Appeals to bloodthirsty republicans or incapable democrats are quickly dispatched by recognizing the bipartisan ability to ignore Flint victims, and broader appeals to corrupt government oversight in organizations like the MDEQ [Michigan's Department of Environmental Quality] are likewise dispatched by observing the malfunctions of other political oversight bodies and procedures that, were proper attention being paid, could have caught the lead problem before it got out of hand despite any potential corruption or mistakes on the part of the MDEQ. In other words, what the lead pipes reveal as lead pipes is a vast network of societal repression, i.e. exclusion, that cannot be so routinely dismissed. Vast as it is, however, this network is not simply mysterious or overly complex in such a way as to render us helpless before some freak event. Instead, while the toxification of Flint residents is indeed an accident in the qualified sense...it is no accident that the whole impetus for starting on the path to toxicity comes from the demands of finance, nor that a city that earns financial crisis managers is also predominantly inhabited by black persons. As [Paul] Virilio observes, the accident reveals the substance—and the substance of Flint's water infrastructure relies heretofore closeted or seemingly debatable mechanisms of exclusion, namely classism and racism.
Dean Dettloff and Matt Bernico, “Atmoterrorism and Atmodesign in the 21st Century: Mediating Flint’s Water Crisis”
