Instructions:
Answer the discussion questions below. The response to each question should be a minimum of 150 words. (It is helpful to post the word count at the end of the response.)
Chapter 14
“As Dr. Reynolds and I walked back to the conference, both of us were fuming. He turned to ask me a question. “Have you heard about the concept of environmental injustice?”
I nodded. “Of course. I studied with Professor Bunyan Bryant.”
More than twenty years ago, back when I was a tree-hugging environmentalist at the University of Michigan’s School of Natural Resources and Environment, the legendary Bunyan Bryant was one of my early mentors. He was a pioneer of the environmental justice (EJ) movement—a movement that looked at environmental and public health issues through the lens of place, race, and poverty. Bryant was a Flint native—with family still there—and focused much of his research and advocacy on the city and its long history of polluting poor and brown neighborhoods. Bryant had even fought lead pollution in Flint decades ago, when a plant that burned lead-painted wood chips was built in a predominantly African-American neighborhood.”
“As an undergrad, I took courses, listened to lectures, and participated in workshops led by Bryant and other EJ academic groundbreakers like his colleague Paul Mohai. Bryant’s work showed me how racial minorities and low-income communities faced a disproportionate share of environmental and public health burdens.
Sitting in those EJ classes, I began to see that the environmental disparities I’d first witnessed in high school weren’t random. The dirty incinerator we had fought so hard wasn’t in Grosse Pointe or Birmingham, affluent suburbs. It was in Madison Heights, one of the poorer communities in our county. Bryant backed up his many examples of environmental injustice with hard-core research, showing how industrial waste, incinerators, trash dumps, and chemical plants were often located in neighborhoods where residents had fewer resources to fight them.”
“Informed by these lessons, I dove into service learning, fieldwork, social justice organizing, and environmental health research. On one spring break, I went to maquiladoras in Mexico, where many of the auto jobs that had fled Michigan went—and saw that they were now troubled by the same pollution, poverty, and labor issues that pockmarked our history in Flint.
Bryant’s work stayed with me as I went off to study medicine and public health—and, eventually, when I came to work in Flint. He was on my mind now more than ever. In lectures, Bryant had specifically called out the persistence of lead in paint and paint dust in black and brown and poor communities as a form of “environmental racism.”
Bryant wasn’t one to dwell on the problems. A central tenet of EJ is that local communities must have control over their environments—and decide whether a pipeline gets a permit, or a wind turbine gets built instead of a natural gas plant. When people have a say, smarter decisions are made—both for the environment and for public health.”
“Our Flint kids,” I said to Dr. Reynolds, “already have higher rates of lead exposure—just like kids in Detroit, Chicago, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. And now on top of all that, they’ve got lead in their water to worry about.”
Lead shifts down the entire bell curve of intelligence, as Dr. Reynolds and I knew, not only adding more people with severely reduced intellectual capacity but also reducing the number of exceptionally gifted people. We knew that lead is more prevalent in poor and minority communities, and thus lead exposure exacerbates our horrible trends in inequality and the too-wide racial education gap. We knew that if you were going to put something in a population to keep people down for generations to come, it would be lead.
“Environmental injustice,” Dr. Reynolds said, shaking his head in disgust.
“I know,” I said. “Some things don’t change.”
Question #1 – P 196-197: This chapter discusses the issue of “environmental injustice” and “environmental racism.” Answer each of these:
Define and explain each of these terms. You do NOT need to have 150 words for these “sub-questions” of question #1.
What examples of environmental injustice and environmental racism are given that could have contributed to the lead pollution in Flint?
How does the higher prevalence of lead in poor communities and communities of color contribute to inequalities?
Chapter 15
“The best thing about being a pediatrician is that caring about kids, speaking for kids, and advocating for kids is an essential part of the job description. At a conference of surgeons or dermatologists, they might have a lunch theme like “malpractice risks” or “how to maximize billing.” But not pediatrics. That’s why I’ve always felt at home in the specialty and with my colleagues. We don’t just treat children’s bodies—we fiercely protect their potential.
Looking over my in-box of emails with Marc, I was starting to think we were not alone. Five hundred miles away from my clinic in Flint, in Blacksburg, Virginia, there was a guy in a very different profession who seemed to care as much as we did.
As the lunch got under way, Dr. Reynolds told the crowd he’d been at home sick the week before, when I’d called to discuss the Flint water. He invited me to explain my findings to the group. With more confidence than I’d had at Thursday night’s board meeting, and armed with more details, I stood and shared my concerns with the pediatricians. We were looking at the data, I said, but preliminary findings were very[…]”
Question #2 – P 201: The author states that pediatricians…”don’t just treat children’s bodies – we fiercely protect their potential.” What do you think the author means by “protecting their potential?” How does this connect to other factors in the book, such as social determinants of health and environmental injustice?
Chapter 16
“MY DAD HAD BEEN AROUND that weekend, we would have played Konkan. We’d have been sitting around the same table, but instead of spending hours on the puzzle, we’d have been dealing out cards and eating fistuq, or pistachios. My dad loves an evening of Konkan. We all do. Elliott, who grew up watching his own dad play the game, can sit for long stretches at the table, hand after hand. Mama Evelyn still comes and plays—and has taught all her great-grandkids the rules of the game, the way she taught Mark and me.
And it’s a truism in the family that, if we play long enough, eventually I will win everybody’s money.
But my dad, Jidu, was still in China working with the auto parts manufacturer. He enjoyed his time there, as well as his second career, post-retirement, making the most of his metallurgy expertise and his engineer’s fascination for problem solving. At sixty-nine, like my mom, he showed no interest in slowing down. Alloys and metals aside, he has lots of passions—for languages, international affairs, and”
“history. He loves research most of all—digging into archives and making new discoveries.
He spent untold hours obsessing over a Persian carpet that had been passed down in my mom’s family, an early 1900s Kerman rug depicting the great leaders of the world. Even when Haji was a boy, the carpet was never on the floor but was hung on a wall, in a place of honor, and featured in family portraits.”
“The rug was a puzzle. Not only did my dad decipher the Farsi key on the border of the rug to identify the historic figures (all men, of course), he worked with art historians and textile scholars to unravel the rug’s origin and secrets. There even was a connection between the rug and Freemasonry and the Knights Templar. It was like The Da Vinci Code for carpets.”
“Next, my dad focused on unlocking our family’s ancestral puzzle—and that became his most successful side project to date. After a lot of persistence, he was able to prove that two family clans from two different villages in northern Iraq—Alqosh and Tel Keppe—had been separated three hundred years ago when one branch left its ancestral home to escape a plague. Over time they lost touch. Any awareness of a relationship vanished. But now, because of my dad’s discovery—which he has given many PowerPoint presentations about—the descendants of the Shekwana and the Kas Shamoun families, literally hundreds of people who have since scattered to every corner of the globe, have connected with cousins they didn’t know they had, including us.
What we never knew, until my dad’s work, was our family’s direct connection to a Nestorian priest named Israel Raba of the Shekwana family. He was born in 1541—my grandfather, twelve generations removed. Israel Raba and his family were famous scribes, known for their poetry and mystical literary work. They lived in an ancient monastery, Rabban Hormizd, just outside Alqosh, where they produced and guarded a library of intricately beautiful and painstakingly illustrated manuscripts.”
Question #3 – This Chapter (and several after) focuses on the work of advocates and specialists. Why do you think the author spends time telling these stories of her family’s history? What connection does it have to her actions during the Flint water crisis?