Flint Rising Director Nayyirah Shariff On The Crisis In Flint And How Resource Privatization Is Like Dune

Molly Lambert: Could you tell me just a little bit about yourself and where you grew up and how you got interested in activism?

Nayyirah Shariff: I’ve grown up in Michigan and grew up in the Flint area and after I graduated from college I had a totally different career, I was in the engineering field, but I was still doing volunteering, registering people to vote, talking to people and when I left the engineering field I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life and I started volunteering for Planned Parenthood. Eventually I got a job at Planned Parenthood as an organizer and launched I’ll say, like, my second career, in activism and always volunteered for a variety of different efforts.

ML: Can you tell me about when you first were aware of the water crisis?

A: In March of 2011 the Michigan governor and state legislature passed the Emergency Manager Law. In December of that year Flint became the first community to be under that law and around that time - I forget where I was actually working at - but there was a group of people in Flint that were collecting signatures to challenge the Emergency Manager Law, to put it on the ballot for people to vote through the referendum process, vote whether or not we still wanted that law or not.

When Flint went into receivership, it was a group of us that was like, we need to actually have a concerted effort to confront what we felt was a fascist law, and that eventually became like the Democracy Defense League before Democracy Defense League. The changes with the water actually began under the Emergency Manager. It was the decision of the Emergency Manager to make the switch to the Flint Rive, but before that the Emergency Manager had raised the water rates and very soon after the switch he raised the rates again. We had a series of Emergency Managers and then also the Emergency Manager who was the Emergency Manager during the switch. He eventually hired people to prosecute residents who were turning on water on their own.

So we saw it kind of as a three part thing. We saw it as a water affordability crisis, a water quality crisis, and in addition to that, speaking out for people who were turning on water on their own. We felt like they shouldn’t be going to jail. We also saw that there were a lot of people who were living at apartment complexes and trailer parks who were paying their rent and their water costs were bundled into their rent bu the owners of those facilities weren’t paying the water bill. So you had people whose water was getting shut off and they were basically becoming homeless. They had no place else to go cause they’re paying their rent and living without water.

ML: And landlords would just not respond to complaints about that?

NS: Basically if you didn’t have water in your home they could condemn your property and if you were a family that had children the state could remove those children from your home and put them into foster care. So, three or four months after the water switch we had the first water distribution station where we collected water and people who needed water could just pick it up. We specifically chose a drop-in daytime homeless shelter, which was the only daytime shelter in the county, and people who were homeless could come in and take a shower and wash their clothes. The city had cut off their water. And so, we felt that by having it there we could also highlight their story and show just how upside down the priorities of the Emergency Manager were.

ML: Were they trying to displace Flint residents for profit? Was that the idea behind turning people’s water off?

NS: It’s embedded in the priorities of the Emergency Manager Law, which is to balance budgets. They’re like “you have a city with debt.” This to me is a very disgusting law because even though we were able to get on the ballot and show that Flint residents like democracy, we don’t like this totally fascist policy, within 45 days the state legislature passed a replacement: a virtually identical version of that law, and then attached a $30,000 referendum so people in Michigan couldn’t use the referendum process to put it on the ballot again because in our state constitution if there is an appropriation attached to a bill then you can’t use the referendum process to reject it.

ML: That is crazy. Can you explain the Emergency Manager thing a little bit more for somebody who might nt fully understand?

NS: We saw the Emergency Manager Law as a tool of voter suppression. It’s a way to use policy and real financial debt to strip away people’s democratic rights. The Emergency Manager is a state appointed bureaucrat that could come to a school district or municipality and when they come in they supplant two branches of your local government — for a school district that’s the elected school board and the superintendent — and for a city that’s the mayor and the city council, so it’s the legislative and executive branches. The Emergency Manager makes determinations of what their job responsibilities are and if they’re going to get any sort of salary.

Instead of the elected officials being accountable to the people who elect them, they basically become employees of the Emergency Manager, who has the power to hire and fire employees without using any sort of civil service guidelines.They could hire employees and determine the salaries themselves. They have the power to sell off public assets without a vote of the people. They also have the power to renegotiate union contracts without a vote of those union members, and they have the power to initiate bankruptcy proceedings. So, we saw this law as the first, at least to my knowledge, way of using financial debt as a way to strip residents of their democracy cause you’re electing people that basically have no power.

ML: Oh my God.

NS: They can’t use the full powers that they are elected to have. This version of the Emergency Manager Law has been used as inspiration for the restructuring of Puerto Rico because Steve W. Rhodes, the person who was at one point in time the Emergency Manager of Detroit public schools and the bankruptcy judge for the Detroit bankruptcy, was used as a consultant in that whole restructuring of Puerto Rico. The other thing about the law and how it was implemented in Michigan was it was only only enacted in majority African American cities and school districts, so there hasn’t been a poor white community yet in the state of Michigan that has lost their democracy.

ML: So who exactly voted to install them?

NS: So, in the state of Michigan we have a Republican legislature. We had a majority Republican state house, a super majority in our senate and all of our top four statewide offices are Republican. Rick Snyder was and still is the Governor of the state. This was part of a series of deals that he used to really attack working families and poor people. The super crazy part is in the state of Michigan we have this thing called revenue sharing because we can’t enact local sales tax. We have a state sales tax and they’re supposed to redistribute those to different municipalities. But because we’re the birthplace of the auto industry and we are a balanced budget state, what the state did was use those things to use the extra funds that they would have given to communities and used it to plug their own budget holes and then turned around and attacked communities because they had holes in their budget. [Laughs]

ML: Oh my God. When they were making this happen were they using coded, or openly racist language about what their intentions were?

NS: As far as the justification, there was language that was dog whistle stuff. And then also because in Michigan we’re very highly racially segregated, they could just use code words and coded language. So they also kind of reinforced some of these racist narratives that have been around since the Reconstruction era like, “Oh, there must be corruption, these communities don’t know how to handle their money!” [Laughs]

ML: So like, “We have to come in and fix it because we are the rich white people who know what to do.”

NS: Yeah, it’s like this paternalistic, “We’re going to send in this person, they’re going to fix your stuff.” And basically what they do is through very regressive policies like selling off pubic assets, increasing fees, doing all of these things — and you know, in Flint before even we had the switch, like, they enacted a garbage fee on everybody and then, like, sold off the sanitation department. [Laughs] Like, after we had to pay for it. Streetlight fees…

ML: Did they just outsource all of the public utilities to private companies?

NS: That’s the goal of the Emergency Manager Law: to take public dollars and transfer it into private hands. I mean, that has happened in other communities. In Flint what they did was they outsourced the sanitation department. They sold off a few public assets. But some of the things, they didn’t say, like, ‘We’re going to sell it,’ because if you’re going to sell it people were supposed to vote on it. So they would lease it. “We’re going to lease this for, like 30 years for, like, $100 or something.” [Both laugh]

ML: God.

NS: It’s just absolutely disgusting. So when those things were happening, there were a very small group of us, probably about 20 people in a population of about 100,000. We were just trying to read all of these things because he could make these decisions happen at a meeting and he would just batch up a bunch of orders. We called them edicts but they were referred to as Executive Orders. We were just trying to read through a massive amount of things written in kind of legalese language, not something just a regular person could, necessarily gravitate towards.

In trying to digest that we were saying “This is really fascism and we don’t really have a say in our government.” It’s hiding under the Emergency Manager Law. Like 75% of the African American local elected officials in this state had their powers taken away from them , stolen from them, and 51% of the African Americans in the state of Michigan lived in a community that had no local democracy.

ML: That is so horrible, I am so sorry. This is all in 2011 still?

NS: Well, it happened over years. In December 2011 Flint was under receivership. We actually had to go through all of this rigamarole to get it on the ballot. It was a fight just to get it on the ballot because we had enough signatures and the state wanted to challenge it because they said that the font was not right? [Laughs] It was just some archaic law. But it was just them trying to use these policies to disenfranchise people and it ended up going to our state supreme court to get on the ballot. We voted it down. In Michigan we do have a lame duck session so the state legislature meets after the election and then breaks for Christmas. Around Christmas is the end of the session so we shoved this through within that last month, and then it got reimplemented in March of 2013 and in Flint the Emergency Manager made the switch to the Flint River, like April 2014. So it just felt like it was an ongoing uphill battle.

ML: Right, like things kept getting worse and you had to learn everything about the archaic laws of a township.

NS: Yes. And these are just regular people who have to go and understand something. You know, we all have our own lives. [Laughs]

ML: Did you start organizing quickly when you realized what was happening?

NS: Yeah. We were always holding meetings and doing demonstrations. We were really trying to educate the public of the dangers of this law and what they did in Flint, which was more slick than what they did in some of the other cities. Someone who wasn’t necessarily engaged with their local government would still see the City Council would still have meetings even though they really had no power.

ML: Right.

NS: City council was broadcast on our public access channel and they were like, “Well, we still have democracy,” because the Emergency Manager was like, ‘Well you still have to answer the phon and take constituent complaints, but you can’t do anything about it.” Like, “You have to give all those complaints to me and then I’ll decide if they’re going to be handled or not.”

ML: Did the City Council push back against that at all or were did they just want to keep their jobs?

NS: Most of them did not and that was the shocking part. We were trying to really push the elected officials — and the Mayor is still going out kissing babies and doing ribbon cutting ceremonies.

ML: Oh man, that sounds just like our Mayor in Los Angeles.

NS: So there was still this veneer that we still were in a functioning democracy but in reality we were really in a dictatorship. So there was a lot of fighting that because they didn’t want to upset the apple cart and they still wanted to be invited to meetings and stuff.

ML: Do you feel like the fascism happened by degrees? Because it seems like they kind of stripped away these individual freedoms one by one. It’s so evil.

NS: I mean, it’s super crazy because we would tell people “Just read the fucking law. Just read it, it will tell you everything. You don’t have to take our word for it, just read it.” But then you have people who are antagonists, so to speak, people who were formerly elected officials. It’s just weird how people rationalize stuff, cause they’re like, “It’s not going to be that bad, we just have to get through this together. It’s not as bad as you say.” Another thing that they did here that was different than in some of the other cities is they all had, like, Flint connections. So people were basing those relationships that they built with them before they were the face of fascism on how they were going to behave in that office. So, it’s just how people are like, “Well, I know this person, so they’re not going to fuck me over.”

ML: It also shows you that some people have such a strong belief in systems that even when the system is blatantly not functioning, they’re very afraid to be like, “This isn’t working.” You know?

NS: Yeah, and that was further reinforce after they switched the water because the water was different everywhere. Like, how it came out of people’s taps, it was different everywhere. For some people, the water was clear, it had no odor. Some people, the water was clear, it had an odor. Some people, their water was just discolored. Some people had grit in their water. And then the other thing was people made the assumption that what was coming out of their tap was the same as everybody else’s.

ML: And you were organizing throughout all of this.

NS: We had the Democracy Defense League which is a grassroots organization. Immediately after the switch, you had people whose water was coming out all crazy. I was working from home. at that point and depending on the time of day my water would present in different ways.

ML: Oh my god.

NS: It would smell like an open sore, it would look like straight up Hennessy or chicken broth. It just stunk, and it was totally crazy. You had people spontaneously going down to city council because they were still meeting even though they had no power. So they would be like, “We’re going to call the meeting to order. We’re gonna do public comment.”

ML: They have to take all the complaints but then the person who’s actually responsible is not accountable for anything. City council can’t do anything.

NS: The Emergency Manager just has to report to the Governor or the Department of Treasury. He doesn’t have to report to anybody else.

ML: What was the supposed emergency?

NS: Financial debt. So, the city was I think it was 15 million dollars in debt and that triggered stripping of democracy and making all these decisions because everything was undergirded by this zeal to balance a budget.

ML: Right, and they can use the budget as the excuse to criminalize poverty.

NS: Yeah and we’re one of the poorest cities in the country that continues to pay one of the highest water bills in the country. It was crazy. Different people were kind of actors, like the media. We’d raise these questions like, “Well, why is our water brown?” and then it would be a superficial article in our local newspaper. We have a local newspaper called the Flint Journal but it’s not a daily. It posts articles online, but it prints four days a week. And so we would try to kind of fight back. There were these different narrative conflicts but they were never like “We need to actually do something about it.”

ML: When did national media start showing up?

NS: I would say the media blackout went away, for the most part, when we had to elect another mayor and as part of her campaign promise she said, “If I’m elected I’m going to declare a State of Emergency based on what’s happening” with the lead in the water. She was supportive of getting our water tested. She declared the State of Emergency because the state’s response was not what we needed. We were organizing meetings and trying to figure out what our collective action should be.

We eventually formed a coalition to file an injunction to try to get the state to force us back to Detroit’s water because we were like, “Look, this Flint water’s not working out, all this shit’s happening. None of these things were happening when we were on the Detroit system.” And then the city council — which still had no power — passed a resolution saying we need to go back to the Detroit water system and the Emergency Manager sent the letter to the Department of Treasury and they basically said, “That’s inconceivable because that’s going to cost too much money, so we’re not going to do anything.” So we were like, “I guess the courts are our only option.”

And as we were doing that, eventually the coalition we had formed to file the injunction was approached by Curt Guyette from the ACLU. He was trying to feel us out to see if we wanted to do broader testing, because there were some people getting tests back from the state for lead levels that were astronomical.

ML: Yeah.

NS: Like, LeeAnne Walters — she was getting horrific numbers and the state’s response was “She’s just an outlier, there’s not a widespread problem, it’s just her house.” And there were other people that that was the response, like, “It’s just your house. It’s just your house. It’s not a widespread problem”

ML: So they’re gas lighting everybody and being like “It’s fine. Keep using it.”

NS: Yeah, just gas lighting everybody. So we were having conversations with civil engineer] Marc Edwards’ team and eventually we designed a process of how we’re going to recruit folks to get their water tested. Just so people could know the truth of what’s in their water. That’s all we were looking for. And then, you know, there was a widespread problem in those 300 tests.

But the state’s response to Marc Edwards was basically like, “You just tried to find lead, you’re just a trouble maker. You’re trying to bamboozle people.” And then when Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha partnered with Marc Edwards to see where they tested from. So she was finding similarities to what he was testing and what was being reported to our state health department — and the state’s response was “She doesn’t know how to read.” [Laughs]

ML: Oh my God.

NS: “She doesn’t know how to read those tables” There’s a health reporter from the Detroit free press who was like, “Well, I just want to look at the data.’ And the state was like, “Oh perfect, now you’re going to actually have the truth out here.” And she looked at the data and was like, “Well, actually Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha was right, y’all were wrong.” [Laughs] And, you know, some of these things kind of all happened at the same time — so October 1 —

ML: What year was that?

NS: October 1, 2015. Our county — Genesee County — health department had voted on a pubic health emergency and that pushed the state to switch us back to Detroit. First of all, they were like, “O.K. you do have lead, we’re just going to give you these filters, and then after this new pipeline is build you’ll be fine.” So, it wasn’t “We’re going to switch you back to a safe drinking water source” And then there was the moment in the middle of October where we finally did go back to the Detroit water, but by that point the damage was done. “You’re just going to give us some filters? Like, what the fuck?”

ML: Right. “We privately partnered with a filter company.”

NS: So there’s a grocery store chain here called Meijer and the family are big donors to the Republican party. They’re like, “We’re going to hand out these filters. We’re going to donate these filters and help y’all out.”

ML: Oh man.

NS: In November we elected a new mayor because the water crisis was the driving factor of their campaign. And the incumbent mayor was lockstep saying, like, “There’s nothing wrong with the water, it’s safe.” He went on our local news and drunk some water. [Laughs]

ML: Oh God. Did the water look cloudy or was it like preselected water?

NS: The crazy part is the TV studio where it was filmed at had all new infrastructure. [Laughs] Like it was a brand new building. So this is not what people are facing in their homes.

ML: Oh my God.

NS: So finally we elected a mayor and the state really didn’t do anything but say “We’re going to have these filters and you have to go get them at a place that hands out federal commodities. If you want filters then you have to go pick them up at this desolate warehouse.

In December 2015 our mayor declared a State of Emergency based on the lead contamination. She did a press conference at 2:00 , by 4:00 it was on CNN, by 9:00 that night she was on Rachel Maddow. That really paved the way for it becoming international news. But through several levels of gas lighting by different people at the state level and other folks — like, it was very difficult.

ML: Did it feel good to have other people finally affirm in public that it was really happening?

NS: Yes, I was so excited. In January 2016 the state finally did a Declaration of Emergency and then about three weeks later the federal government did a Declaration of Emergency, and we’re like, “Great, now everybody knows about it. We’re finally going to get the reparations that we deserve!” And then it was like “Oh hell no, you’re not, because the states are asshats.”

ML: Oh man.

NS: So, the state activated the National Guard and then it was very disgusting because they were mandating that people had to show a photo ID to get a case of donated water that celebrities were sending.

ML: That’s horrible.

NS: They had them at fire stations and the National Guard are in their full regalia. It’s like well, you didn’t need an ID to get poisoned, but now I have to show an ID to get one case of water? I posted something about it on my social media that ended up going viral and they ended up cancelling it.

We found out in January 2016 that they didn’t have any materials around the Declaration of Emergency in any language other than English so the undocumented Spanish speaking community, they didn’t know it was a crisis. They found out about it basically when it became international news. In late January we did a state-wide call — if you know how to speak Spanish, come to Flint because we need to go door to door and tell people to not drink the water and to not boil the water because you can not get rid of lead by boiling the water, you’re actually concentrating it because it’s metal —

ML: Oh my God.

NS: — so as you’re boiling off the water vapor, you’re concentrating it. And the first water contamination we were finding, even before we knew about lead, was total trihalomethanes or TTHM which is a chlorination byproduct, because the Emergency Manager had laid off a bunch of the people that worked at the Water Department.

ML: Oh God.

NS: Right before the switch we had a water department using the treatment plant full time and they were woefully understaffed. All of these e-coli outbreaks were happening and to stop that they were dumping in chlorine and stuff. With the total trihalomethanes, if you boil the water or if it’s hot water, it’s six times more deadly. because you are inhaling it through the steam and then legionella — that’s through the steam — so, you know, we were trying to inform the public to not boil the water. And an organization based in Detroit translated the materials into Spanish so we could go speak to folks.

It just became clear to me — the state is still using this to abuse people through disaster capitalism. The sheriff was using people on work release in the county jail to deliver water door to door, and also serving warrants on people.

ML: I was looking at your Instagram and you posted a meme about the water crisis where you compared it to Dune, that I really liked. Could you explain that for someone who might not know what Dune is exactly?

NS: Oh my gosh — I was just talking about this. Dune is the classic sci-fi series by Frank Herbert. It’s about a stagnant society that’s on the edge of collapse. There’s a planet called Arakis, or Dune where the people aren’t considered important, but it’s the only place that produces the most important thing in the universe, called “the spice” or Melange. Melange has anti-geriatric properties and people can use it to see the future. Dune’s inhabitants are called Fremen. The rest of the universe just sees them as these illiterate people. Because they live on Dune, a desert planet, water is the most important thing to them. Not spice. They wear “stillsuits” that really reclaim everything related to water, because water is the center of their society.

So this is drawing comparisons to Michigan. We’re a peninsula. We’re surrounded by 20% of the world’s fresh water and we have Nestle that is pumping water for cheaper than what Flint residents individually pay for water every month. So, Nestle is pumping 400 million gallons of water for like $200 a year. In Flint, we’re paying $200-$300 a month for water that has poisoned us and has destroyed our homes. And we’re surrounded by this water, we need to be stewards of the water. We need to have some of those Fremen ideologies where water is the most important thing to our survival — because we can only live three days without water and if we’re poisoning the water then we’re not going to be able to survive.

ML: Right, like humans can’t survive on money. They need water to live. So bring me up to date on what is going on now.

NS: It’s been years since we’ve had, clean, safe, water. We’re still struggling here in Flint because for the most part the cameras have gone away and we’re still living our days with bottled water, because even though there has been some service line replacement, our homes have been destroyed, our bodies have been destroyed.

The state right now is seeking to absolve themselves from accountability around this crisis because they ‘re trying to create this narrative that residents were just exposed to lead. If somebody’s exposed to something, it could be interpreted as being unintentional, but I mean, the state was actively involved in poisoning us and actively involved in covering it up.

ML: And they’re still disavowing all responsibility for it?

NS: Yeah, because even though there’s a couple of class action civil lawsuits around some of the damages and what’s going to happen to people’s health long term? And even though, we’ve kind of reframed some of the national narratives to say “Yes you can have lead exposure through water.” There are antiquated policies at the federal level that mean people are still at risk. Right now Detroit public schools have lead in their water. There’ve been several school districts across the country that have had lead in their water but the EPA does not mandate for testing for lead in school. So there’s still like, kids being poisoned by drinking water in school.

ML: That’s insane.

NS: We need to change on the national level. As an activist, someone who has lived through this crisis and is still living through it, I have irreparable damage from drinking this lead tainted water and that’s something I don’t want to happen to any other person on the face of this planet.

We don’t want another Flint to happen. That’s what gets me up in the morning to go to work and continue to fight for the justice and reparations that we deserve for this, because none of the solutions that have been implemented were driven by Flint residents. It’s still this paternalistic mindset of “This is what we feel you need” without asking us, which is further disrespect. [Laughs]

ML: Right. And it’s all temporary solutions to a problem that they created instead of a real solution.

NS: Yeah, and the real solution is we need investment in infrastructure.

ML: Yeah.

NS: That’s what we need. We need it in Flint, we need it in Michigan, and we need it across the country, because nobody thinks about the water that comes out of our tap unless it’s looking brown like chocolate and smells like rotten eggs. But lead and some of these other chemicals, they’re odorless, they’re colorless, they’re tasteless — so we don’t know what we’re ingesting.

ML: Yeah. And people deserve to know and deserve to have clean water and, you know, electricity and basic things.

NS: The United Nations said that nobody’s water should be shut off due to inability to pay. We need water to survive. Water is a human right and everybody deserves clean, fresh, accessible, affordable, water. And it shouldn’t be like, “If you can’t afford it you just deserve to die.” I’m a sci-fi nut and I’m just waiting for when they’re going to try to charge us to breathe air.

ML: Oh totally.

NS: I don’t know if it’ll happen in my lifetime but it feels like the trajectory.

Ml: That’ll happen when they try to colonize Mars. What did you make of Elon Musk claiming he was going to solve the Flint crisis?

NS: For me it felt like I’m tired of white male saviors.

ML: Totally.

NS: It felt really colonialist to me.

ML: Oh yeah. And because he’s a white South African.

NS: “Oh I know the solution without even asking people.” That just feels weird and is the antithesis of how I live my life.

ML: My editor was saying she feels like some people would be surprised to realize that this was happening under the Obama administration because obviously America is in a very fascist place right now. You must have felt like a Cassandra in Flint being like, “Oh I see what’s happening and it’s not good.”

NS: I mean it’s horrible. We never got a Disaster Declaration under the Obama administration and we damn sure won’t get one under the Trump administration. But when it’s a Disaster Declaration you have the federal agencies taking the lead, and under an Emergency Declaration it’s still the state agencies who are responsible for poisoning us. We have two people that are still working for state agencies on trial for manslaughter and they’re still getting a check and Michigan taxpayers are paying their legal fees. In many ways it feels like you’re raped and the state is your rapist. They’re controlling the criminal justice system so you don’t really get the justice that you deserve.

With the Obama administration, he deported more people than any other President ever. When he came to Flint, it felt like he minimized the plight of Flint residents. I was very excited at first when he came. I worked for the campaign in 2008. Michael Moore’s movie Fahrenheit 11/9 has that scene of when Obama drank the water to prove it was fine. There was an audible gasp in the crowd, like, “Why would you do that?” So that was very disheartening.

ML: Yikes.

NS: Yeah, just basically making light of “Hey, I was probably exposed to lead and I’m fine.” I’m like, “Well, if you’d had this level of lead exposure, you probably wouldn’t have been President Barack Obama, you would have been janitor Barack Obama.” It’s like saying “Well, seatbelts — you’re fine without wearing a seatbelt, that doesn’t really do too much.” It’s like, “Well, tell that to all the people who fucking died. Like, they’re dead. [Laughs] Tell it to the families of the people whose family members died because they weren’t wearing a seatbelt.” I guess in olden times when there weren’t seatbelts in cars, people died all the damn time.

ML: That’s why Ralph Nader wrote that book, Unsafe at Any Speed. That’s the only reason they put seatbelts in cars is cause Ralph Nader shamed everybody.

NS: Yeah, it’s crazy. Now, even if you’re in a serious accident you’re able to survive because you’re not ejected.

ML: So they didn’t come in at the federal level but then, you look at something like Katrina, where they obviously super botched the response to that. And because the way that cities are built is, like racist and segregated on purpose, they just sort of demonstrate where their priorities are and it’s disgusting.

NS: People claim ‘We’re the greatest country on earth.” But we’re not investing in people on so many levels. So what defines greatness is that you can bomb somebody to the ice age? Is that how greatness is defined? Like, yeah, we have all this military prowess but we have 100,000 people who’ve been poisoned by their government living in Flint.

ML: How did Michigan go into debt?

NS: A lot of structural reforms that need to happen at the state level are very unpopular. We have low taxes and a lot of stuff is kind of beholden on the auto industry so when the American auto industry jumped off the cliff and then we had the housing crisis and all these things. Folks just continue to kick cans down the road cause they don’t want to deal with it because they’ll be unpopular. There was this nonpartisan magazine that did an investigation and found that if the state had continued to do revenue sharing at the level that they did in the past, you wouldn’t have these cities in debt. So you wouldn’t need an Emergency Manager Law. The other driving force of this law wa that they wanted to stop cities from going into bankruptcy and they wanted to maintain their bond rating. They wanted to still present well to Wall Street and the bond holders.

ML: So they’re functioning like a company and not like a governing thing.

NS: Our Governor — Governor Snyder — in many ways is like Michigan’s version of Donald Trump. Not as bombastic as him. But, you know, he’s a failed businessman and he came in saying he wanted to run government like a business and then bending over backwards to give corporations tax breaks but it’s on the backs of poor people.

So, the driving motivator is, like, “Well, the bond holders are going to get paid on time and in full, and damn everybody else,” because the Emergency Manager’s not required to take in their decision making matrix — like, taking into account public health or quality of life.

ML: Yeah. They just care about profits.

NS: They make decisions based on balanced budgets. Like, “We don’t care if you’re sick, that you’re poor, that you’ve been poisoned by us. You still need to pay your water bill and if you don’t you’re going to lose your home.”

ML: You were saying too, this is very specifically motivated by racism and it’s terrifying. As a sci-fi fan you must have been like, “What the hell is happening?” Like, it’s purposeful state sanctioned racism.

NS: Yeah, because trying to imagine what it was like living with de facto segregation — it’s like, I don’t know, I’ve never lived through that — but there’s all these public health studies that show basically, especially in hyper segregated places, your zip code determines your health outcomes.

Layering it into this conversation — your zip code determines your access to democracy. Here with the water crisis, your zip code determines whether you’re poisoned or not. If we had full access to democracy we wouldn’t have been poisoned, but the state came in and took away our democracy and created kind of like a second class citizenship with the different communities and school districts that were under emergency management.

ML: It’s a war on the poor but very specifically not on the white poor. It just seems so blatant.

NS: Yeah.

ML: Do do you feel like there’s any chance for systemic reform or do you think it’s just broken?

NS: The Emergency Manager Law is still on the books. It hasn’t been implemented again, but it’s still on the books. Like, currently there’s not officially a city that is under the Emergency Manager Law even though there are all these different — but it’s still lurking, kind of like an ogre. [Laughs]

That’s the scary part because even though we have our gubernatorial elections and fortunately Snyder has been term limited out so he won’t be in office anymore, it’s just tough. Even though you have people that may say, “Oh we’re not going to implement it,” it’s like, “No, we need to get rid of the law. Like, you may not do it but who’s to say what the next person is going to believe?” We need to get rid of it here in Michigan and we have to make sure that this isn’t exported to other communities across the country.

ML: Right, this could happen anywhere if it could happen here.

NS: Michigan is the birthplace of the auto industry. With unionization, with the United Auto Workers, we built the middle class. In the 50’s, Flint had one of the highest per capita incomes in the country and now look at it. 60 -70 years later you got 100,000 people who’ve been poisoned. Even though I continue to tell my story, I want to make sure that it’s being used to create actual systemic change and not disaster porn or trauma porn.

ML: Yeah, or superficial change, like throwing water bottles at it.

NS: Yeah, the water bottles — that wasn’t something that the activists wanted. We wanted the Army Corps engineers to come in and actually dig up the pipes and give us new pipes. Not give money to corporations like Nestle and Coca Cola with bottled waters, which is just creating more plastic and propping up petroleum. So, we didn’t want that.

Nayyirah Shariff is an activist and the director of Flint Rising

Molly Lambert is a writer in Los Angeles and organizer with NOlympics LA