Tick, Tock, Tick Tock: Flint’s Disposable Poor Children

Release Date: March 18, 2016 

America’s political blame game continues while children continue to suffer life impairing harm. The nation was riveted this week as Michigan Governor Rick Snyder and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Chief Gina McCarthy were grilled over the shameful inaction on the Flint, Michigan water crisis by members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. There is plenty of blame to go around. But where is the action for the children and families of Flint? Every day we delay the damage to children and their families grows. While Congressional members were calling for accountability and resignations, water in Flint was being tested again. Recent testing at one home in Flint found lead poisoning levels of 11,846 parts per billion. When 5,000 parts per billion is considered hazardous waste, why are we wasting time apportioning blame before the problem is fixed and the poor children and families of Flint have fresh, clean water to drink and cook with and bathe in? Tick, tock, tick tock.

During the months following the governor-appointed emergency manager's April 2014 reckless decision to switch its water supply from Lake Huron and Detroit’s system to the Flint River corrosive water as a cost-saving measure – never mind its health and life threatening impact on the children and citizens of Flint – and the delayed decision to tell residents to stop drinking the water in October 2015, the crisis in Flint has too many shameful moments to recount at so many levels. Authorities disregarded or hid evidence and misled residents who could clearly see, taste, and smell the problem for themselves and put the city’s financial concerns ahead of concerns for child and adult life and well-being. The revelation that General Motors stopped using Flint’s water in its manufacturing plant in October 2014 and told the city it was too corrosive for its car parts was a full year before authorities admitted and warned people not to drink, cook with, or bathe in it. Tick, tock, tick tock, tick tock.

The state’s quiet January 2015 late action to provide bottled water just for its Flint employees was 10 months before children and families were warned. The EPA failed to act for months after it knew that lack of corrosion controls in the city’s water supply could put residents at risk of lead poisoning. Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality failed to heed EPA’s private warnings for months that corrosion controls were needed to prevent a risk to public health. A state-employed nurse reportedly dismissively told a Flint mother whose son was diagnosed with an elevated blood lead level: “It is just a few IQ points. ... It is not the end of the world.” No child in America is disposable. Tick, tock, tick tock, tick tock.

No blood lead level is safe. That’s what the group of doctors led by Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha knew when they raised concerns about elevated lead levels they saw in Flint’s children.

Lead exposure, through water, paint, soil, or other environmental sources is a threat far beyond Flint. The EPA has called it the most serious environmental health hazard for children. An estimated 535,000 U.S. children between one and five years old suffer from lead poisoning. An estimated 24 million housing units have deteriorated lead paint and elevated levels of lead-contaminated house dust. Over 40 percent of the 26 states and District of Columbia that reported childhood blood lead level results to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) national database have higher rates of lead poisoning among children than Flint. Nearly half of the states did not participate in this voluntary reporting preventing the true measure of the lead problem in America. Tick, tock, tick tock, tick tock.

Lead causes biological and neurological damage linked to brain damage, learning disabilities, behavioral problems, developmental delays, academic failure, juvenile delinquency, high blood pressure and death. Pregnant women, babies, and young children are especially vulnerable because of developing child brains and nervous systems. Tick, tock, tick tock, tick tock.

For the Flint children exposed to lead including 9,000 preschoolers under 6 local, state and federal help are needed right now. While lead poisoning is irreversible, some steps can decrease its effects. Michigan’s Governor Snyder failed horribly in his response to the crisis, but has now proposed funding for safe drinking water, food and nutrition, physical, social and educational enrichment programs, and water bill relief. Earlier this month, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) approved Governor Snyder’s request for a Medicaid and CHIP waiver from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to raise income eligibility standards to enable 15,000 more pregnant women and children in Flint to receive program benefits. Approximately 30,000 current Medicaid beneficiaries in the area also are now eligible for expanded services under this new waiver agreement. Thanks to a letter from Michigan Senators Gary Peters and Debbie Stabenow and Representative Dan Kildee, HHS has also expanded funding to enable Flint’s Head Start and Early Head Start programs to serve every eligible child. These programs will now provide comprehensive early learning, health, and family well-being services to 1,011 Head Start children and 166 Early Head Start children in the city of Flint.

I and so many others are beyond angry that the lead in the water in Flint would have been addressed much more quickly if the majority of the child victims had not been poor and Black. In Flint 56 percent of the population is Black and 60 percent of its children live in poverty. Even though important progress has been made over the years in reducing lead levels in the U.S., Black children remain disproportionately at risk. A 2013 CDC study showed that twice as many Black as White children had elevated blood levels.

Children and families everywhere would benefit immediately from stronger, clearer and consistent national standards for measuring, monitoring, and reducing lead exposure that are enforced. The incalculable child harm from lead poisoning should be reason enough to act now with great urgency and persistence. And the nation’s bottom line would benefit too. Every dollar invested to decrease lead hazards yields an estimated return of $17:1 to $221:1. These cost benefits exceed the return on vaccines long considered one of the most cost-effective public health interventions.

These much needed and overdue actions for children that so many callous public officials failed to take are urgently needed today. Flint’s poor children, sacrificial canaries in the coal mine, must be helped and all children in America must be prevented from suffering their fate. No child in America is disposable. A child has only one life to live and it is today. Tick, tock, tick tock, tick tock.

America, I Am You

Release Date: March 11, 2016 

“I am an insider serving a life and 20 year sentence at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution. Twenty-six years ago I was rendered infamous by the State of Tennessee through a judicial process of ‘thingafication,’ replacing my identity with a capitalistic signature, 133881. Since then, at 19 years old, my journey towards humanization has been a struggle . . . to know that you are more than a number and not have the support of your family or community environment to prove otherwise can be depressing.”

America’s Cradle to Prison Pipeline™ is a toxic cocktail of poverty, illiteracy, racial disparities, violence and massive incarceration which sentences millions of children of color to social and economic death. Once young people have entered the prison pipeline, to many people they become invisible, just a statistic.

Rahim’s pipeline to prison started during a chaotic childhood in poverty and a struggling family. His mother had given birth twice as a teen before Rahim was born. Rahim's father was never part of his life. His mother worked in a warehouse for minimum wage and struggled to keep food on the table and clothes on her children's backs while refusing government assistance — but Rahim says that was a cost later paid by hungry children who started a life of crime in order to eat and dress like their peers. Rahim was eventually expelled from high school, received a juvenile sentence for auto theft and burglary and was sent to a youth detention center. Less than a year after his release he was charged with felony murder after his gun went off during a robbery and a bullet ricocheted off the floor and killed an employee. He was sent to jail and received a life and 20 year sentence.

Three of his brothers have been his cellmates and he has been locked up with a total of five siblings at two different prisons. He writes about his childhood in verse: 

Who Am I? Who am I?
Society doesn't seem to know . . .
You see us in the "now", our prison condition
Blind to the facts of our mental afflictions
Past decisions made before our 15 second/mindless/crime spree/felony convictions.
The money/the honeys/the madness/materialistic sadness
Thirteen brothers/five sisters, seriously drastic.
Who am I, Who am I?
Choking in poverty, the pain runs deep you see . . .
Who am I, Who am I?
My eyes, my ears, my peers; no difference: 5, 10, 15 to 30 years in prison.
Environmental voices in me, our life and death choices to be, anger and stress forcing me,
Public defenders coercing me, my family and friends divorcing me.
Crying shame, born with crime in my veins . . .
still begging for a new beginning.

In prison, “I was determined to survive, upset with myself, angry at the system, and filled with guilt. From jail to prison, I was stripped of my civilian clothing, a symbol that I was no longer fit to be human. My sadness, remorse, and vulnerability I masked with a ‘mean-mug,’ the look of a cold-hearted convict. Old-heads in prison gave me the game, the knowledge of how to live and avoid death.” Eventually Rahim started to realize he was more than the way the system had defined him. “After all the growing pains of becoming a man in prison, disciplinary reports, fights, selling drugs, and rebelling in any way that I could to resist the system, I decided to change.”

Rahim got a chance to participate in a program called SALT: Schools for Alternative Learning and Transformation, which brings college students together with incarcerated men and women to study as peers in college courses and workshops behind prison walls. It was its own kind of new beginning and for Rahim “there was no looking back.” He became a leader in the program, facilitating classes and developing community education sessions and mentoring other “inside” students. “My learning has forced me to contend with the realities of American society. I wasn’t born a number . . . yet I can’t deny that numbers surround me. More than 2,200,000 fill the jails and prisons across the U.S.A. Million dollar contracts are given to private companies to monopolize the market of the prison industrial complex . . .  I know that I’m more than a number because numbers can’t feel, love, breathe or think for themselves. I have dreams, goals, and ambitions.”

Last June, Rahim was released from prison and recently celebrated his 45th birthday — his first outside a prison in 26 years. Rahim received a four-year scholarship to American Baptist College and has become a partner in the Children’s Defense Fund Nashville Organizing Team, speaking locally and nationally and facilitating SALT classes inside a juvenile detention center. He believes “education combined with community equals a peaceful society,” and wants others to believe that they, too, are more than a number — something he never heard as a child, but something he wants to teach other young people as he focuses on helping them become their best selves:

America the Beautiful, America the Great, America, America,
America, It’s not too late.
Who am I? I am you.

America's Back Door

Release Date: March 4, 2016 

The Harvard Gazette has released a series of articles on inequality in America. They describe Harvard University scholars’ efforts across a range of disciplines to identify and understand this nation defining and dividing concern and possible solutions. The first piece in the series opens: “It’s a seemingly nondescript chart, buried in a Harvard Business School (HBS) professor’s academic paper. A rectangle, divided into parts, depicts U.S. wealth for each fifth of the population. But it appears to show only three divisions. The bottom two, representing the accumulated wealth of 124 million people, are so small that they almost don’t even show up. Other charts in other journals illustrate different aspects of American inequality. They might depict income, housing quality, rates of imprisonment, or levels of political influence, but they all look very much the same. Perhaps most damning are those that reflect opportunity — whether involving education, health, race, or gender — because the inequity represented there belies our national identity. America, we believe, is a land where everyone gets a fair start and then rises or falls according to his or her own talent and industry. But if you’re poor, if you’re uneducated, if you’re black, if you’re Hispanic, if you’re a woman, there often is no fair start.”

The article notes that inequality “has become a national buzzword and a political cause célèbre in this election year,” in part because across so many measures it is on the rise. Harvard-trained historian Dr. Carter G. Woodson was focused on a particular aspect of inequality when he founded Negro History Week — the precursor to Black History Month — ninety years ago. Dr. Woodson was especially concerned about the “mis-education” of Black children from their earliest ages — “The thought of the inferiority of the Negro is drilled into him in almost every class he enters and in almost every book he studies” — and the cumulative effects it could have: “When you control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will find his ‘proper place’ and will stay in it. You do not need to send him to the back door. He will go without being told. In fact, if there is no back door, he will cut one for his special benefit. His education makes it necessary.”

Dr. Woodson believed teaching children about Black history and Black accomplishments was a crucial corrective step. We now understand the wisdom behind teaching not just Black children but all children Black history just as we make sure all of our American stories are being told as we prepare our next generations for our multicultural nation and world. Although Black History Month is over, every month should be Black and Native American and Latino and Asian American and women’s and non-propertied men’s history month.

Black History Month has helped infuse more multicultural attention in American education, but there is still a big struggle ahead to ensure children are taught the truth in schools in every subject including history, geography and literature. A misleading McGraw-Hill geography textbook called American slaves “workers from Africa” and the evil slave trade just one of many “patterns of immigration.” We must vigilantly monitor and challenge false history, geography and literature that sugarcoats and mischaracterizes the horrors of slavery, lynchings and institutional racism. As scholars watch American inequality’s continual rise, Black children and other children of color remain disproportionately at risk of inferior status, discrimination and racial disparities in measure after measure. We must challenge anyone training any of our children to go around to the back door — yet too often we are still leaving some children outside it. This must stop.

We should remember that for so many Black children and youths each day in America, there is too little to celebrate:

		3 are killed by guns.
		4 die from accidents.
		19 die in the first year of life.
		86 are arrested for violent crimes.
		90 are arrested for drug crimes.
		148 are born without health insurance.
		153 are born to teen mothers.
		212 are born at low birthweight.
		318 are corporally punished in public schools.
		329 are born into extreme poverty.
		399 are confirmed abused or neglected.
		603 are born into poverty.
		763 drop out of high school.
		1,144 are born to unmarried mothers.
		1,174 are arrested.
		4,529 are suspended from public schools.

Every day in America. We can and must do better and combat systemic, cultural, economic, and educational inequality — hidden and overt. There is no more urgent problem in America than inequality and its many progeny manifested in our education, health, and criminal justice systems and in all aspects of American life. This is the time to face the truth and to do something about our divided nation. We must all change the odds stacked against poor and non-White children so that every child in America has an equal opportunity to achieve and succeed.