June 23, 2022 47who deserve a say in determining the
course of their lives.
Too often, of course, recognition does
not flow as it should: instead we find our-
selves victims of a kind of “misrecogni-
tion” that does not assist us in realizingwho we are but delivers us over to dis-
tortions that do damage to our sense of
identity and self- worth.^2 When a viola-tion goes unacknowledged or the cry of
suffering goes unheard, when a claim for
asylum is rejected or citizenship is denied,or when poverty is treated as something
natural and deserved, we can say that the
stream of recognition has been brought
to a stop. Our social life can truly flourish
only where recognition obtains. With-
out it we are rendered invisible. Q(^2) On the problem of misrecognition and
a critique of the Hegelian theory, see
Patchen Markell, Bound by Recogni-
tion (Princeton University Press, 2003).
Dire Straits
Scott W. Stern
Toxic Debt: An Environmental
Justice History of Detroit
by Josiah Rector.
University of North Carolina Press,
314 pp., $95.00; $29.95 (paper)
The environmental justice movement—
the fight of Black, brown, immigrant,
indigenous, and poor communities to
free themselves of unequal environ-
mental burdens (dirty air, unclean
water, toxic chemicals, etc.)— is often
said to have begun in late 1978, when
a group of Black homeowners in Hous-
ton hired the attorney Linda McKeever
Bullard to halt the opening of a landfill
just feet from their local public school.
In 1982 Black residents of Warren
County, North Carolina, launched a
sit- in campaign to protest their expo-
sure to toxic chemicals, generating
headlines nationwide. Throughout the
1980s and early 1990s, major studies
conducted by the federal government,
the United Church of Christ, and the
sociologist Robert Bullard (the Hous-
ton attorney’s husband) documented
the disproportionate location of
dumps and landfills in Black neighbor-
hoods— a phenomenon that came to be
called “environmental racism.”
In 1991 the First National People
of Color Environmental Leadership
Summit met in the nation’s capital,
and within a few years various federal
agencies had committed (at least on
paper) to the movement’s goals. While
scholars have noted the importance
of earlier events— the 1968 sanitation
workers’ strike in Memphis (at which
Martin Luther King Jr. spoke just be-
fore his assassination) or the United
Farm Workers’ campaigns to eliminate
pesticides during the 1960s— the move-
ment is nonetheless generally thought
to have originated in the 1980s and
1990s and in the urban South.
In Toxic Debt: An Environmental
Justice History of Detroit, Josiah Rec-
tor, who teaches at the University of
Houston, instead looks northward to
Detroit and its environs. As a gradu-
ate student at Wayne State University
in Detroit a decade ago, he first came
across records that charted the city’s
rich and often overlooked history of
environmental justice organizing. It
was also in Detroit that Rector, a white
newcomer in a city that is nearly 80 per-
cent Black, witnessed one of the most
naked displays of environmental injus-
tice in recent memory.
Beginning in 2014, the City of De-
troit shut off the water of more than a
quarter- million people. Starting at the
same time, authorities in nearby Flint
made a series of cost- cutting decisions
that resulted in lead- laced water being
pumped into thousands of homes. As-
tonishingly, Detroit’s water has been
so foul for so long that its rate of child-
hood lead poisoning is twice as high as
Flint’s— despite the fact that the city is
surrounded by the largest freshwater
system in the world. During Rector’s
time there, moreover, Detroit recorded
the highest rate of childhood asthma
among the nation’s largest cities. A 2017
study estimates that air pollution causes
7 percent of all deaths in Detroit— more
than twice the city’s rate of homicide.
After interviewing activists and
immersing himself in the region’s ar-
chives, Rector concluded that the
“existing literature on environmental
justice did not give me the conceptual
vocabulary I needed to make sense
of what I was seeing in Detroit,” both
past and present. A decade later, he has
written a book that advances two major
interventions. First, it pushes back the
environmental justice movement’s
genesis to midcentury union organiz-
ing. Second, and just as significantly, it
firmly connects the effects of debt and
austerity— that is to say, capitalism— to
environmental racism.
“While most environmental justice
studies examine communities on the
‘fence line’ of billowing smokestacks
and toxic waste dumps,” Rector writes,
“finance and real estate have been
no less historically implicated in ra-
cialized environmental injustice than
heavy industry.” Toxic Debt concretely
documents this history by recovering
the voices, names, and actions of indi-
viduals whose fights have been forgot-
ten or buried.
It is an especially dark irony that, for
hundreds of years, access to water was
central to the identity of the place now
called Detroit. To the Huron- Wyandot
people, this flat expanse of land was
Taochiarontkion, or “the coast of the
strait.” To the Anishinaabe, it was
Waawiiyaataanong, or “where the
water curves around.” To the first
French settlers arriving at the dawn of
the eighteenth century, it was simply Le
détroit, or “the strait.”
The colonizers from France brought
not merely a new name but new dis-
eases, new systems of violence, and
new methods for exploiting the ar-
ea’s natural resources. From their
first days, they dumped refuse and
raw sewage into the tributaries of the
Detroit River. Their pollution was so
prolific that early- nineteenth- century
observers compared the city’s water to
a sewer. As more settlers arrived, well
water came to be insufficient to slake
the city’s thirst. In 1805 municipal au-
thorities began charging for access
to public water, and in 1853 the state
legislature created a Board of Water
Commissioners. Officials laid dozens
of miles of water pipes, mostly in the
whiter and more affluent parts of town.
Immigrants, Black people, and those
on the city’s outskirts were forced to
drink less sanitary water.
Throughout the nineteenth century,
the continued presence of sewage in
the water led to repeated outbreaks of
disease. A particularly deadly bout of
typhoid fever in 1892 coincided with
a debilitating economic panic in 1893
and increased labor radicalism among
the working class; as unemployment
climbed to 33 percent in 1894, pressure
mounted on the city’s elite to provide
safe and affordable drinking water. In
1895 the populist mayor Hazen Pin-
gree ran for reelection on a platform
of eliminating all fees for water access.
He won by a wide margin, sweeping all
wards except the wealthiest. Yet Mich-
igan’s industrialists decried what they
called “state socialism,” and ultimately
they killed Pingree’s proposal.
In the first years of the twentieth cen-
tury, the cause of safer drinking water
was picked up by bourgeois reform-
ers. In 1913 Detroit began chlorinat-
ing its water supply, and in the 1920s
it inaugurated a filtration system. The
sewer system was gradually expanded,
though it was not until 1940 that the
city began treating its sewage and not
until 1942 that it finally recorded zero
deaths from typhoid.
With industrialization came rapid
growth. In the first three decades of the
twentieth century, Detroit’s geographic
area and population both swelled five-
fold; the Black population increased
twentyfold between 1910 and 1930, as
people fled north to escape the indig-
nities and terrors of Jim Crow. Housing
discrimination forced these migrants
to live in the least sanitary parts of
the city. Ironically, growth also led the
authorities to call for the demolition
The Detroit Renewable Power waste incinerator, located on the city’s predominantly
Black east side, a year after it closed down, October 2020
Jim West /Alamy
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