Michael Harriot - White Water Welfare: Jackson, Baltimore and the other racial wealth gap

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OPINION: The water crises plaguing Black communities are less about poverty, infrastructure or municipal ineptitude than they are about Black taxpayers subsidizing white wealth.

✍🏾Michael Harriot

thegrio.com
White Water Welfare: Jackson, Baltimore and the other racial wealth gap
OPINION: The water crises plaguing Black communities are less about poverty, infrastructure or municipal ineptitude than they are about Black taxpayers subsidizing white wealth.
9:00 AM · Sep 8, 2022

https://thegrio.com/2022/09/08/white-water-welfare-jackson-baltimore-and-the-other-racial-wealth-gap/


It’s Baltimore’s turn.

Now that the residents of Jackson, Miss., have water pressure after residents of the city spent days without service, the city of Baltimore is experiencing its own water crisis. Late Wednesday night, the city’s Department of Public Works finally lifted an order to boil water that had been in place for three days in parts of West Baltimore and Baltimore County due to an E. coli contamination in the municipal water supply.

Baltimore officials have yet to offer an official explanation on why people who have paid their water bill don’t have water but there are a ton of online articles explaining why Jackson is beleaguered with a water crisis. It’s about white flight. It’s about crumbling infrastructure and the city getting swindled out of millions of dollars. It’s about Mississippi’s legislature being controlled by white lawmakers who refuse to give “free money.”

Clean and safe drinking water isn’t just a natural resource; it’s a commodity that is becoming increasingly valuable in many parts of America. And while the prevailing narrative would lead one to believe that these communities are filled with impoverished Black people who can’t afford the costs of maintaining its infrastructure and paying for water, the truth is, these are just the latest example of a crisis facing Black communities across America.

To understand what happened in Jackson and Baltimore and what is going on in majority-Black cities across America that don’t have access to the most abundant liquid on Earth, we must first stop trying to fix this with “thought and prayers.” It is not even about money or resources. It’s about theft. It’s about economics. It’s about white privilege and economic inequality.

It’s about welfare for white people.

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