June 23, 2022 49narrative of the rise and fall of a labor–
environmental– civil rights coalition.
But he continues the story to the pres-
ent day and addresses many modern
battles and controversies, including the
increasing centrality of municipal debt
to Detroit’s environmental catastrophe.
On the day the Environmental Lead-
ership Summit opened in Washington,
D.C., Detroit finalized the sale of a mu-
nicipal incinerator to the financial ser-
vices subsidiary of tobacco giant Philip
Morris, in a deal brokered by Goldman
Sachs. Over the next thirty years, this
incinerator belched hundreds of thou-
sands of pounds of toxic chemicals into
a predominantly Black neighborhood
on Detroit’s East Side.
Rector uses this incinerator, and the
battles over it, to exemplify how cuts in
federal aid, metropolitan segregation, an
evaporating urban tax base, and Reagan-
era regulatory policy (including a change
in the acceptable level of cancer risk) all
made Detroit more dependent on such
public- private partnerships. Deindustri-
alization had emptied the city’s coffers,
and Mayor Young— who was in office
from 1974 until 1994— and other mu-
nicipal leaders who held on to power for
decades capitulated to wealthy private
investors while describing environmen-
talists as Detroit- bashers, outside agita-
tors, and racists. The incinerator deal
was an attempt to dig Detroit out from
under tens of millions of dollars of
debt, but the tax breaks the deal guar-
anteed to investors ultimately indebted
the city even further.
Rector also tracks resistance to sites
like the incinerator, which pitted a
Black mayor and City Council major-
ity against a predominantly white en-
vironmental coalition—its makeup, he
argues, reflected “the collapse of labor-
environmental coalition politics after
Black Lake.” Activists, including new
ecofeminist groups, attempted through
civil disobedience to shutter the incin-
erator, but the UAW refused to con-
demn it. And while some activists of
color and rank- and- file union members
participated in anti- incinerator actions,
the opposition lacked a multiracial,
cross- class base.
In recent decades, Detroit’s lead-
ers have slowly hollowed out the city’s
municipal workforce, laying off union
members and relying more and more on
private contractors. This has coincided
with a rise in water costs and billing
irregularities. At the federal and state
levels, Clintonite politicians “reformed”
the welfare system and deregulated big
banks. Such policies led to the with-
drawal of vital support from many poor
Detroiters, as well as the proliferation
of subprime mortgages (disproportion-
ately targeted at people of color), the re-
sultant financial crash of 2008, and then
a collapse in property values. Working-
class Detroiters could not afford their
property taxes, in part because officials
continued to assess properties at their
pre- 2008 levels, and between 2011 and
2015 the city foreclosed on more than
100,000 homes.
The federal government intervened
to protect the predatory banks and
failing auto companies but offered no
similar benefit to struggling homeown-
ers; its unwillingness to regulate credit
default swaps and derivatives even in
the aftermath of 2008 “contributed di-
rectly to Detroit’s municipal fiscal cri-
sis,” Rector writes. Escalating debt, in
turn, resulted in continued water rate
hikes.In 2011, with cities across Michigan
deep in debt, the state legislature en-
acted a law that radically expanded the
power of emergency managers (state
officials appointed to oversee munici-
palities in fiscal crisis), allowing them
to effectively override the authority of
all elected officials in a city and suspend
all collective bargaining by municipal
employees for five years. In 2013 Mich-
igan governor Rick Snyder appointed a
bankruptcy attorney, Kevyn Orr (from
the corporate firm Jones Day, which
represented several of the Wall Street
banks that had been directly involved
in Detroit’s housing and debt crises),
as emergency manager for Detroit.
Months later, Orr filed for bankruptcy
on behalf of the city, citing an inflated
debt load, and hired his former firm to
manage the bankruptcy.
The “grand bargain” that Jones Day
crafted (and for which it earned tens of
millions of dollars in legal fees) ensured
that banks and other “secured” credi-
tors were fully paid, while city pension-
ers and municipal departments faced
cuts.^1 Orr embarked on a privatization
crusade, even seeking to privatize the
city’s water department. He failed, but
soon he leased the department to a re-
gional compact, wresting control of the
city’s water from its residents for the
first time in nearly two centuries.
In early 2014, amid Orr’s assaults, the
water department “began the most ag-
gressive water shutoff policy yet,” Rec-
tor writes. Over the next five years, as
rate hikes made water increasingly un-
affordable, this necessity was shut off for
at least 300,000 people. Epidemiologists
noted a spike in water- borne disease
and gastrointestinal ailments in areas
affected by the shutoffs, which were dis-
proportionately poor and Black.
Meanwhile, in 2013 an emergency
manager in Flint, seeking to cut costs,
led the city to switch its water source
from piped- in treated water to the Flint
River. Because the river was high in
corrosive matter, toxic lead and cop-
per began to leach from pipes, leading
to Flint’s water poisoning crisis. Yet
this problem was not confined to Flint.
Rector tracks how cuts to state lead-
abatement programs, as well as the De-
troit emergency manager’s outsourcing
of its school maintenance and engi-
neering to private contractors, exacer-
bated toxic levels of lead and copper in
that city’s water supply as well.
Rector traces how redlining, white
flight, banking deregulation, disinvest-
ment, austerity, welfare reform, voter
disenfranchisement, and ultimately the
“suspension of democracy in Michi-
gan’s Black- majority cities” combined
to create the “interconnected water
disasters” for hundreds of thousands
of people. By 2014, half of Michigan’s
Black residents— but just 2 percent of
its white residents— lived in cities gov-
erned by unelected emergency manag-
ers. “The dehydration of Detroit and
the poisoning of Flint were the logical
outcomes of policies that prioritized
the repayment of toxic debt over the
lives of the urban poor,” he concludes.Toxic Debt i s a n out st a nd i ng book, but
it would be wrong to overlook its own
debt to decades of pathbreaking schol-
arship. In the 1970s and 1980s activist-historians excavated the long- buried
histories of Black labor radicalism in
Detroit; in the 1990s and early 2000s,
scholars used Detroit as a microcosm to
understand how racism made and un-
made American cities. More recently,
journalists and academics have mined
new archives to tell “people’s histories”
of Black and working- class Detroiters.
Rector’s work builds on generations of
scholarly labor, marrying the most in-
fluential urban and labor histories with
a quickly growing library of books that
trace the genealogies of environmental
racism and injustice.
Still, omissions remain, including
the legacy of colonization and indig-
enous resistance to it. Early in Toxic
Debt, Rector describes Ojibwe indi-
viduals and activists in the 1900s and
1910s asserting territorial claims to
Belle Isle, an island surrounded by the
Detroit River, but they then largely
disappear from his book. Such neglect
of indigenous history is most certainly
not Rector’s alone; while recent books
by scholars like Nick Estes and Dina
Gilio- Whitaker have done vital work
in recovering the legacies of indigenous
environmental justice activism, much
is left to be brought to light.^2 A par-
tial explanation for this absence is un-
doubtedly the limitations imposed by
what survives in conventional archives.
Unions like the UAW left behind meet-
ing minutes, correspondence, even their
own newspapers. Indigenous communi-
ties resisting American empire or en-
slaved families striving for clean water
rarely left traces in written records, and
almost never in their own words.
Nonetheless, Rector’s book is relent-
lessly clear- eyed in its focus on contem-
porary injustice and resistance. His final
substantive chapter describes the strate-
gies employed by Detroit activists in the
mid- 2000s and the 2010s, including their
creation of alternative food, energy, and
water systems. His epilogue examines
the Green New Deal in historical per-
spective, spotlighting the increasing
support for it among industrial union
members, and ends with a brief but il-
luminating discussion of climate justice
organizing in Detroit. “It is difficult to
survey the human suffering in frontline
communities,” he writes, “without con-
cluding that decarbonization must be
implemented synergistically with pol-
icies that address the ongoing crises of
poverty, inequality, and racial dispari-
ties in the United States.”
Robert Bullard— one of the environ-
mental justice movement’s pioneers—
recently noted that four decades ago,
“the concept of environmental jus-
tice was a mere footnote.” Now it’s “a
headline.” This is emblematic of the
enormous potential— and danger— of
the moment in which we’re living. In-
tentionally or not, Rector’s conclusion
echoes the UN’s Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change, which ar-
gued a few years ago that our only
hope of avoiding the most catastrophic
impacts of climate change will require
transforming the toxic world economy
at a speed and a scale that has “no doc-
umented historic precedent.” Q(^1) See Caitlin Zaloom, “The Broken
Promise of Retirement,” The New
York Review, July 1, 2021.
(^2) See Nick Estes, Our History Is the Fu-
ture: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota
Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition
of Indigenous Resistance (Verso, 2019);
and Dina Gilio- Whitaker, As Long As
Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for
Environmental Justice, from Coloniza-
tion to Standing Rock (Beacon, 2020).
New York Review Books
congratulates Vincent Kling
and Sophie R. Lewis on
their translation prizes!
Vincent Kling, winner of the
Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s
Prize, for his translation of
The Strudlhof Steps by
Heimito von Doderer.
Sophie R. Lewis, co-winner of
the 35th Annual French-American
Translation Prize for Nonfiction†
for her translation of In the Eye of
the Wild by Nastassja Martin.
Funded by the German government,
the Prize has been administered by the
Goethe-Institut New York since 2015.
†The French-American Translation Prize
is generously funded by the Florence
Gould Foundation.
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