Toxic Water, Toxic System: Environmental Racism and Michigan’s Water War

The tireless resistance of local communities fighting for ownership of America’s third largest water system

Toxic Water, Toxic System exposes the consequences of a seemingly anonymous authoritarian state willing to maintain white supremacy at any cost--including poisoning an entire city and shutting off water to thousands of people. Weaving together narratives of frontline activists along with archival data, Michael Mascarenhas provides a powerful exploration of the political alliances and bureaucratic mechanisms that uphold inequality.

Drawing from three years of ethnographic fieldwork in Flint and Detroit, this book amplifies the voices of marginalized communities, particularly African American women, whose perspectives and labor have been consistently overlooked. Toxic Water, Toxic System offers a fresh perspective on the ties between urban austerity policies, environmental harm, and the advancement of white supremacist agendas in predominantly Black and brown cities.

Michael Mascarenhas is Professor of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of New Humanitarianism and the Crisis of Charity: Good Intentions on the Road to Help and Where the Waters Divide: Neoliberalism, White Privilege, and Environmental Racism in Canada.