Residents of Jackson says tap water runs brown (stock image)
Over 150,000 people have been without drinking water for weeks. Taps run coffee-coloured, foul liquid and only bottled water is safe to drink or even wash with.
Those that cannot afford bottles go thirsty, and even those with money have to queue for hours to get enough for a family to survive for a few days.
This is not the site of a “natural” disaster in the Global South. This is Jackson, the second largest city in the state of Mississippi, in the heart of the richest country in the world.
The US city was left without drinkable running water after its main treatment plant was damaged during flooding in August. But authorities were already advising people to boil water before using it several months before the rains hit. Potentially deadly lead contamination has long poisoned the area, and flooding allowed it to spread into the water system
Marshall lives in west Jackson and has no choice but to drink the tap water. He’s says it’s been brown for about eight months.
“Very seldom it’s pure. Sometimes it’s a little lighter, a little darker,” he said. “In the bath tub when I first turn it on, it always comes out rust, then it gets lighter. But every time, the rust comes first.”
Marshall doesn’t have a car, so he can’t get to the sites where the National Guard is handing out bottles. He also doesn’t have electricity or gas because of a recent fire in the house next door, which means he can’t boil the water to help make it safer either.
Jackson’s problems are the result of years of neglect, and that neglect is a political decision. If the city were a white-majority suburb anywhere else in the US, the issue would have been resolved long ago. But Jackson is black and poor, with more than a quarter of its people living on or below the poverty line.
Some people say that Jackson is a black-majority town because of “white flight” to the suburbs. There is some truth in that. But the main reason is a 40-year government-backed practice known as redlining—deliberately marking areas with high black populations as “risky” for investment.
This made it impossible for most black people to get mortgages in some areas. Jackson, with its surrounding pollutants, was one of the few places where they could buy a house.
The same process led to a near identical scandal in Flint, Michigan, in 2016, where city residents were exposed to toxic water for months. Lawyer Arielle King says that history stands behind today’s crisis.
“They can say that there are different factors that lead to flooding, but people wouldn’t be subject to areas that are susceptible to flooding without redlining in the first place,” she said. “So again, it does kind of come back to race, and environmental racism, unfortunately, every time.”
He said this was an investment in “Mississippi’s people”. The Republicans have also tried to block national government aid to Jackson and other contaminated towns.
The Jackson experience also shows up the utter inadequacy of president Joe Biden’s much-vaunted £1 trillion infrastructure spending plans. As his bill went through Congress last year Biden took to the White House lectern saying, “Never again can we allow what happened in Flint, Michigan, and in Jackson, Mississippi.”
Yet it has happened again. That’s because decades of structural racism cannot be undone at a stroke of a president’s pen.
Beating the system requires a massive social movement that challenges racism and the power that stands behind it. It means making Mississippi ungovernable until there is change.
Yet time and again Biden’s Democrats have sought to demobilise such movements, or divert them into “safe” electoral channels by telling people to vote rather than riot. The crisis in Jackson is the sorry result of that strategy.
Fascist Tommy Robinson didn’t receive the same treatment
Russia has threatened revenge after British-made drones targeted its oil refineries and transport networks
Progressive candidate has won primary in Republican dominated state
Rank-and-file rebellion secures pay rise
