The collapse of the water system in Jackson, Mississippi, has brought forth cries of “environmental racism.” Less loud are the questions and condemnations for the Democrats that have been running Jackson since 1949.
CNN has repeatedly referred to the water crisis as a case of environmental racism. CBS News interviewed Donna Ladd, the editor and co-founder of the Jackson Free Press, who wanted to make it clear that people shouldn’t “zoom in on easy causes.” To criticize the city’s leadership, which is mostly black, would be racist, you see?
“The bottom line is that, as an urban city that’s now over 80% black, that has happened over time and over white flight and cycles of white flight,” Ladd said. “This is a systemic structural and even institutional racist problem at its core, no matter what happens on top of it and who individually we can critique.”
Don’t criticize the Democratic leaders who have been running this city for the “decades” that this has been a problem. Blame something vague, like a specter of racism looming over the city thanks to “white flight." Isn’t that convenient?
The Mississippi Free Press lays out the issue much more clearly. The Environmental Protection Agency has long been raising the alarm over the city’s failure to put any effort into hiring new employees, including qualified water operators and basic maintenance personnel. According to reporter Nick Judin, the intervention from the state’s Republican government “comes in the absence of a fully implemented crisis plan on the part of the city.”
CNN’s Maya Brown tried anyway to lay this at the feet of Republicans. She tried to blame the GOP for only allotting $3 million instead of the city’s requested amount of $47 million. But the mayor said it would take $2 billion to fully repair the city's “dated” system, which has been a problem since the 1900s.
"It's structural environmental racism and definitely not Democrat mayors and legislatures appropriating funds meant to keep up the water filtration system and slushing it through public union delegates and social justice advocates instead."
— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) August 31, 2022
Of the last 122 years, Democratic governors have run Mississippi for 96 of them. The state only had GOP governors from 1992-2000 and then from 2004 to now. Brown highlights the mayoral term of Harvey Johnson and notes that the water problems and “lack of federal and state resources” left its water system a concern when he left office in 2005, after nearly 100 years of Democratic control of Mississippi and nearly 60 years of complete Democratic control of Jackson.
The “dated” system that has been an issue for “decades” going back to the 1900s is something Democrats could have fixed at any time. The failures to hire staff for and maintain the city’s water system, which the EPA has detailed, were failures by the city’s Democratic leadership.
Individuals are responsible for these failures — not some unnamed, all-encompassing concept like “systemic environmental racism.” That's just a smokescreen to cover for Democratic politicians failing to do their jobs properly.