What the Eyes Don’t See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City

Dr. Mona’s first visit to Flint was on a childhood trip to AutoWorld, an indoor amusement park built to make the town attractive to tourists. The amusement park did not live up to this scheme, closing a few months after its opening. Mona also remembers watching American filmmaker and Flint native Michael Moore’s documentary Roger and Me. The documentary chronicles Moore’s pursuit of GM CEO Roger B. Smith to confront him about the harm he did to Flint by downsizing the plant. It was not until medical school, however, that Mona realized she wanted to practice medicine in the city. Despite the bad press and depressing economic and social statistics, Flint residents continue to fight back against the numerous injustices they face daily. As Mona notes, she “came to Flint for its hope, but also for its lessons, both terrible and beautiful” (118).

One of these lessons is Flint workers coming together and taking action against labor exploitation and injustices. The GM plant denied autoworkers basic rights, including overtime pay and medical compensation, and forced them to work in dangerous conditions. The workers organized the Flint Sit-Down Strike (1936-1937), where they barricaded themselves inside a plant and refused to vacate. This strike brought GM to its knees. The company agreed to pay the workers living wages and provide decent benefits, leading to the creation of a middle class.

The expansion of the middle class came at a cost to the city, and especially its African American residents. It led to greater housing demand. GM decided to build plants in the suburbs, where taxes were lower, which would attract residents to the suburbs and solve the housing crisis. This suburban exodus of residents, however, were primarily all white individuals and families. During the same time period, restrictive housing covenants forced African American families to live only in certain neighborhoods, and there were also discriminatory home selling, lending, and education practices. GM’s corporate greed along with decades of racist policies created modern Flint. 

Elin, who Dr. Mona was in regular contact with, continued to work behind the scenes to marshal political support, including that of Dan Kildee, who represented Flint in Congress. She maintained that lack of congressional representation prolonged and worsened the DC water crisis. She hoped Representative Kildee’s support could bolster her and Dr. Mona’s political clout, ensuring that more people took the Flint water crisis seriously. Kildee’s legislative director on Capitol Hill, Jordan Dickinson, reached out to Dr. Mona almost immediately and “was on board and had the complete support of his boss” (132).

Marc Edwards and his Virginia Tech research team also released additional results from their citizen water testing project. The headline of Edwards’s report was “FLINT HAS A VERY SERIOUS LEAD IN WATER PROBLEM” (132). The report detailed that a significant number of Flint households had lead levels above 15 parts per billion (ppb), the number deemed safe by the federal government, although Dr. Mona points out that no level of lead is truly safe. These findings horrified both Dr. Mona and Elin and they thought this report would jolt the county and state into action. Dr. Mona expressed an interest in meeting Edwards, but Elin initially cautioned against this meeting. She told Mona that people in the water business were afraid of him, and that the DC water crisis had left him “emotionally and psychologically damaged” (133).

Dr. Mona also continued to focus on the blood-lead data from Hurley, along with Jenny LaChance, a research coordinator at the clinic. They, with help from the Community Pediatric residents, designed a research study which examined blood-lead levels before and after the water switch and controlled for where the children lived. The preliminary results indicated that there were higher lead levels since the 2014 water switch. However, the small sample size concerned Dr. Mona, because critics could say the study was not robust enough, casting doubt on the findings. Jenny and Dr. Mona realized they could bypass the county and state health department, since Hurley processed the blood-lead tests for the entire county. Because Dr. Mona was the director of the residency program at Hurley, she had the authority to review data from all patients at the clinic. They would need Hurley’s institutional review board (IRB), a type of committee that makes sure research conducted on humans follows ethical guidelines, to approve the study.

According to Dr. Mona, “there is no greater public health enemy” (146) than Charles Franklin Kettering, an engineer and inventor who headed GM’s research department from 1920-1947. Kettering was also the driving force behind the introduction of tetra-ethyl lead (TEL) as a gasoline additive. TEL is extremely dangerous to humans. The US War Department tested it as a nerve gas and found that just five teaspoons applied to human skin could be deadly. This finding, however, did not stop GM or Kettering, because the addition of TEL enabled greater efficiency of car engines.

An anti-lead movement rose with the announcement of this “new ‘improved’ gasoline” (148). One of its pioneers was Alice Hamilton, a social justice activist, medical doctor, and professor who studied occupational illnesses and the dangerous effects of industrial metals, including lead, on the human body. Hamilton pushed GM to find a safer alternative to TEL. The surgeon general at the time called a conference to resolve the lead-in-gasoline controversy in 1925. GM’s primary medical expert, Dr. Robert Kehoe, concluded his testimony at the conference by stating that “GM would discontinue use of TEL immediately if it could be proven to be harmful” (151). This statement, which became known as Kehoe’s Paradigm or the Kehoe Rule, established a new precedent that forced public health officials to prove harm before legal action could be taken against dangerous health practices. The surgeon general then put together a committee to investigate TEL. The committee found that TEL’s danger to human health was unproven. The costs of this decision have been incalculable to the environment and human bodies. To Dr. Mona, Kettering committed one of the greatest environmental crimes in US history, adding more lead to the environment and to children’s blood.

Medical scientists have demonstrated time and time again that “there is no safe level of lead in the human body” (156). Because of the significant decline in children’s blood lead levels over the last several decades, many public health officials believe lead is no longer a health issue. But these officials assume that paint and paint dust are the only household items that might contain harmful lead levels. Many did not know that lead might occur in water. In fact, millions of water pipes in the US are made from lead, and the majority of them are found in older, low-income, and minority neighborhoods. Despite knowing how crucial it is to protect children from lead exposure, the federal government has done little to regulate lead in water.