- Chichi Izondo, Muhammed Madi and Chelsea Bailey
- Jackson – Mississippi
5 September 2022, 04:33 GMT
Marshall says he has no choice but to drink from contaminated tap water
Marshall lives in west Jackson, Mississippi, a part of the city inhabited by a majority of black and poor citizens. He says he has no other choice but to drink from the tap water, which Jackson residents have been advised to avoid. When the tap is opened, brown water comes out.
He says that the water has been this way for eight months, and that he has no other choice but to drink it.
“Yes, madam, I drink of this water.” He smiles when I ask him if he’s worried. “I will turn 70 later this month,” he replies.
Marshall doesn’t have a car, so he can’t go to sites where the National Guard is distributing clean water. He also has no gas or electricity due to a recent fire in the house next door, which means he can’t boil water to help make it safer.
“It’s seldom [المياه] Clear. Sometimes it is a little lighter, or a little darker. And when I open the bathtub faucet, it’s always mixed with rust at first, and then it gets a little lighter. But every time, rust comes first.
Jackson City Councilman Aaron Banks has lived in the Mississippi capital for most of his life, and now represents a district of more than 90 percent of its black population.
Banks says he believes a devastating combination of crumbling infrastructure and climate change ultimately led to a breakdown in Jackson’s water supply.
picture released, Archyde.com
Volunteers have been distributing bottles of drinking water to the residents of Jackson
In 2020, when temperatures as low as minus zero degrees Celsius shut down the Jackson City desalination plant, Banks says his circuit has been without water for regarding six weeks — the longest in neighboring areas. The city’s infrastructure has found it extremely difficult to adapt ever since.
“Not a month has gone by without a notification telling us that the water is boiling, or the water pressure has gone down or no water at all for the past two years,” Banks says. “.
Time and time once more, Mr. Banks says, those who have to adapt to these circumstances are mainly people of color. The local council member adds that for many years he has seen funds pumped into infrastructure for cities and neighborhoods around Jackson, but no money has been directed to the restoration and modernization of much-needed facilities, including the city’s desalination plant.
“People’s health is secondary to the state,” says Sarina Larson.
It is noteworthy that President Joe Biden’s Historic Infrastructure Plan allocated funds to underserved communities such as Jackson, whose population in 2020 was regarding 163,000. But the funds are earmarked by state lawmakers who, according to Banks, tend to be politically minded and prioritize projects that serve their constituencies rather than focus on tackling the backlog of problems in Jackson.
“We have an antiquated desalination plant that no one has paid attention to in years,” says Professor Edmund Merrim, professor of urban planning and environmental studies at Jackson State University.
“I think the problem is that the response is usually impromptu.”
But Professor Miriam also sees another factor diverting funds away from Jackson’s crumbling infrastructure – racism.
Experts and observers say that what is happening in Jackson, and in other cities such as Flint, Michigan, whose water sources have been contaminated with lead, is a direct legacy of segregation and racial segregation for generations.
“It’s a decades-old, well-entrenched position,” says Ariel King, an attorney and environmental justice advocate.
“I think the history of racial segregation and the refusal to grant mortgages in this country has contributed tremendously to the environmental injustice we are witnessing now.”
The practice of “redlining,” or banks’ refusal to grant mortgages to non-whites, began with the government’s blessing during the 1940s because lending to people of color was seen as too risky.
The program has been going on for more than 40 years, and as a result, according to King, low-income, predominantly black communities have concentrated in areas with polluting industries such as oil refineries, wastewater desalination plants and landfills.
She adds that these areas still exist to this day.
King gives some examples of US regions such as the one that some call the “Cancer Route”. This Mississippi area once housed many of Louisiana’s vast farms, but now contains 150 petrochemical plants and oil refineries.
For decades, the population – the majority of whom is black – has suffered from one of the highest rates of cancer in the country due to pollution.
King says the legacy of that kind of environmental racism, as well as decades of underinvestment in low-income areas, is now playing out in Jackson.
“They can say that there are different factors that lead to flooding, but people would not have found themselves having to live in flood-prone areas if there had not been a practice of denying them mortgages in the first place,” she says.
“So the problem goes back to race and environmental racism every time, unfortunately.”
Sarina Larsson attends law school and lives a few homes from Marshall. She moved to Jackson from Sacramento, and wants to be a public defender. Sarina also blames the area’s problems on the policy of refusing to grant mortgages to blacks.
In her kitchen, there are bowls of different sizes on the floor, which she sets to collect rainwater, and then she uses a water purifier.
“The pipes in Jackson contain lead, so I’ve never had one glass of tap water, and I don’t use it to brush my teeth,” Sarina says.
But she admits that most people here can’t afford the $300 water purifier she bought.
“A water crisis like this only becomes a problem if it affects people of a higher class,” she says. “It continues in Jackson and provides an example. People’s health is secondary to the state.”
“People of color are deprived of basic services,” Imani Olugbala-Aziz says.
We met Imani Ulugbala-Aziz at a local community center, where she and others from the Jackson Cooperation volunteer group distribute bottled water. They ran out in less than half an hour. Emani tells us that there is almost no water in her house.
“It’s a crisis of opinions and values, and there’s a lot of environmental racism going on. We pay our taxes to the government to do what they have to do, but they don’t.”
“We are deprived of basic services. People of color are deprived of basic services. We live in the worst parts of the city just so we can get on with life.”
“We don’t ask for palaces, we just want to live and have natural things like running water, clean water.”
She says the local area has a high rate of homeless, and shops are closed, making it difficult for people to buy water.
“The water boil notification has been active for regarding a month. The water is not suitable for drinking, so what can we do? How do we feed our children, how do we cook and eat?”
Imani says people pay high water bills, unlike people who live in areas with a white majority.
“It’s not something that’s just starting to happen, it’s a situation that gets worse with time and can no longer continue as it is. We are suffering here.”
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