Black Skin, White Asks: Why the Flint Water Crisis is a Colonial Situation

• In Event: 40821 - Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 18. Urban (Re)Development

Abstract

Much work has been done on the role of emergency management in the state of Michigan detailing how the process was used to erode public control and implement an austerity plan for a majority of the state’s Black and Brown communities. Comparatively, little work has been done to connect this austerity plan to the broader neocolonial revanchist project that would ensue. This paper, based upon 25 interviews and content analysis, explores the rationale, discourse, and justifications for why the State of Michigan enlisted Black emergency managers to carry out their neocolonial revanchist agenda to extract assets from predominantly black communities all over the state of Michigan. These emergency financial managers did not operate as autonomous agents empowered by the state to make fiscally sound financial decisions for distressed local units; rather, they were recruited to execute the directives of the state, which surmised that it would face greater examination if the individuals involved were white. This study elucidates the methods by which neocolonial state politicians utilize black figures within the framework of emergency management to implement policies aimed at undermining Black local governance, in favor of regionalization, a seemingly egalitarian model of “shared governance”, which really aims to make certain that white control persists, no matter how migratory patterns may alter future regional composition.

Author

• Aaron C Foote, Grinnell College