Community water distribution in Jackson, Mississippi. Photo: AP/Steve Helber.
By Chi Chi Izundu, Mohamed Madi, Chelsea Bailey, Cooperation Jackson – Sep 07, 2022
The city of Jackson is suffering from years of neglect by the state of Mississippi. Residents of the majority Black city need a new water system, but a legacy of racism and antipathy towards their Black led city government have created a health crisis for thousands of people. Cooperation Jackson presents the history of this crisis and has announced a call to action.
Jackson Water Crisis: A legacy of environmental racism? was originally published on the BBC News website.
Marshall lives in west Jackson, in the US state of Mississippi – a predominantly black and poor part of the city. He has no choice but to drink the tap water that Jackson residents have been told to avoid. When he turns the tap on – the water runs brown.
He says it’s been like this for about eight months and he has no choice but to drink it.
“Yes ma’am. I been drinking it.” He smiles when we ask whether it worries him. “I turn 70 later this month,” he says.
Marshall doesn’t have a car, so he can’t get to the sites where water is being handed out by the National Guard. He also doesn’t have electricity or gas because of a recent fire in the house next door, which means he can’t boil the water to help make it safer.
“Very seldom it’s pure. Sometimes it’s a little lighter, a little darker. In the bath tub when I first turn it on, it always comes out rust, then it gets lighter. But every time, the rust comes first.”
Jackson councilman Aaron Banks has lived in the Mississippi state’s capital for most of his life, and now represents a district that is more than 90% Black.
He says he thinks a devastating combination of aging infrastructure and climate change ultimately led to the latest collapse of Jackson’s water supply.
In 2020, when freezing temperatures caused Jackson’s water treatment facility to shut down, Mr. Banks says his district went without water for nearly six weeks – far longer than the surrounding areas. The town’s infrastructure has struggled to keep up ever since.
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“We have not gone a month without having a ‘boil water’ notice or low to no water pressure in the last two years,” he says. “Unfortunately, that is something we have gotten used to as American citizens – nobody should be adapting to that type of quality of life.”
Time and again, Mr. Banks says, those who are forced to adapt have predominately been people of colour. For years, the councilman says he has watched state funding pour into the infrastructure of towns and areas around Jackson – but they’ve missed the facilities that need it most, including the city’s water treatment plant.
President Joe Biden’s landmark infrastructure bill earmarked money for disadvantaged and underserved communities like Jackson, which in 2020 had a population of 163,000. But the funding is allocated by state legislators who, Mr Banks says, often succumb to politics and prioritise projects for their constituents instead of focusing on fixing systemic issues in Jackson.
“We have a water treatment facility that’s obsolete that nobody has thought about for years,” says Professor Edmund Merem, an urban planning and environmental studies professor at Jackson State University.
“I think the problem is that the reaction tends to be ad hoc.”
But Prof Merem also believes another factor has pulled focus and funding away from the Jackson’s crumbling infrastructure – race.
Experts and advocates say what is happening in Jackson – and in towns like Flint in Michigan, where the water supply was contaminated with lead – is a direct legacy of generations of discrimination and segregation.
“This is a deep seated, decades-long, in the making kind of situation,” says Arielle King, a lawyer and environmental justice advocate.
“I think the history of racial segregation and redlining in this country have deeply contributed to the environmental injustices we see right now.”
Redlining began in the 1940s as a government-sanctioned practice of denying mortgages and loans to people of colour because they were deemed “too risky.”
The programme lasted more than 40 years, and as a result, Ms. King says, low-income, predominately black communities were concentrated in areas with polluting industries like landfills, oil refineries, and wastewater treatment plants.
And those areas, she notes, still exist today.
She points to parts of the country like so-called Cancer Alley as an example. Once the home to Louisiana’s sprawling plantations, the area along the Mississippi River is now an industrial highway of more than 150 oil refineries and factories.
For decades, the predominately black residents have suffered from some of the highest rates of cancer in the nation because of pollution.
Ms. King says the legacy of this kind of environmental racism, coupled with decades of underinvestment in low-income areas is playing out in Jackson.
“They can say that there are different factors that lead to flooding, but people wouldn’t be subject to areas that are susceptible to flooding without redlining in the first place,” Ms. King says.
“So again, it does kind of come back to race, and environmental racism, unfortunately, every time.”
Sarina Larson is studying to be a lawyer and lives a few blocks from Marshall. She moved from Sacramento and wants to be a public defence lawyer. She too blames redlining for the issues the area has been having.
In her kitchen, there are bowls of varying sizes all over the floor. She catches rain water in them and then uses a water filter.
“The pipes have lead in them in Jackson and so I would never drink a glass of water,” she says. “I don’t brush my teeth with the tap water”.
But she admits that most people can’t afford the $300 dollar (£260) filter she bought.
“A water crisis like this doesn’t become an issue until it affects people of a higher class. It has been ongoing and Jackson has been an example of that. People’s health is secondary to the state.”
We met Imani Olugbala-Aziz at a local community centre where she and others from the volunteer group Cooperation Jackson were handing out bottled water. It took less than an hour for them to run out. She tells us she barely has water at her own home.
“It’s a crisis of views and values and there’s a lot of environmental racism going on. We are sending our money to the government to get what needs to be done, done. And they’re not doing it.
“We’re underserved. People of colour are underserved. We stay in the worst parts of town, just so we can survive.
“We’re not asking for mansions, we just want to live and have the normal stuff, running water, clean water,” Ms. Olugbala-Aziz says.
She says the local area has a high homeless rate and local shops have closed which makes it hard for people to buy water.
“We’ve been on the boiled water alert for about a month. It’s not drinkable, so what do we do? How do we feed our children, how do we cook and eat?”
Ms Olugbala-Aziz says people are paying high water bills, whilst those in predominately white areas aren’t.
“This is not something that has just happening. This is slow rolling and it has gotten to the point of untenable. We’re struggling here.”
Cooperation Jackson issued this call to action to address the ongoing water system crisis.
Jackson, Mississippi is currently suffering through an unprecedented water crisis. After decades of systematic and intentional neglect due to environmental racism, capital flight and deindustrialization, the city’s water system has collapsed.
This collapse didn’t have to happen. As a result of the city’s declining tax base over the decade, it cannot pay for the repairs by itself. Nor should it have to. Jackson is the Capitol of the state of Mississippi, which means it is the base of state government and resources. In addition, it is also where the Federal government’s administrative resources in the state are concentrated. These entities use the water system, just like the cities over 160,000, predominantly Black residents do. They must pay their fair share in overhauling and modernizing the system.
Jackson’s elected officials have been asking the state government to make a substantive contribution to the system for decades. However, the Republican, predominantly white, party leadership that has dominated state government for generations now, fundamentally refuses. They would rather the city collapse than structurally enable and support its Black political leadership and Black life in general.
Enough is enough! The State and Federal governments must provide the City of Jackson the resources it needs to completely overhaul and modernize the city’s water filtration and delivery systems. The new system must be designed with ecological sustainability in mind, and it must be built by the working people of Jackson. Money must not be an issue. If the government can generate billions of dollars to provide immediate and long term aid to the governments of Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel so readily, then it can generate them for the people of Jackson.
Justice for Jackson Entails the implementation of a Just Transition that adheres to the following principles and demands:
1- That the State and Federal government immediately fund the complete overhaul of the Jackson water treatment and delivery systems.
2- That the new system fully remains within the democratic control of the city of Jackson.
3- That the new system be built by the people of Jackson and that over 50% of the contracts awarded be granted to either contractors from Jackson and/or Black and other minority contractors to ensure equity and the development of intergenerational wealth in our communities.
4- That the new system be ecologically designed and built with as many locally and or regionally sourced resources as possible.
Build and Fight
We are also clear that the suffering communities of Jackson cannot and must not wait on State and Federal redress that might not ever come, given the ongoing legacy of racial neglect. So, we must be clear about building and fighting for the practical community based solutions to the water and climate crisis that is underneath it, that we can implement ourselves.
To this end, we think it is imperative that we create a Jackson Emergency Response and Mutual Aid Network network that can serve our community in the event of water outages, future polar vortex freezes, tornados, hurricanes, floods, or massive social unrest.
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We also think it is essential that we start developing more autonomous, community based resources as well to meet our needs. Here are some systems that we think need to be developed and we are calling for national support from all people of conscious to help us resource and build:
1- Home and community based water catchment, treatment and delivery systems. Having a critical mass and a network of these will help us address future crises, and further the enablement of greater sustainability in our community.
2- Home and Community based solar farms to construct more autonomous energy supply systems, that will also add another layer of sustainability and autonomy in our community.
3- Food sovereignty networks, that are based on increased local and regional food production, and locally based networks of distribution.
Take Action. Join us in these efforts.
We are asking everyone who reads and agrees with this to join us and take some concrete action to bring all of these demands and ideas to fruition. Here is how you can take initiative.
1- Donate to Cooperation Jackson or to other Jackson based social justice based organizations involved in aid and community organizing work aligned with this vision.
2- Contact President Biden and your Senators and Congresspersons and demand that they advance our principle demands.
3- If you have any professional construction skills, we are asking you to volunteer with us in the next coming weeks and months to help build new water catchment systems and do solar installations.
This is going to be a long, critical fight and we are asking you to join it, learn from it, and build a broader movement from it to meet the critical challenges and threats of our time.
