What the Eyes Don't See
I devoured Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha’s What the Eyes Don’t See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City (2018), which is not typical of my nonfiction reading. The author, Dr. Mona, is the woman who found scientific proof that Flint’s water was indeed toxic; through her position as the head of the pediatric residency at Flint’s Hurley Medical Center, she was able to access blood-lead levels of Flint’s children. Her courage and tenacity, her family’s background and her long-established love of social and environmental justice primed her to step out as a leader for Flint. This book is her story.
Beginning with the book’s epigraph (a quote from Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax), Dr. Mona’s articulation of how she uncovered the blood-lead levels of Flint’s most vulnerable population—its young children—grabbed me tightly and didn’t let me go until I had completed its final sentence. She blends her personal stories with the tragedy of Flint’s water crisis; the story of her family’s experience as Iraqi immigrants to Michigan, the story of the historical activist figures who inspire her, and the story of how Dr. Mona came to know and research the Flint water’s lead contamination come together in this book. By including so much, I found myself learning about not only Flint, its history and its water, but also the history of environmental justice activism, the history of twentieth-century Iraq, among other things.
This book tells of two governments which fail their people. One many Americans can easily swallow, and one which challenges our assumptions about the strength and credibility of democratic government here in the US. What the Eyes Don’t See reminds its reader of the genocide and reign of terror under Iraq’s Ba’athist regime of Saddam Hussein; it also examines how the state of Michigan and the federal government failed to intervene when people first questioned the quality of Flint’s water. I, for example, didn’t know that in our country if a city’s budget isn’t balanced, some states (like Michigan) allow the governor to suspend the mayor’s work and put a governor-appointed manager in place. This had happened to Flint, and as a result, representative democracy no longer existed on a local level. Perhaps, if that would have been otherwise, Flint’s water crisis would not have gone ignored for so long; perhaps it would have made little difference. There is no doubt that the many layers of government in place to protect citizens failed their mission and ignored, even covered up, a long-term crisis.
There were many moments in this book that made me beyond angry. I found myself looking at the tap water from which my family drinks differently. I questioned the basic safety and security so many Americans take for granted. And, like a growing number of disconcerting moves away from democracy and towards oligarchy that I have witnessed in my adult life, this story reveals a deeply troubling instance of American democracy on the wane. Often the question of Flint’s water safety seemed less important than the question of monetary bottom lines; once the decision was made to change Flint’s water supply (a financial decision), the powers that be refused to acknowledge any problems, probably because of the fiscal impact such problems would have. In other words, money weighed more than human safety; and, of course, the fact that the human population in question was poor and often black is hard to ignore. As Dr. Mona suggests, this sort of water crisis would never have gone on in one of Michigan’s wealthier communities.
What I appreciated most about What the Eyes Don’t See beyond the fact that it tells Flint’s story, is that Dr. Mona responds to the Flint crisis not with abject defeatism, but with hope. Her reports proved that unlike the national trends of blood-lead levels in decline, the youngest population of Flint experienced an increase in their blood-lead levels. Once these findings became public, and the state consequently stopped trying to fight the science, Dr. Mona chose to pursue resilience as the cure to this additional (and totally unnecessary) toxic stress. And so, even though the residents of Flint still don’t have safe drinking water all these years later, there are excellent systems in place to mitigate the effects of the (many) environmental injustices to which Flint citizens have been victim. This model of resilience-building is so moving and one from which I hope other cities will find inspiration.
What the Eyes Don’t See is the story of one woman who found herself in the midst of a terrible tragedy with the network and professional ability to make a difference, but it is also her very personal story of dealing with that tragedy and sorting through all the things that led to that moment and enabled her to be the one to take a stand. It is both inspiring and hopeful as it empowers all of us to ask questions and be persistent when things don’t seem right. This book inspires its reader to not only be more knowledgeable, but to be better advocates of social justice.
A Few Great Passages:
“[T]his is also a story about the deeper crises we are facing right now in our country: a breakdown in democracy; the disintegration of critical infrastructure dues to inequality and austerity; environmental injustice that disproportionately affects the poor and black; the abandonment of civic responsibility and our deep obligations as human beings to care and provide for one another” (13).
“We may not be able to five every child a happy, healthy, and safe childhood—though we should keep trying. But we can mitigate the effects of adversity and toxic stress by building resilience. It’s the key to development, the deciding factor between a child who learns to cope and thrive and one who never makes it to a healthy or productive adulthood. Resilience isn’t something you have or don’t have. It’s learned. While the stress hormone response in a child overloads the child’s system, it can reset to normal if she is soothed by caring adults in a nurturing, stable environment and community. The brain can heal” (25)
“Politics is about how we treat one another, how we sustain and share our common spaces and our environment. When people are excluded from politics, they have no say in the common space, no sharing of common resources. People may think of this as benign neglect, but it’s isn’t benign. It is malignant—and intentional” (93).
“Before industrialization, children rarely had lead in their bodies. It was due only to industrial greed and convenience that it was mined and released into the environment. Even the ancient Romans suspected it was dangerous, even deadly, but we in the modern age allowed it—we looked the other way and let convenience drive policy” (155).
“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 educational 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” (197).
“Challenging injustice means standing up for the weak, the / vulnerable, the abused, and the forgotten—be it in health, employment, education, or the environment. It means being vigilant on behalf of people who are treated as pariahs and scapegoats, populations that are dehumanized, displaced, and treated as disposable. It means fighting oppression at every opportunity—no matter the place or country” (219-220).
“I was beginning to see that my family’s saga of loss and dislocation had given me my fight—my passion and urgency” (247).
“The world shouldn’t be comprised of people in boxes, minding their own business. It should be full of people raising their voices, / using their power and presence, standing up for what’s right. Minding one another’s business” (252-253).
“Lead was only one of many developmental obstacles that our children faced. We had to frame their population-wide lead exposure, the entire trauma of the water crisis, as an additional toxic stress to a community already rattled with toxic stresses. This would give us a playbook of sorts. Our knowledge of the plasticity of the brain, its ability to rebound despite adversity, gave us hope. There were things we could do, interventions that were known to mitigate toxic stress. We had a scale we could tip. The burgeoning neuroscience in this area gave us the answer: treatment was to build resilience” (271).
“We needed what experts were now calling an ‘ecobiodevelopmental’ approach, with short-term, intermediate, and long-term interventions that touched every level of a child’s life. Science had been ignored and denied in Flint, but it was science that was critical to uncovering the crisis. Our science spoke truth to power. And now I wanted the science of child development to lead the way in our recovery” (271).
“[I]t was with hope—and a commitment to justice—that MSU and Hurley stood beside me and helped me create something new: a model public health program to bring hope and healing to Flint” (302).
“Flint falls right into the American narrative of cheapening black life. White America may not have seen the common thread between Flint history and these tragedies, but black America saw it immediately. That the blood of African-American children was unnecessarily and callously laced with lead speaks in the same rhythm as Black Lives Matter, a movement also born from the blood of innocent African Americans” (308).
“The state wouldn’t stop lying until somebody came along to prove that real harm was being done to kids. Then the house of cards fell” (318).
Bibliography:
Hanna-Attisha, Mona. What the Eyes Don’t See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City. New York: One World, 2018.
