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Ben Pauli: Democracy and the Flint Water Crisis

• Ben Pouli • Season 3 • Episode 13

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Ben Pauli, a Kettering University Political Science Professor, is a water rights activist. Pauli embedded himself with a group of Flint residents during the Flint Water Crisis. This is the group that brought the tainted Flint drinking water problem to the public's attention. The group also was successful in advocating that government fix the cause of the toxic water problem. 


Professor Pauli discusses the historical activism that helped Flint survive economically and environmentally for almost 100 years. He concludes that Flint has been fighting David vs. Goliath-type battles for generations which helps it survive. Pauli argues that generational activism is an asset to the city's efforts to overcome the economic crisis for the past 40 years. One lasting change resulted in recognizing drinking water as a right in the Flint City Charter. 


Pauli's ethnographical research is done in an academic book, not your typical data-filled one. The book reads like a CIA or police intelligence field analysis of the capability of a group in fostering and accomplishing public policy changes. "Flint Fights Back" is an insightful book and takes an extensive view of the Flint Water Crisis, remarkably different from other books and articles written on the Flint Water Crisis. Most fascinating is Pauli's analysis of the ability of local activists to form an identity and narrative story that sells their cause in the marketplace of public opinion. 

Pauli concludes that Flint is a parable, the canary in the coal mine forewarning for other cities and towns in the United States. Many of whom may catch a glimpse of what their futures may be in years to come. Professor Pauli claims that Flint's activism has sparked change that eventually has taken hold in many other places in the U.S. 


"Flint Fights Back" is a guide for those who wonder how to bring change to their towns and cities. Rather than see an involved and active public as an asset, many leaders and residents view some in Flint as the "problem." Professor Pauli speculates that, in all likelihood, the Flint Water Crisis would never have been discovered and addressed without the persistent and determined work of the Flint activist. Yes, the same activists who didn't take gaslighting by their Mayor, Governor, and government as the answer to fixing poison in Flint's drinking water.

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SPEAKER_00:

Hello, this is Arthur Bush, you're listening to Radio Free Flint. Today's guest is Professor Ben Poley from Kettering University. Ben has wrote a book about the water crisis. Professor Poley embedded himself with a group of Flint water activists during the Flintwater Crisis and discusses his experiences. More importantly, he discusses Flint's capability and capacity at activism, and the consequences of his of the activism that he witnessed and what the abilities are of the people of Flint to actually bring change. It's a very interesting conversation that we have about the future from a political scientist's point of view. I'm sure you'll be fascinated by the conversation and by Professor Pole's conclusions about the people of Flint and its culture. So thank you for listening. Without any further ado, here's Professor Ben Poli.

SPEAKER_02:

Thanks very much. It's my pleasure to be here. How did you get in doing a book about the water crisis?

SPEAKER_03:

Well, firstly, it was that it was affecting my family personally, and I should say the teen. At that time, there wasn't yet enough water crisis. There had been some issues with water and making some tweaks of the we were not given the impression that there was any serious threat to family's health. So we're determined to use Flin's tap water. We've always been leaders in tap water. We had a three-year-old son at that he was to some extent always come under. So when we started to there was lead in her, and that was a couple of months, that was a big concern for our family. So but we could certainly identify what's going through as people just kind of start to understand, figure out what to do about it on a personal level, but then also figure out what to do about it on a collective level. And that was the piece that really came to interest me because once we had a filter installed or faucet and more or less okay as a I started to realize that crisis really exposed the concerted effort of community members themselves to the issues of water quality, attention research, what was going on placing pressure on public officials to take the situation seriously and respond. Um that got me really intrigued on a couple of firstly, just as a concerned resident and as a bit of an activist myself, um, I was curious to see this kind of social movement that was developed. Um but then the other part of it is that as a scholar, um, I'm interested in social movements in general and particularly useful ideas and tell tell us about you. So I I'm I was actually born in in Madison, so I have Midwest roots, but I grew up in Washington State. My mom was uh in a thing out there, she's actually now the the city washing so she has quite a an uh in city government. Uh my dad is a geologist. Certainly as I was writing it, I was aware that a crisis books, and of course I hadn't read those books yet, the print, so I was having to imagine a little bit what we're up to and to try to stake a claim to my own particular angle on the crisis. And and you know, really I I don't think I I had to work terribly hard to figure out what that was because I mean the whole reason why I ended up deciding the first place is that I ended up in a position for this. I was a resident and a parent who was worried about the safety. But I was a newcomer to the V and still uh bringing a little bit of that outsider's perspective. I also had a foot in this world of water activism, maybe more than a foot ultimately was pretty involved on the activist side, so I was getting to see the crisis for that. But then in April of 2016, I was also invited to a scientific team that was doing research into water quality issues and so I had an opportunity to gain a kind of front row seat to some of the scientists. So um bringing all of those perspectives together, you know, I I think resulted in a pretty advantage in what was happening. And that was part of what I was trying to accomplish in was to get the crisis from a variety of angles and to try to give people a pretty robust and rich analogy to understand what happened. And the first few chapters of the book in particular is offer a number of different possible narratives, a number of different ways of telling the story of the crisis, no one of which is necessarily to the others, bring out different elements, suggest different kinds of lessons that we might take away from the crisis. But the other thing I wanted to do is I really wanted to foreground the perspective of uh water activists and fluence. I wanted, you know, their story really to be the heart of the story. And so their analysis of the crisis, the one that really gets the most attention in the book. Um and I also, to some extent, just try to chronicle the various ways in which they responded to the crisis, drawing from their assessment of what its origins was, what its significance was, and what needed to be done in response to it.

SPEAKER_02:

Your book really takes a look at the water crisis activism, but it also morphs, at least by the end of this book, into an assessment of capability of collective action. And at one point in your book, you use the word flint fights back. You describe your activity as fighting back collective action. The assessment of Flint's capability, the fight back, at least with respect to the water crisis, always was fascinating.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, I mean, one of the things that was frustrating me a little bit about the way in which the story was being represented, the story of the crisis was being represented after it became big national news, is that it tended to get boiled down to a few exceptional personalities who kind of came along at the right time and found each other, and they were each bringing different things to the table, and it was really their combined efforts that helped to break the story open and you know force people to pay some attention to it. But you know, what I could see happening on on the ground around me was was rather more complicated than that. You don't usually get social change unless there's a larger scale mobilization on the part of people in a community like Flint. And that's exactly what we see. When we go back and look you know, all the way to April of 2014 when the Flint River water started flowing through the pipes, people started raising concerns about that almost immediately, actually before even it happened. There was a steady drumbeat, really, of public concern and outcry and ultimately organizing an activism that created the conditions under which any particular individual was able to have an effect. That really was the story that I wanted to help to tell in the book was a story about all of these people whose names you know you you don't necessarily know, who haven't gotten the same kind of attention, awards, and accolades and credit and so forth, but who collectively came together and created the conditions under which the crisis finally got acknowledged, ultimately, at least to some extent, addressed.

SPEAKER_02:

As you covered that aspect of this, your experiences beforehand with working who had been involved in trying to be forward-looking about this charter, adopting a more modern approach and governance. You met many people and you said you and then you had the opportunity to have a real bird's eye view about these people from your work with Isaac and themselves.

SPEAKER_03:

Certainly, yes. I mean, I I think that you know, in Flint, there's a real kind of historical sensibility that that people are operating with that's very striking. I mean, Flint, as you know, has a very rich history, and it's one that is still alive in respects, and and there's a lot of pride that people take in aspects of that history, especially this tendency for Flint residents to band together and to stand up for themselves when they feel like they're being exploited or abused in some way. And it you know, it goes all the way back to at the very at the very least, the sit-down strike of 1936-37, this idea that you know, even if we're David fighting Goliath, you know, there are times when you've really gotta put your foot down and stand up for what's right. And you don't necessarily weigh the odds of victory, just throw yourself into that fight. And I think that it's that kind of scrappy mentality that we see uh as being very central to water activist culture as I see it here.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, it's it's it's endemic to the culture itself, isn't it? Of the people at Flint, this history that they have of battling the roller coaster in the American economy played out in uh particularly automatic, they do have that what you call scrappiness.

SPEAKER_03:

It certainly has. I mean, I think it's worth remembering that when these activists started going to officially sponsored meetings about the water after officials were beginning to admit that there was some, you know, not so insignificant issues with water quality, you know, what they were told at those meetings was that there was absolutely no possibility of the city switching off the Flint River. And so it wasn't even worth having a conversation about. And to some extent, you were betraying just how irrational and stubborn you were by even raising that as you, and just how unreasonable you were, because you weren't willing to have a serious conversation about what should be done with the water.

SPEAKER_02:

You know, your voice is obviously part of a choir of those who looked at this crisis and who have come to the same fork in their own. Some of those have been singer-songwriters, troubadours, who have wrote the history of this crisis in song. And one of those, Ashley Gubak, a German who's based in Boston, wrote a beautiful song, Michigan. And the song talks about the gaslighting that was being done by those who were essentially the lyrics of their song or something, putting putting some sand in their eyes. Isn't the notion that you you know don't believe your lying eyes, okay? Don't believe your your taste. Don't believe your common sense. This water that you're drinking is really not what you believe it is, and you're unreasonable.

SPEAKER_03:

I mean, that's really gaslighting and No, I think that's the right term, and in fact, it's a term that was used by multiple water activists talking to me about that. This is one of the reasons why the crisis dragged on for as long as it did.

SPEAKER_02:

So you have an administration that wants to tout their greatness and their wonderfulness, telling people that their water's not dirty and telling something's this, and you're looking through. That has an impact on people who already have a culture of, as you referred to, if Flint fights back. Wasn't that kind of stuff just putting a red flag in front of a bull?

SPEAKER_03:

For for sure. I mean, at least again, that I that is a mentality that I have encountered quite a bit here in Flint is this kind of indignation that people feel at being treated that way. You know, when it happens to them, they don't just curl up into a ball and say, oh, sorry, I bothered you, right? Instead, they start looking for some kind of workaround. I think that's what happened with these public meetings around water, is that, you know, when when people realized they weren't going to be taken seriously there, um, they didn't give up. They just turned to different kinds of tactics. It wasn't trying to, you know, convince people in positions of power to do the right thing so much as it was pressure and force them to do the right thing. And that meant mustering muscle. And that's something that Flint folks are good at doing.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, that goes back to the sit-down strikes when the bosses didn't want to meet their demands as we sat down inside the even before that, we asked for reasonable things like bathroom breaks, on the right down, a little heat, ready work, the winter, and more simple things like better hours working. The people didn't take no for an answer, did they?

SPEAKER_03:

No, and I I I think that that that's the key, because again, if they had gone to these meetings and they'd taken for granted this idea that switching off of the river was a non-starter, and they they would have put themselves at the mercy of people who were making decisions on the basis of cost, who were making decisions on the basis of convenience, who were not necessarily prioritizing what the people who were drinking the water wanted to prioritize, which was their health and and the public health. Rendering that no, right, is a really important moment within any any social movement because it means to some extent it's not going to work within the confines of the system and the way it defines your issue and your reality. To some extent, residents had to go out and create this other reality by collecting their own evidence of what was going on and making sure that that was so compelling that people ultimately had to come around to their way of seeing things.

SPEAKER_02:

Now you described the Flint culture that you observed inside of the water activism as being one of an activist culture that existed in the community as a whole, and you spoke of it in your book as being uh intensive localism. What do you mean by those descriptors?

SPEAKER_03:

What I've seen since I've lived in Flint is that we've got a lot of them in community uh organizers and activists who are very, very active. And some of them are active around issues that I think of are of very broad significance. And to some extent, their activism isn't issue-based activism, if I can put it that way. Most of what I see going on in the community is very much grounded in the kinds of needs and concerns that exist among Flint residents and on addressing those needs and concerns. You know, again, that that isn't necessarily true of every activist culture, but a lot of what I've seen here is very much focused on trying to make Flint the best place it can possibly be by focusing intensely on the issues that are are going on right here within our own the experiences which you had and which you're describing tell me that you've met the Flintstones. I'd like to think I have. I mean, um certainly some of the people I've worked with and and gotten to know and friends and and comrades have been here for, if not their whole lives, uh in every case, a very, very long time. You know, I'm thinking about people like Claire McClinton, who was a union organizer, um who is in in some ways, although she doesn't always like being described this way, sort of the matriarch of our uh water active and and pro-democracy activist community here. There are uh people like Claudia Perkins Milton, who was was also involved with the union back in the day, and was uh really a pioneering figure as a black woman within the the union. They are it's it's folks like that who are bringing all of that history to the the the fight, you know, when when they take on uh an issue like water. It's not just water isn't their only point of reference. I mean, they have this whole rich history of organizing and activism that they're drawing from and any number of issues that they've confronted over the years, and they're drawing from that knowledge and experience in doing what they do. So I've learned so much from them. That's been really one of the great kind of revelations of moving here to Flint and and becoming a part of this community, is that it it's been another opportunity to realize how much I have to learn from others.

SPEAKER_02:

Let me bring the focus back to the Flint. You write in your book when you're describing what might have gone better in Flint during the water crisis if people had had a more commonality of interest to draw on a greater collective identity. Your book isn't throwing shade on Flint, it's just describing what what was lacking with this particular group of active dealing with the water crisis itself.

SPEAKER_03:

But when you talk of being well, and and as Art would put it, you need a a story of us. One of the anyway, in order to mobilize particular issues, you need to have a conception we are, who are people. That's something that doesn't be uh to some extent, you know, identity as a social construct that has to be created. So the the way we tell ourselves starting determining how we're gonna tackle struggle. And so I think having theory helps, and having people like Claudia, who were have been involved for years, to keep bringing that back in and kind of reminding us we are when you look at a guy like uh Charles Reyes III, he's not just that's right, yeah. And you know, Art himself has spent a lot of time studying and deorganizing, uh, got a degree from Harvard, and maybe he has been writing of work for a long time. Inside for many of us, in a community like this, I mean, they they need the kinds of ideas and skills and capacity that folks like that provide. Sometimes we're tension involved in determining what particular story would be told and who's gonna be at the center of it and what kinds of tactic utilize. I mean, it's a it's a messy process. In chapter eight of the last you know, part of what I wanted to try to capture was not only work that people were were doing trying to make that happen, but also in the complication, some of the limitations of that work, because I wanted to tell a story that was honest and that was you know a way for other people looking from the outside in.

SPEAKER_02:

One of the grasps you're finding reactive.

SPEAKER_03:

When you're talking about plant water crisis, environmental justice struggle, often you're where there's some kind of pressing threat, a substance that is essential for life, whether that be water, air, whether that be the part of injected into this struggle, is that people really did feel like they were fighting for their lives, for the lives of children, for the future of this as a whole. Flint as a city, a city that's been described at times um as a city that's kind of barely hanging on to life. This was a fight, not only on an individual or family level, but really a fight for the community. I think that there was a lot in terms of the way people conceptualized the emergency manager phenomenon, really to that to some extent, because that was sort of a hostile of me that had the dissolved the city, and emergency managers have the power. The precarious future, I think, was very much in those minds with uh their own destoxic substance that could really kill them.

SPEAKER_02:

The culture that surrounds a willness. Right or mad hours will be.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, and and knowing that we in a lot of industrial uh cities where to some extent people have patterns themselves because the state has kind of collapsed, local government is not able to do all of this that we associate with the functioning government, whether that be keeping the parks mode or the trash, fixing the sidewalks, uh you know, to extend the absence that this kind of need for a DIY mentality. But again, I think Flint, that combined with this other deeply embedded in Flint's history, going back to what we were saying before, where when we are facing some kind of threats to our well-being, you know, we're not the kind of people take that sitting down. We are the kind of people who stand up and fight back if the odds are against is that something is different, unique?

SPEAKER_02:

I mean, you use words intense local.

SPEAKER_03:

I've never heard this be set in some sense as a model for other pieces that are fatal issues because we know that other keys are in it.

SPEAKER_02:

Are we saying is that Flint's repairable? It's an object lesson for other people.

SPEAKER_03:

That really has been a core theme of Flint's again, going all the way back to the sit-down strike is what uh really jump-started the American labor movement as a whole. You know, what happened here, it had this kind of wildfire type effect of spreading. I think that the the rise and fall of to some extent it encapsulates the whole idea of the American, you know, gone wrong. You know, constant the dynamic um and almost exaggerating in ways that help us to understand what's going on in other countries as well. It's part of universal street of the of the country as a almost like on the cutting edge of that, his showing other countries where they're going.

SPEAKER_02:

A lot of people have wrote books, they've done documents about an analogy toward whatever about the this is a city that is full of life on on the way toward recovery. Let's talk about the people at Lynn are the unrealistic.

SPEAKER_03:

Sometimes there are objectives set for themselves, the ideals that they're trying to and this do everything oneself. And that's part of what I try, right? There are times that is on making sure that we are the ones liberating ourselves, solving problems as noble as that is, meant that we didn't have all of the capacity to actually tackle the hand. Sometimes people were very much in of outside help, outside research. That's a tricky thing to navigate. You're starting out with that kind of pride. How do you welcome resources that are gonna help you realize what you're trying to accomplish without comproming your autonomy, without inviting other interests in that might clash interests? That's that's a reset of you're looking at at people's insistence on self-governance, you know, this idea that they know best right for them, and that they ought to be the drivers anytime a decision being made that directly impacts their personal lives. There's a lot of that that is not only um that you know people ought to be self-governing, true, just as a matter of fact. People often do have a better sense of you know how water is in their everyday lives than the quote-unquote expert, and how impacting their person than an emergency manager does aside. Sometimes you know, popularly reactive, it's all about tearing down experts and you know these kind of shadowy strings controlling the world that we live in. At its core, I think principles that are harder to argue with. Yeah, I mean, I I saw it firsthand at the water. I mean, remember, I'm coming as a science PhD that I have something to offer full analysis of the situation. And what I realized was that I was another body, it was nothing special uh in terms of how I would really buy up. It wasn't that we're waiting around for for somebody with a fancy degree to come and explain the situation to them. They already felt like they had a pretty and and you know what? They were right. They were way ahead of their under their analysis of what was going on, and that's why again I was saying earlier, I've learned so much. I've learned more from the people I've been working with, that's for sure.

SPEAKER_02:

The really essential scribes are rag tag extraordinarily fashioned. I'm gonna set that in. I mean, these aren't just the group side government or people aren't wanting to hang on. These are people who are challenged the system of governments back to the Boston Deep Park. That's right.

SPEAKER_03:

I think that we're talking about who on one hand, we're very much mated on an level by the threats that the water pose themselves and their family members. We don't want to discount that part of it. A lot of people would argue who do actively deorganizing, that if you don't have that strong element of self-interest, it's gonna be hard to generate a lot of fire to sustain it over time. It was certainly about more than just that. Part of the indignation that people felt at having their water contaminated, it wasn't just what was being done to their own body and the body of their children. It was what was being done to their community. It was this idea of feeling like there didn't matter, that this is the kind of thing you could do to Flint and get away with it. Certainly on that level to fight back, not just on behalf of individually, but on behalf of as a whole. In terms of how that fits our larger national issues. I mean, again, people in Flint, they were offering a kind of of what democracy, how a democratic should function, what that look in practice. And a lot of standing up, trying to not only themselves live up to a certain set of principles, but to make sure that those in the power are due, and they fail to do that, then you know, you take matters on hand. And it's in that sense that I think the the social movements around water can potentially truly be a source of inspiration for other communities.

SPEAKER_02:

Man, how do you think the flint stones did in family?

SPEAKER_03:

Well, you know, when you think of all of the things that probably have happened, people didn't mobilize the they did, it's a you know fairly long. Now, of course, it's always difficult to counterfactuals to say what would have happened if we removed some variable. I don't know sitting here talking about a flint water crisis at all. If residents hadn't into their own hands and really been as determined as they were to expose what was going on and forced people to acknowledge it. So I think that was really the first thing that they accomplished was to get the crisis recognized as a crisis. Beyond that, when you think about the amount of rises that have come this way in response to the crisis, it's not insignificant. Flint has been the beneficiary of hundreds of millions of dollars that people have fought for and lobbyed. It's important to recognize that those bills don't get passed act of creating pressure around. And so we had activists here that were very much involved in that effort. Right up to the present, you know, we're trying to get all of our lead service lines out of the ground. We have activists who are on the front lines here who are working diligently to make sure that people don't get left behind. You know, we have a big water crisis settlement now. That's all, and again, it's people in the community who are going around making sure that understand that and are signed up for it and are getting the that they deserve. All of that stuff, and we keep going down the list, is a product, a great extent, of residents themselves and the necessary pressure and bringing public attention to the issues. In that sense, I think it's been pretty cool to have accomplished. Does that mean that every movie or that every opportunity was capitalized on on the way? No, of course not, especially in a city like Flint, where we don't have a lot of capacity to begin with, you know, to take on every issue. There were times when I think we probably would have done more as an act of immunity if we'd had more people, if we'd had more money. When you look at just how sick the crisis came, not only Flint, but to the whole country, to the world, it has helped inspire things outside of don't think that it would have happened to that extent without the country people mayor. What do you see as the outcome of the governance? One thing that is of note is that we are placing more empty on treating water as a right people have, you know, fundamental human rights. It's now recognized in our charter uh in declaration of rights at the beginning, and there are a couple of sh is that idea is embedded in certain policies around water. Flint has been very proactive, for example, during COVID to spend water shut off. Hopefully that's something that future, but it's gonna have to be something that you know residentally fight for. It's one thing to have it in the charter, it's another charter to actually get followed. That isn't what we have here, is that we have this governing document that is consulted for all of the the knocks we've had over the past few years. There are a lot going on here to have hope to even be optimistic.

SPEAKER_02:

One of the reasons hope has is I think that's right.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, at the end of the day is that people don't just run away from challenges. You know, I've met some are never going. Flint is their home. They know that a a lot to about weather and that good work to be done here, and that there are good things happening the time. I mean, we don't always get that side of in fact, we almost never get that side of, you know, it's not like wallowing spare day in and day out. I mean, in their lives and trying to make things happen and having little victories and having little setbacks in the way that in any other community, except again, as you say here, that fighting's especially strong. And we've got a lot of in the book, that's kind of where I did this. I I definitely did not want to make it sound like easy for David to fight Goliath. That David is always on the right side of every issue because he's David. I mean, you know, you again, without trying to turn it into some sort of uh caricature of the the little guys and gals fighting the system, that there's a lot more complexity to it than that.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, the water was brown, smelled like marine, still the city officials said the water was clean. People broke out in rashes, so we're losing their hair, they can blame to the mare, but he just didn't care. He said,

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