riotrite:

So I know the crisis with lead poisoning in Flint, MI is bad. I don’t want to downplay how bad it is- many, many children will now grow up with an incredible array of developmental issues, most notably skeletal and neurological, perpetuating cycles of poverty and white supremacy, due to the willful and malicious negligence of people in power.

But it’s not just Flint.

Back in undergrad I was an intern with the public health department in another extremely poor and (overwhelming) majority black city. Specifically I was the intern of the lead poisoning enforcement team, which, at least at the time, consisted of one nurse and me. Our job worked like this: a hospital would get a child whose bloodwork showed the child was already poisoned (lead poisoning damage is permanent and irreparable, by the way, so we were always too late) and they would call us. We would investigate the child’s living situation with a digital camera and a handheld spectrometer and determine where the lead was coming from- lead makes paint more durable so usually it would be exterior trim, doors, windowsills, and radiators. I can actually identify it by sight by the way it peels. Sometimes it would be a local playground or empty lot since the city is built on top of the crumbling remains of failed and unregulated industries. Sometimes it was the water supply of old pipes hadn’t been replaced, but systemic lead poisoning through municipal water wasn’t an issue where I was, so the city and its poisoned children never made national news. I doubt it would have anyway; white America generally ignored us as much as possible.

Anyway, I digress. We would find out where the lead came from and then legally force the owner of the house to renovate to spec. I have been personally yelled at by more than one slumlord for this part of the job.

But more often than we could feel good about, it wasn’t a slumlord who owned the property; it was the child’s grandma or uncle or mom who, if they had enough money to renovate their home, wouldn’t be living where they did anyway. We did lots of community outreach and education, and we were constantly battling the slumlords, but all too often, our job boiled down to enforcing more financial hardships on families who already had one or more poisoned children and didn’t even come close to having the financial means to do anything about it anyway.

Name a bad psychosocial outcome and lead poisoning has been linked to it. Name a non-genetic skeletal or neurological syndrome and prenatal/childhood lead poisoning can precipitate it (this is honestly not that huge of an exaggeration). Essentially, your body mistakes lead ions for calcium and iron ions (mostly), which are absolutely vital building blocks for your body, and uses them for a thousand different wrong purposes, leading to irreversible and tragic damage, especially in children. It’s really horrific in terms of what it can do to a body and to a community. And it’s NOT just in Flint. Poor towns across the U.S. are filled with lead paint, and if there’s any grant money available for homeowners to renovate, it’s usually a drop in the bucket.

So I’m really glad to see people paying attention to the atrocity in Flint, but I also want people to know that this is an epidemic, and it’s specifically an epidemic of people in poverty/people of color. The cycle of poisoning and lack of remediation is caused directly by policies cutting back legal and financial services to the poor and enabling slumlords to dominate neighborhoods and cities with high interest and variable rate mortgages (among other things), and the complicity and corruption of regulatory agencies.

So again, it’s great to see all the righteous indignation directed at Flint. But I suggest you save some of that anger for your own lawmakers and local “real estate entrepreneurs,” because I promise you that lead poisoning is closer to home than you think.