52 pages • 1 hour read
Mona Hanna-AttishaWhat the Eyes Don’t See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 5-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “Red Flags”
This chapter summarizes the red flags that journalists, Flint residents, and government employees raised regarding the lead levels in Flint’s water. One example is that of LeeAnne Walters, a mother and resident of Flint’s south side. A few months after the water switch, her family experienced rashes, abdominal pain, hair loss, and one of her children stopped growing. Even with flushing, a guideline recommended by MDEQ, the Walters’ water had astronomically high lead levels. There were also elevated lead levels in her children’s blood. Walters notified the city of her children’s high blood-lead levels, but city officials blamed her household plumbing since the city’s water tests showed it in compliance with federal regulations. To provide the family with lead-free water, the city arranged for a garden hose to run from a neighbor’s house to Walters’ house. However, the plumbing was not the lead source. Walters installed new plumbing made of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) when the family moved in.
Walters eventually contacted Del Toral and told him her research-grounded hypothesis: the city was not using corrosion control, and the corrosive water was leaching lead from the water pipes. Based on the lack of corrosion control chemicals on the city’s publicly available list of chemicals used to treat Flint’s water, Walters was right. The city was in breach of federal law. Del Toral followed up with MDEQ, but the agency continued to pushback. His leaked memo details of the water testing he conducted in LeeAnne Walters’s home, which led him to conclude that “Flint could be facing an epic water crisis” (59). Instead of an investigation into the water crisis taking place, EPA and MDEQ officials second-guessed his results. Del Toral gave his memo to Walters, who leaked it to a Detroit investigative reporter named Curt Guyette.
Dr. Mona was angry with the government for their gross indifference to the water situation. She was also angry with herself. Her responsibility as a pediatrician is to advocate for her kids to keep them safe and healthy. Yet, over the last year, she failed to do this by telling parents that the Flint water was safe. Dr. Mona knew she had to take a stance to protect the Flint kids from further harm.
Chapter 6 Summary: “First Encounter”
To Mona, “we don’t think enough about what lies beneath the veneer of the places where we grew up” (72). She uses Royal Oak, the Detroit suburb where she and her brother Mark grew up, as an example. Royal Oak had a dark history. The suburb served as the base of operations for Monsignor Charles Coughlin (Father Coughlin), a Canadian-American Roman Catholic priest, who was one of the first political leaders to use radio to reach the American public. In the 1930s, he became one of the most influential voices of the time. His radio programs spewed hate and anti-Semitism, and he promoted the racist and nationalistic policies of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Emperor Hirohito of Japan. The local post office, which sorted Mona’s family’s mail, was built to process Father Coughlin’s huge volume of fan mail. None of Mona’s history classes in Royal Oak taught about Father Coughlin. Mona learned from her parents to always dig deeper to better understanding the world and not be afraid of the findings. This lesson drove Mona to continue to expose the Flint water crisis.
Mona’s first meeting with an employee from the Genesee County Health Department serendipitously takes place the day after she learned about lead in Flint’s water. The employee oversaw lead in the county. The original purpose of the meeting was to discuss lead poisoning in kids from old paint and paint dust, an ongoing concern in Flint due to the old age of homes, and required cleaning supplies for families to help them remove the lead. Dr. Mona raised the subject of lead in Flint’s water at the end of the meeting, citing Del Toral’s leaked memo. The health department employee said that water was not his jurisdiction, that no one had looked at blood-lead-level data for the kids in the county, and then left. Mona did not give up but decided to email his supervisors at the county health department. In the email, she expressed her concerns that there could be an increase in childhood lead poisoning from Flint’s water.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Miasma”
Dr. Mona strongly believes that science is about making lives better. Scientists should not stand passively on the sidelines, especially when they know something is negatively impacting people and their community. Mona tells the story of three individuals who felt duty bound to share their work and make a difference. The first individual is 19th century physician John Snow who, challenged the prevailing miasmatic theory that breathing stagnant air spread cholera. Instead, he believed the disease spread via unsanitary drinking water. His research supported his hypothesis. Snow traced high mortality rates to one community’s water pump; however, his conclusions were not broadly accepted until after his death.
The second individual is Paul Shekwana, a distant cousin of Mona’s and a bacteriologist. He researched sanitation, drinking water, and food safety. One of his most important contributions was an article published in 1906 which urged doctors to practice handwashing before and after seeing patients. Hand hygiene saves millions of lives each year. Mona’s family also has a letter in which Shekwana warns residents to not use a certain well because of poor water quality. Shekwana’s death continues to mesmerize Dr. Mona’s family because it was untimely and mysterious. Murder is one possibility, due to the bad news he spread about germs and water quality, as is suicide, possibly from a broken heart.
While urban poverty is less lethal today than in Snow and Shekwana’s times, the environmental stressors from city-living still negatively impact children who carry these injustices with them for the rest of their lives. No one understands this better than Marc Edwards, a Virginia Tech civil engineering professor who helped expose the unsafe lead levels in DC’s drinking water. Both Walters and Del Toral invited Edwards to Flint where he began “‘citizen testing’” (92) of the lead levels in Flint’s water. These tests all found high levels of lead in the water. MDEQ once again pushed back and continued to say that Flint’s drinking water met state and federal standards. After her discussion with Elin and the citizen testing results, Dr. Mona recommended only bottled water to her Flint patients. She also began to see lead poisoning signs in her patients, increasing her frustration with the lack of governmental response.
Chapters 5-7 Analysis
In Chapters 5-7, Dr. Mona provides readers with the political and scientific context to understand the public health crisis in Flint. Public health funding is inconsistently allocated in Michigan. As a result, counties and municipalities rely on their own tax bases, mainly property taxes, to maintain services. Poorer counties have smaller revenues from property taxes compared to wealthier ones, leading to wide disparities in health protection for Michigan residents. Making matters worse for Flint residents is that the state has cut resource allocations to the city for years. This means that the city had trouble maintaining and updating its old underground water system. Because of this, many of the city pipes leaked, leading to Flint residents paying the highest rates in the entire country for water. As readers find out later in the book, these high utility bills are partly why many residents did not flush their water, which was one of the directives made by the state’s health department.
One of the most shocking aspects of this section of the book is the number of red flags that city and state officials ignored. From the DC water crisis, water specialists and government officials knew that “water treatment is an art” (62) and required massive sampling when any water source switches were made. Despite knowing this, and the horrible impacts lead poisoning had on so many DC residents, city and state officials did not sample the Flint water like they should have. Furthermore, even when renowned water experts, such as Miguel Del Toral and Marc Edwards, investigated Flint’s water and concluded that it contained lead, government authorities continued to proclaim that the water was safe for drinking. The author is very upfront about her liberal views, which might turn off less-liberal readers, especially when she discusses environmental injustices and greater government involvement. Yet, chapters 5-7, which are grounded in history and science, show that entire families and communities are being hurt by institutions that were built on racist policies and officials simply accepting these inequalities.
Dr. Mona also makes clear in these chapters that she stands on the shoulders of giants. Part of why Mona spends so much time discussing Flint residents, including LeAnne Walters, Miguel Del Toral, Marc Edwards, John Snow, and Dr. Paul Shekwana is to illustrate that she was not the first or only person to care or take a stand against water crises. The expression she routinely uses throughout the book, “the eyes don’t see what the mind doesn’t know” (22), sums up these activists’ struggles to get their concerns heard by their colleagues and the broader public. For the Flint giants, they were up against research and policy that had primarily focused on reducing lead exposure in children from lead paint and lead in gasoline only. Many pediatricians, public health experts, and government officials did not believe that lead in water was a serious public health issue. With the blood lead-levels data, Dr. Mona and her team were able to scientifically demonstrate that lead from water could get into children’s bodies.
