Flint Water Crisis Case Study

The water crisis in Flint Michigan was a travesty of justice and could have been avoided. While examining this unfortunate incidence, the truth of what happened is clear, conscience and deplorable that the choice in cost-cutting measures would lead to contaminated water that was harmful to many.

The water crisis could have happened in any town or city in America, or could it. However, Flint, Michigan a place 70 miles north of Detroit, which once thrived as the home of the nation’s largest General Motors plant, and according to the 2016 US Census Bureau Report, “41.2% of the residents now live below the poverty line and 56.6% are African American.”

Flint, Michigan’s economic decline when GM downsized its industrial plant represents Auguste Comte’s coined term Sociology, as in this crisis, the study of social behavior, groups, attitudes and how a society develop and change were examined, dominated the headlines and reported on around the world for months.

CNN reports in the Flint Water Crisis Fast Facts, “in order to reduce the water fund shortfall, the city switched water sources, after an audit projected a $25 million deficit, and the water fund was declared solvent and the remaining deficit was eliminated by an emergency loan.” C. Wright Mills’ sociological imagination was

DuBois (1868-1963) and African American contributor to sociology who speaks of the Double Consciousness division of individual’s identity into two or more social realities. In Flint or Philadelphia: How the Michigan Water Crisis echoes Du Bois and “The Philadelphia Negro”, which mirrors Du Bois thoughts for a racially egalitarian society, combating prejudice and the study of urban life. Du Bois addresses many subjects concerning African Americans and it is noted in Flint or Philadelphia that “black people in the US are at greater risk of harm than whites because of built-in prejudices. The economic culture of the US left many of them behind and forced to live in unsafe