Water Needs to Be Central to the #BlackLivesMatter Conversation
Minority groups need better representation in water leadership, and minority US communities need water justice.
Did you know there is a population in the United States equivalent to that of Phoenix whose members do a daily search for water to meet their basic needs?
This population is made up of mostly Native Americans on reservations, Hispanics in colonias along the U.S.-Mexico border, and African-Americans in the rural U.S. South. It has very few whites.
Can you imagine sending your daughter to school with a bucket to get water? As Catherine Coleman Flowers from the Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise told me several years ago: “Sometimes Walmart is the nearest toilet.” And the place they buy clean water.
The #BlackLivesMatter protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder late last month have transformed the national conversation about nearly every aspect of race and inequality. Water needs to be central to that conversation — specifically, representation of minority groups in water leadership, and justice for minority U.S. communities, many of which have suffered from astonishing levels of unequal access to safe drinking water and sanitation compared with white-majority communities.
Justice. On World Water Day in 2016, I attended a water summit at the White House marking the occasion. The Flint, Michigan lead and drinking water crisis had made headlines earlier that year, and US Representative Dan Kildee of Michigan explained how, in Flint, political austerity had closed the clean tap and injected lead into the brains and bodies of Flint’s children with untold and unfathomable consequences for this community’s future leaders. No mountain of data or disruptive technology could have prevented this poor judgement. And we certainly can’t pin it on climate change for a change. It was the product of environmental racism, practiced against Flint’s predominantly poor, African-American population.
Can you imagine sending your daughter to school with a bucket to get water? As Catherine Coleman Flowers from the Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise told me several years ago: “Sometimes Walmart is the nearest toilet.” And the place they buy clean water.
— John Sabo
Problems such as Flint can’t be solved with just technology. We need to build community capacity to operate and service the technology, as well as meet the data challenges of monitoring that technology in real time and getting alerts out to the community when the system isn’t working properly. These are challenges all big U.S. cities face. They mirror the challenges of delivering clean water and sanitation to low-income countries. We need to dramatically improve access and also study the process by which access works.
Representation. But as I looked across the room of 150 guests at the summit, I could count on my two hands the number of guests who were not white. Catherine Flowers, whose work concentrates on providing basic sanitation services and water access to Americans living in the U.S. South, was one of only three African-Americans at the meeting.
Training a more diverse New American water workforce and leadership needs to be the goal of every state university system in America.
— John Sabo
This inequity in representation four years ago at a White House summit reflected reality on the ground then — and reflects it now. There just are not enough Hispanic, African-American and Native American water leaders that we can point to today, or invite to a summit, much less partner with on research, innovation and investment for creating water abundance for all. The world of water leadership — in policy, management and research — continues to be overwhelmingly white, male and over age 50: the “silver tsunami,” as some call it.
Training a more diverse New American water workforce and leadership needs to be the goal of every state university system in America. Without many, many more leaders such as Catherine Flowers, we will continue to struggle to see the next Flint. Without it, we cannot pretend we are solving our water problems for all, or at all.
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