Episode 3: Darrell Dawsey

Native Detroiter Darrell Dawsey is a writer and journalist who shares how the State of Michigan gamed the system and lied to Flint residents about their water. Darrell, formerly with the ACLU of Michigan who broke the story concerning Flint's struggle for clean and affordable water, describes how the state moved Flint from the Detroit system and the multiple ways the federal government failed Flint when it was aware of clear and consistent contamination of this city's water. He also talks about how he supported Flint residents in his capacity at the ACLU and his respect for Flint residents who forged an interracial cross-class social movement that brought national attention to their water quality issues, compelled the state to address these concerns, and continues to contend with this struggle until the problems created by the water source switch are resolved.

Transcript

Tainted Tap Podcast

Host by Dr. Katrinell M. Davis

Interview Transcript with Darrell Dawsey

Air Date: May 4, 2021

 “We like to tell the story of the horrors of the beginnings, the struggles of

middle, and the utopian outcomes at the end, and that's not the way life

works…it also sends a naive and wrong message to folks that, that struggle ain’t

really struggle; that struggle ain’t hard. That it’s something that, over the course

of a few nice headlines, you can start and ramp-up and close in a matter of

weeks or months or whatever the timeline may be. That's not the way it really

works. Flint is a prime example of that.”

Darrell Dawsey

 What led to your work with the ACLU? 

Darrell Dawsey: Well, I've always had an interest in social justice. When I was in college, I was a student activist. We were involved in the creation of the department of African American studies at Wayne State through protests and negotiation and a number of other tactics.  I worked with various community groups in the city and other cities around the country on a number of different issues, different movements. So, it's just something that I've always been involved with as a journalist. We kind of can't necessarily be as a member of certain organizations or whatever, but my journalism was still community-driven and community-oriented. I would always tell people newspapers and places I worked at. I wasn't an ambassador from the paper to the community; I was an ambassador from my community to the newspapers and to journalism as a whole. So, I've always felt a need to make sure that I stood up for our folks, represented our communities as best I could, do all I can to make sure that our stories are told accurately because I don't think there is any group in the country whose story is as distorted and misunderstood, and buried in many cases as black people.  So, as a journalist, even though I may not have been actively hands-on involved in particular organizations the way I had been in college and after college, I still felt the need to do everything I can to make sure that I directed my talents towards ensuring the best images and interests of black people.

 How did the ACLU get involved with what was going on in Flint?

Darrell Dawsey:I'm no longer over there; they do some good work; but that too is sort of what I'm talking about in terms of what I call the “liberal-progressive industrial complex”: folks who love black folks as long as we're victim, but they are not necessarily supportive of us when we are in positions of authority. And when we want to speak, especially when we want to speak on things that they may not seem to consider. I had some folks from the community give me a call. I believe it was some activists from Detroit actually, who I knew who were going up to Flint because they had relatives, people they knew who were complaining about the quality of the water. There had been a couple of small, shorter stories about the fact that folks were protesting over the water.  There were public boiled water advisories, people going down to city hall with jugs of brown and yellow water complaining, but it hadn't gotten any traction beyond the standard, “look at the poor people that are going through this thing. Onto the next story.” I got a call from somebody up there, and I was the communications director at the time for the ACLU, and we had a fellow, Curt Guyette: he was dating a reporter who was brought on by the ACLU.  I was more or less Curt’s editor on a lot of things. He felt comfortable with me editing his work. I really respect Kirk's ability and his passion, and his seriousness about what he does. Curtis is a great investigative report. I said, “Well, Curt, I'm getting some calls from some folks up in Flint about the water quality; just go check it out, let's find out what's really happening.” So he went up there and talked to some folks, and he came back, and he was like, “Man, you're not going to believe what the heck is going on.” So, after talking to some of the folks in the community, people who have been protesting, who come to find out that there were folks who had been looking at the water quality and who would come to realize that water quality had been contaminated with lead. And this was because of the pipes. We had known that Flint had done things like switch the water: they had switched from the Detroit municipal system, which was one of the best in the world, to the Flint system, they just kind of opened up and decided that they were going to use. And not long after this was open, General Motors, which was getting that water from Flint, forced the state to put them back on the Detroit system because the water from the Flint River was so bad that it was corroding the engines in the GM vehicles. So we knew then that something was up, but nobody put two and two together. Well, Curt started digging, and he managed to put two and two together, wound up talking to folks from the EPA who had come out and running, tested the water problem. The ACLU was actually involved in some of the tests (just kind of monitoring some of the tests). I became a water quality expert in a couple of weeks, and we began to kind of understand not only how the lead was being leached off of the pipes into the water system and dust into people's bloodstreams as a result of the switch, but we began to understand how the city and the state were gaming the system. Gaming the system by manipulating the tests in various ways: the jars where water samples would be kept weren't big enough; they would wait to turn on, let the water run for a second, then test it as opposed to what you’re drinking when it comes out the tap. So, the system was being gamed. We found out that people were lying, that state officials were lying about the water quality, about when they knew, about what had been promised to the people of Flint. And all of this talking was taking place against the backdrop of emergency management in Michigan. I don't know if you understand that issue, but what had happened, we got all these Republicans up in the state legislature, and they basically decided that they were going to impose bankruptcy on all of the major cities around the state; and of course, most of these cities were predominantly a large majority black. Many of those smaller, rich white municipalities that had also run into municipal problems were also looking at bankruptcies and shortfalls, they were let off the hook. They weren’t given the same treatment. Flint had an emergency manager in place, I believe his name was Darnell Earley, and he was the one who basically was responsible for moving Flint from the Detroit system to the Flint water system, and then for maintaining that situation, even after they realized that think that Flint was in trouble. Governor Snyder signed off on Earley. He knew what was going on and knew to the point where he's actually been charged because he lied as well. These people were derelict in their duty, and it was simply an abysmal and abominable and inhumane performance and treatment of poor folks in Flint.

Flint is, I think, 30% white; it's not even all black people. There were a lot of white folks who were hurting just as well. But these people, they didn't care. They had an agenda: part of that agenda was removing water customers from the Detroit system to weaken the Detroit system. This was a part of an all-out assault on black-controlled cities and black-run places. I don't think they necessarily planned to poison children and elders and other folks in Flint, but they certainly intended to get Flint off of the Detroit system, to leave Detroit short one more customer so that the water system in Detroit could be easier to take it over. 

How did the crisis impact Flint residents?

Darnell Dawsey: Well, I mean, obviously, the problem began with folks just turned on their taps and start seeing yellow and brown water and didn't understand, and they're showering in this stuff. And after a few days, people are breaking out, have all kinds of skin conditions, children are sickly. Initially, you don't obviously see the immediate effects or something like that, but over time, folks were just like, “What the heck is going on? This water is smelly and brown”.  People who just care about their children, people who just care about what's coming through their pipes and coming into their homes, kind of took to the streets, took to talking to some of these municipal leaders about these things, and like anything in our community it just bubbled up from the grassroots up by folks who are being victimized. There were families that began to get together call for something to be done for the city to take a look at this. I believe that there was a small group of folks who had reached out to some people about water quality testing, around the same time that the ACLU was really getting involved with looking at the quality of the water, so we wound up kind of working alongside these folks. Now, there still was not, even at the ACLU, the sort of large mobilization of resources that you see later. I don't think folks immediately understood what this meant. In fact, I remember going to some people and saying, "Hey, listen, I hear about water quality up in Flint. Is there anything that can be done?”.  I had folks say, “Wow, I don't know if we can sue, or I don't think that there's a whole lot...”. even initially at the ACLU, there was some skepticism about what really could be done about it. Curt and I just wanted to make sure that people understood what the problem was first and foremost, how we should move accordingly once we understand it. So, just kind of looking at the water quality and stuff and talking to people, folks underground obviously were the ones doing the pushing in terms of a movement around this. So, they began to have rallies and things like that. Once the studies from some of the folks who work with Virginia Tech and some other places began to kind of get out, people had data now that they're armed with, and you can go to the state, you can go to lawmakers, you can go to other officials, and you can say, “Hey, look, this is what this means."  One of the big kickers was when a physician, Mona Attisha, did a study that showed that children in Flint were lead poisoned, and they had high amounts of dry traces of lead in their bloodstream and that they were suffering as a result in terms of cognition and things like that. Her work was hugely instrumental in terms of moving the needle. Her work was obviously hugely instrumental in terms of broadcasting this to the world. So, that coupled with Curt reporting, the work that we were doing in terms of putting all this together, I was overseeing just a lot of the content that we were doing on different platforms with this thing. That sort of critical mass of journalists and content, combined with the research that Dr. Mona was putting down, really kind of turned a whole lot of heads. And at that point, people really began to realize, like, you're killing children in Flint for what. That’s when I began to see the Erin Brockovich’s, Cher, and Snoop Dogg. All kinds of people began to get involved in what was going on. But folks on the ground, they were very insistent, and they were the ones calling. Nobody was really paying attention to them until we started really amplifying this and combining this with a lot of the test results that we've seen. So, I got to always get folks on the ground and Flint, the credit. I mean, they're the ones who sort of popped everything off. I mean, this was and remains their movement and their effort.  

 I love that you’re saying that because the victims aren't laying down

and taking it, the so-called victims, they don't lay down and take it.

Darrell Dawsey: I'm from Detroit, and Flint’s the sister city, so we know how to fight. You go up to Flint to visit your relatives, but you don’t go messing around. You fight. They were as tough as we were. So, I have a great deal of respect for the activists in the community members on the ground and fled, many of whom became politicized through this. There were people who didn't have necessarily politics, but they became politicized by saying what this could do to their children, to the kids up the street. You had schools that were still pumping water through the fountains during this time. A lot of public places hadn't even shut down their fountains yet because, or closed up the bathrooms yet because they weren't taking this kind of thing as seriously as they should. The folks in the community raised enough of a hullabaloo that we were able to kind of help turn the tide. Now, the problem still persists, and there were a lot of people who kind of came along and tried to act like all of a sudden, the problem was miraculously fixed with the national federal government got wind of it or whatever. I've only actively ever campaigned for two candidates. One was Jesse Jackson in 1988. It was the first run, the first time I was eligible to vote.  Jesse Jackson won Michigan, and I remember being a part of that, knocking on doors and feeling so proud. And the only other time was for Barack Obama. And we'd go into Obama’s Detroit headquarters and try to work with different people, making calls to my kids. I felt a certain level of pride. And let me say, I was never more embarrassed and frustrated, upset with Barack Obama, the way he stood up there in Flint and drank that water, talking about the water was okay. He wanted to help Snyder and all the rest of them hurry this issue off the front page. He shows up in Flint, this dramatic press conference. I don't know if you remember it.

That was a betrayal. That was an outright betrayal of the very people who loved and supported that man the most. And I couldn't stomach that, and I think nobody's ever made him answer to that because the water wasn't good. We can scientifically prove that the water was not good then.  I mean, it still isn't right now in many places in Flint. The problem had not been ameliorated in a matter of months. We were talking about children.  I mean, there were lead pipes where they didn't even know they were lead pipes in place because some of the pipes had been placed so long ago that they weren't showing up on certain plans and schematics anymore. So, of all of the political hypocrisy that I saw on display throughout this ordeal, that was probably the most hurtful.  You expect right-wing dirtbags to lie and not care about black children to be raised, right. You don't expect the first black president to stand up there and lie in the face of the nation about such a serious problem afflicting his core constituents. My thing is that I wasn't one of those people who felt like Barack Obama was going to give us 40 acres and a mule; I wasn't expecting reparations. I'm clear in many ways he was a steward of the office of American Imperialism, and that's just what it is. I mean, we don't have to lie about it.  They sort of want one of him to be this progressive guy. He ran as a progressive talking about single-payer and all this, and then got into the White House and very much showed that he was a centrist. But the most interesting story about Obama sort of as a political climber was the story in the New Yorker that nobody wanted to read because it had that racist cover with him and Michelle giving the fist bump, and he was dressed up, it had the Muslim garb, it was a very controversial cover of the New Yorker. But the story was fantastic because they talked to people from the south side of Chicago, community activists, political activists who had been involved and who had helped Barack Obama rise, and they talked about how he pretty much used that community organizing thing to get where he was trying to go and then left a lot of them behind. He didn't bring a lot of the values, didn't bring the plans, didn't bring the expectations. You just made a career move on them. I wasn't surprised. I also don't expect anybody who runs for president to not be like that. I mean, you have to be ambitious, you have to be arrogant, you have to be cutthroat in a certain way. I mean, that's just what the office demands. So, I had no illusions about Barack Obama, even when he first got elected, I had certain expectations, but I didn't think that they were all out of pocket. He was Barack Obama. I'm clear about who he was, but to just stand there in front of the world and lie about the quality of the water in order to make a scandal go away for a hateful, racist Republican administration in Michigan, was a bridge, too far. You don't have to do that. There's nothing about the office that demands that you do that. So, I felt betrayed. I felt as betrayed by Obama as I did by Snyder, but I expected from Snyder. That was one of the low points. I think when people ask about how come the thing moved off the headlines as quickly as it did, that was one of the things that happened. It was an embarrassment for the EPA. Obama didn't want to stand there and have the EPA chastised too much under his watch. Although the EPA absolutely fell down on the job and the EPA fell down on the job, not because the EPA was worried about being too progressive, but because the EPA was worried about all of the hits that it was getting from right-wing media, and because they were afraid that these things would lead to further cuts. So, the EPA stayed quiet, even though the EPA knew that the water was bad. Flint got sold out all the way around by the state, by many people in the city, emergency managers, and by the federal government, which at the time was held by a black man. So, Flint got played, but people have continued to fight. That's the great thing, even if it's not necessarily in the headlines all the time anymore, even if it's not the first thing on a lot of folks' minds, people's whose children were lead poisoned, who are suffering cognitive disabilities for the rest of their lives as a result of this, elders who were sick. These people continue to build families, friends, neighbors; these people continue to win. 

 Obama seemed to be responding to a need for normalcy.

Darrell Dawsey: Well, people like to wrap a story up neatly in this country. We like to tell the story of the horrors of the beginnings, the struggles of the middle, and the utopian outcomes at the end, and that's not the way life works. I understand the three-act structure: I do screenplays, I write books, I get it, but life doesn't fit into a three-act structure. That's not the way it goes, us kind of trying to fit that fit into that narrative; it leaves a lot of people shafted and allows problems to continue to linger, but it also sends to me a message, a naive and wrong message to folks that, that struggle ain't really struggle, that struggle ain't hard. That it's something that, over the course of a few nice headlines, you can start and ramp-up and close in a matter of weeks or months or whatever the timeline may be. That's not the way it really works, and Flint is a prime example of that.

                        We want heroes, and there's nothing wrong with one of the heroes. But the real heroes are the people who continue to do the work long after everybody else is gone. And then you don't see them. We want there to have been these heroes coming out of government and out of these lofty positions, and that's why I say heroes are those brothers and sisters on the ground, the mothers who were horrified at the idea that their children might be impaired forever. Folks like Curt. Curt has some accolades, but Curt continues to toil around issues like that. Nobody is paying a whole lot of attention, but he's continuing to do the work. And I think the same thing applies to a lot of the people who really took the issue up and made it their life's work. They continued to toil, and that’s a wonderful thing. 

What aren’t we still talking about Flint or hearing about it on the 

national news?

Darrell Dawsey: We absolutely should, especially at a time when we're talking about infrastructure in the United States. Joe Biden has just proposed a 2 trillion-dollar infrastructure bill that Congress has taken up. If we're having the conversation about infrastructure, Flint should be exhibit A. We need major infrastructural overhauls in this country. And I'm actually surprised that the revival of the conversation about Flint has not found its way into the mainstream media. 

[W]hen we talk about the major changes that need to take place in this community, changes need to happen from the bottom up. And there's nobody at the lower rungs of society like black folks are. We are the bottom caste; it is what it is. It's not because of our own making, or we don't have wonderful stories of survival with resilience and success. We do. But that's not how America is set up. When we win, it's “in spite of," not “because of," and they're absolutely need to be more of an intentional effort to make sure that we're moving, that we're rising. What needs to happen in order for our communities to really fulfill their full potential? America can't continue to be America as we know it, you know what I mean? Not to say the country has to dissolve, and when we look at where the country is now, it's going the wrong way. You need greater access to the polls, not less, but it's going the wrong way. You need to be able to do more with your surpluses and the benefits that come from having mechanized labor, but it's going the wrong way. We screwed up in this country about a lot about work: what work is, why people should work, what should be the outcomes of work; we got folks losing their jobs to machines. When I was a kid, I grew up watching real cartoons, and there was a cartoon called the Jetsons. And if you remember the Jetsons, it was all about the future was supposed to be great, right? All these robots that did everything, that cleaned your house, and George lived in this beautiful high rise, and he had the car, and he had all the gadgets, and he just had the complete life as a result of technology and automation. George went to work for Spacely Sprockets. Look at the future that we're creating: it's a future where the machines are doing the work, the robots are taking over. You go in into the supermarket. You can self-checkout. They don't need clerks anymore. It doesn't require people to work that, but where are the benefits? Where's the surplus? Why are we treating those people who lose their jobs as a result of this as the pariahs of society? These should be folks who are benefiting from somewhere. You've got more leisure time; you're supposed to be able to go to school. You're supposed to be able to seek new careers. You're supposed to be able to raise a family. Mechanization, industrialization, technology, it was supposed to make things easier for us. Instead, what we see is things being made use to make things harder for us. Technology becomes a police state for black folk. We see greater militarization of the police forces in our communities among black folks. So, the things that should be used to make our lives better are instead just treated as one more weapon to make our lives harder because that's the way America is set up. It's not about the great technological changes; it's the way America is set up. In Flint, they could have been replacing those lead pipes with PVC piping long ago, but because we've decided in this country that we want to withdraw money from urban areas, because we decided we want to disinvest in many of these places, this is what happened. Flint is an American city. I tell people all the time, I've traveled around the world. Racism, white supremacy is a European export, so I'm not trying to suggest that Europeans are somehow less racist than Americans, but they're more enlightened, and they have a greater sense of national duty. When you go to France, to Paris, you may find yourself in the 18th arrondissement, which is the hood. That's where a lot of the African immigrants from Cameroon and places like that settled it, but it doesn't look like no hood that you're going to find in America because they take care of the city. They still feel a national responsibility. There's no reason for New Orleans to have looked like it looked after hurricane Katrina, no reason for Detroit to have ever looked like it looks, no reason for the south side of Chicago to have the issues that it's happened. But, because America is working the way America works- I believe it was Neely Fuller- he said, “Unless you understand racism, nothing in America makes any sense.” None of this makes sense. I once heard Stokely Carmichael talking; it was a clip from the sixties. He was talking about the quote-unquote “war on poverty” of the LBJ. He said, “If you want to end poverty, you could end poverty tomorrow. This is not a problem. What causes poverty? Lack of money. What makes people poor? Lack of money? So, if you don't want people to be poor, what do you do? Give them money.  We act like it's so hard. All over the world, in Finland, Norway, Denmark, UK, industrialized, advanced societies provide healthcare, free education for their people. The best school systems in the world, certainly not even close to being in the United States. We’re something like 35th, 38th nationally in terms of educating our children.  You look to Finland: Finland's the number one nation in the world in terms of educating its children. But what's the thing about Finland that makes Finland so different from the United States?

Finland It's a homogenous land. When you're in a white supremacist nation, you got white folks who say, “I would rather this country burn like hell than have to share the wealth and the resources with people who don't look like me.” So, there's no reason why the United States can't be a global leader in educating its children, or in infrastructure, or all the other things that we've been talking about. But unless you understand racism, unless you understand white supremacy, none of this makes sense. The richest country in the world, having a Flint Water Crisis on its hands, that makes absolutely no sense. There's no excuse for that except racism. 

What are the concrete paths forward? 

Darrell Dawsey: Well, I mean, it's a multi-varied thing. I wish I had the solution, I really do, but it's building on a lot of the struggles that our people have already begun to undertake. We've got movements in this country that have been working since our people were in bonding. I think it's about joining on to the things that many of our ancestors and our elders put in place: being active in your community, understanding the real politics of your community, the real players of politics in your community.  We love conspiracy theories and talking about the Illuminati, but you don't even know who your state rep is.  You don't know who your county commissioner is, you don't know who's the head of your school board, but you want to talk about the Illuminati. I'm not saying that there aren't folks who don't plot against us. You aren’t going to understand that if you certainly don't understand how your waterboard operates.  I once did an interview with a brother named Khalid Abdul Muhammad. He used to be second in charge to Louis Farrakhan, and brother Khalid was a very fiery brother, well known for making very incendiary kinds of remarks.  But I was interviewing him one time, and we talked about conspiracy theories and all this. He attracted brothers who very much trapped in that kind of thing. And he was saying, “Brother Darrell, sometimes, our people trip over the macro chip, looking for the microchip.” You're so busy trying to manufacture crazy conspiracy theories that stuff like the water's brown in Flint; there's lead in the water. And that goes right over your head.  So our people have to be involved in very real politics on the ground in our communities. Know who these people are. Who are the developers who are building that building, that structure of the street from your house or in your downtown? Where are the contracts going to? Who's educating your children, who are providing the textbooks? Who's responsible for cleaning the floor? I mean everything; we need to be investigative journalists ourselves. That's the way a functional democracy is supposed to operate. A democracy is only as good as the level of education and investment of its citizens. Otherwise, you get a sham democracy, and you get an oligarchy, which is what we have in the United States, this white supremacist, sexist oligarchy.

We have to be able to talk to one another, especially across disciplines. Our engineers need to know what our farmers are doing; our farmers need to understand what our attorneys understand; attorneys need to understand the challenges that our mine workers are facing; our mineworkers and factory workers need to understand the challenges that our physicians face. We need cross-community, cross-cultural, cross-professional, cross country communication. We find too many reasons to be balkanized when we should be banning together.  

We need people who are honest about how difficult the work is. I think it was Amílcar Cabral who said, “Tell no lies claim no easy victory.” So, we need to be clear about the struggles that we embark upon and what they demand of us, and how serious this stuff is. I think about civil rights leaders of the 1960s, 1950s, 1940s even, from A. Philip Randolph onto the Dr. King, the Panther party, and all these folks, and these folks' kind of had a very serious understanding of what they were up against. And then we kind of fell back into sort of this performative activism, and that isn't going to get it done. Not at all activisms, parachute activism, that's not going to get it done. We got too much of that. Even today, I see we've got these national spokespeople who like the parachute at the folks' localities, speak about something for a little while and then move on. But your job is to empower the people on the ground. Their job is not to elevate you; your job is to make sure that when you come to town, that you're getting the cameras put on them.

For every police shooting that we may see a brother like Ben Crump or Al Sharpton go to, we should also know the names of the leaders in those communities who are standing up and who’re taking a position, and who were fighting. We shouldn't just see our brother Al, or brother Ben, or somebody like that drop in someplace, give their speech, and then they leave. I'm not necessarily accusing them of anything. I'm just saying that the way we still got this messianic kind of approach to leadership when even the people that we've constructed, these messianic tropes around, like Dr. King. These are organic folks. These were folks who were in their communities, and they fought, they knew people, they knew who was who. You take somebody like a Fannie Lou Hamer, these people just regular ground folks, these people weren't people would try to get on MSNBC and have a show. These were people who were really trying to do the work. Now, folks who are trying to make a show, you aren't even making sure that when you leave Bug Festival, Tennessee, or wherever, the next brother or sister's going to be shot by the cops. You need to make sure that we know the names of the black folks who are on the ground, who were fighting to make sure that there's justice.