedom
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Geographies of race and ethnicity II
Urban geography II
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| Unique citing works | 146 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 14,6 |
| Citation span | 2016 - 2026 (11) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | Yes |
| Citation types | Neutral: 145 |