What the Eyes Don't See summary

Mona didn’t stay in the UK very long. When she was very young, her family moved to Michigan, where her father found a research position with the General Motors corporation. Her father was a loyal GM employee for many years, but he was one of the lucky ones. Many people ended up being fired as the company downsized in the 1980s and 90s.

Mona’s family lived relatively comfortably in the suburbs of Detroit, and Mona ended up doing four years of medical school at Michigan State University. She then did her final two years in clinical training in the town of Flint, Michigan – and promptly fell in love with the beleaguered city.

Thanks to unionization, factory workers in the United States could now enter the middle class and become part of the consumer economy. It also meant that northern cities like Flint became destinations for African Americans looking to escape the Jim Crow south and find decent employment.

In fact, from 1915 to 1960, over six million African Americans moved north in what is known as the Great Migration. But while many were able to start new lives, it wasn’t easy. Those who moved to Flint had an especially difficult road ahead.

There’s one more factor that puts Flint, Michigan in a unique position. When US cities are in financial trouble, there’s a provision that allows the state governor to install an emergency manager (EM). And this is exactly what happened in Flint in 2011.

When an EM is installed, the elected mayor is essentially stripped of his power. So while the EM is tasked with finding ways to cut costs, there’s little concern about whether these cuts will harm people. After all, since EMs aren’t elected officials, they don’t have to answer to the people, only to the governor. By 2013, EMs had been installed in Detroit and Pontiac as well as Flint. This meant that 50 percent of all African American residents in Michigan lived in cities controlled by an EM. The same applied to only two percent of Michigan’s white residents.

Every public health official should know about the dangers of lead. Simply put, it’s incredibly toxic to our minds and bodies. It poses a dangerous threat that human beings have known about for a long time.

What makes lead especially dangerous is that the symptoms of lead poisoning are not readily apparent. Plus, the effects that it can have on children, especially infants who drink baby formula mixed with lead-tainted water, are incredibly harmful and can last a lifetime.

When Mona Hanna-Attisha chose to do her clinical training in Flint, it was the first time she’d been back since visiting AutoWorld as an eight-year-old. Despite the poor reputation Flint had garnered over the years, Mona fell in love with the city, and in 2011 she became the director of the pediatric residency program at Hurley Medical Center, one of the few public hospitals left in the country.

Why did she fall in love with Flint? When she returned to the city and talked to the people, what she found was resilience. She couldn’t help but admire the people of Flint and want to help them – especially the children. 

Mona first became aware of Flint’s water problem on August 26, 2015, during a barbeque with family and friends. One of the guests was Elin, a childhood friend who now works for a think tank based in D.C.

During the barbeque, Elin pulled Mona aside and asked if she’d heard about Flint’s water issue. There had been some items here and there in the news, but the state had been consistent in issuing statements that said they’d been testing the water and everything was fine.

When Mona found out about the water problem, it was all she could think about. She tried to be present in her personal life as a wife and mother of two daughters, but she couldn’t rest while the problem was getting worse every minute of every day. The more people continued to drink and bathe in the water, the worse off everyone was.

But it is hard for poor families to avoid tap water. Not everyone has the budget for bottled water, especially when it comes to bathing kids. While these thoughts were keeping her up most nights, Mona made the difficult decision to reach out to the controversial environmental engineer Marc Edwards.

Mona presented her findings at a tense press conference on September 24, 2015. Sure enough, one of the first responses, from the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS), was that the report was simply showing seasonal changes in the water’s lead levels. They claimed that this was completely normal. Mona couldn’t believe it. Had they even bothered to read her report?

But it hadn’t fallen exclusively on deaf ears. Mona received some much-needed support from Michigan senator Jim Ananich. In particular, he liked how she had ended the press conference – by holding up a baby bottle and reminding people who the most at-risk people were in this crisis.

The ridicule did stop. When Mona awoke the morning after the press conference, her sense of doom and gloom had been replaced by a steely resolve. She knew she was right. She knew the science was solid and could stand up to any honest scrutiny.

Ultimately, this fight had never been about her. It was about Flint, the community, and keeping her patients safe. She was doing her job, and there was no one who could make her feel bad about that.

On October 1, 2015, Michigan state officials finally admitted to a problem. Sort of. They held their own press conference at which the head of MDEQ, Dan Wyant, made an unconvincing announcement. He claimed that the state now had a ten-point plan for winning back people’s confidence in their drinking water. However, he fell short of explaining how the state would accomplish this, aside from testing school drinking water.

Wyant continued to mislead the public by telling the press that Flint was using corrosion control when it wasn’t. But the Genesee County Health Department did declare a public health emergency. And on October 3, 2015, water filters were distributed to Flint residents.

What was really happening behind the scenes? Where did it all go wrong?

Thanks to persistent FOIA requests by Marc Edwards, many emails and memos from state and federal officials have become public. They suggest that environmental injustice is still a problem in the United States. Clearly, the kind of racist attitudes and policies that forced African Americans to live in the most polluted areas of Flint haven’t vanished.