Health Highlight: Tue. 11, Apr.
Today’s Highlight(s): A look at the role of systemic-racism and it's impacts on water and sanitation access in developed countries like the US.
Health Highlights workflow is powered by Glasp.co, Neeva, and Perplexity.ai; and produced using iA Writer & Presenter.
🧠 Learn, ❤️ Like, 🤝 Share, and 📩 Subscribe!
“The effects of racism, social exclusion, and discrimination on achieving universal safe water and sanitation in high-income countries”
✍🏼 Brown, Acey, Anthonj, (et al.) • 🌐 Full Article • 📚 Glasp Highlights
BRIEF
This article discusses the often-overlooked problem of water and sanitation access in high-income countries (HICs) such as the United States. Policy decisions based on historical prejudices and financial mythos have produced access gaps and barriers, such as those observed in Indigenous and rural communities, and have resulted in large-scale public health disasters such as the Flint, Michigan, and Jackson, Mississippi water crises.
Say more
In the United States, factors such as failed treaties with Native Americans, discriminatory legislation, and practices such as Jim Crow and redlining produced and maintained systems of inequality that disproportionately harmed marginal and low-income neighborhoods, which were frequently one-in-the-same.
“As a result of racist policy and inaction in the USA, Native American households are 19 times more likely, and Black or Latin American households are nearly twice as likely, to be without functional water and wastewater access than households identifying as white.” 1
The legacies of these policies can be observed in the investment in and maintenance of infrastructure for largely minority populations, particularly when it comes to the utilization (or lack thereof) of public funding.
“The Flint water crisis is an example of how a cascade of failures by utilities and Government officials who refused to listen to community concerns exacerbated a loss of trust in water systems, both in Flint and across the USA.” 1
“The majority-Black city of Jackson (MS, USA) had a long-term interruption in water supply, from August to September, 2022. The interruption resulted from years of underinvestment, which some residents have attributed to state policies routing available federal funding to smaller communities with a high proportion of white people.” 1
Realization, reconciliation, and remedy
High-income countries, particularly the United States, take pride in an identity based on modernization and abundance. When confronted with the fact that critical components of social infrastructure are unable to supply the most basic of human needs—clean water and adequate sanitation—this narrative is contradicted.
“The myth of universal service provision—ie, that HICs have already achieved safe water and sanitation for all—results in major underinvestment in providing water and sanitation services for populations for whom access is limited, inadequate, or non-existent.” 1
What’s needed is an honest examination of the current system’s injustices, a codifying of rights for equal access to clean water and sanitation, and a rethinking of the role of government in implementing those rights, with specific concern for a future impacted by water scarcity.
“Reversing the current reality of entrenched and growing inequalities caused by systemic racism and exclusion will require the upending of financing models that rely on market forces and full-cost pricing for ratepayers to fix, maintain, and create water and sanitation infrastructure to meet community needs.” 1
“Governments should establish or reinstate national-scale, representative monitoring on water and sanitation services that includes disaggregation by race, ethnicity, income, property ownership, housing status, and other variables associated with restricted consistent access to high-quality water and sanitation services.” 1
🏷️ #WaterRights #Equity #Equality #SafeWater
Notes
“The effects of racism, social exclusion, and discrimination on achieving universal safe water and sanitation in high-income countries” https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214–109X(23)00006–2/fulltext