Theorizing Prevention: Disability Justice in the Wake of the Flint Water Crisis

• In Event: Changing Perspective: Through the Lens of Disabiity

Abstract

Disability, it is often assumed, leads to a diminished quality of life. At best an obstacle to be overcome and at worst an unrelenting tragedy that renders life no longer worth living, disability is, in the words of disability activist Cheryl Marie Wade, “a fate worse than death.” It is perhaps not surprising, then, that disability studies scholars and activists have gone to considerable lengths to challenge this so-called “tragic view” of disability often by way of assurances that disabled people can—and do—lead flourishing, rewarding, and meaningful lives; lives that are, in other words, worth living. And yet despite these efforts, the manifest obviousness of disability’s undesirability continues to serve as the unquestioned backdrop for debates surrounding attempts to cure, if not eradicate, certain forms of disability. In this paper, I examine the ways in which the need to argue that disabled lives are “worth living” has come to determine the terrain and scope of disability politics, unintentionally privileging some issues such as abortion, genetic engineering, and euthanasia, over others like environmental disability.
Consider the case of Flint, Michigan, in which disabilities were acquired not as a result of a genetic or fetal anomaly, but rather as the outcome of what Rob Nixon refers to as “slow violence”—that is, “a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales” (2013, 2). So long as disability is understood relative to prenatal testing and selective abortion, it is easy to dismiss efforts at prevention as expressing the lesser worth of disabled lives. However, when confronted with instances of environmental harm that occur as a result of a complicated tangle of factors including post-industrial depopulation, state disinvestment, racial inequality, and environmental degradation, disability studies scholars and activists are faced with a conundrum. However much we may criticize the media’s sensationalist representations of disability in the wake of the Flint water crisis, this case illustrates the need for a more developed understanding of prevention that takes account of class, race, and differential susceptibility to environmental harm—an understanding that is not possible from within the confines of an emphasis on the value or worth of disability. When we consider that the majority of disabilities are acquired—indeed, only 15 percent of disabilities are congenital (only a fraction of which are detectable in utero)—this demand becomes especially pressing.

Author

• Ann Kathleen Heffernan, The University of Chicago