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"We are all Flint." Toxicity is generalized, spoken of as an issue impacting everyone equally. Much like "All Lives Matter," it presumes that toxicity has consequences for all who drink water. This statement is professionalized: according to doctors, journalists, and activisits, lead is an ongoing presence in everyday lives of all Americans, especially in older cities. Yet this discounts the fact that America is a place built on enduring racial and economic inequalities.

Toxic solidarities? When does solidarity take a toxic turn?The toxicity in this case is actually a misrepresentation of the toxicity itself. In an effort to promote solidarity and attention after the Flint water crisis, activists across the country argued “We are all Flint.” This statement argued that we (how is the we visualized in an American context? Nicole Fleetwood’s Intro to Troubling Vision: performance, Visuality, and Blackness might be good to think with this) are all vulnerable to toxicity in our water. Fennel argues this whitewashes the crisis in Flint.

In this case, the toxicity isn’t necessarily the chemicals themselves, but the imposed mismanagement from a structural and hierarchical level.  AND Fennel argues the real toxicity is the complete misunderstanding of the Flint Crisis as solely a water crisis. What about the role of “financially toxic housing?” To think of water infrastructures as separate, as a public good, and housing infrastructures as private and outside the notion of a public good, is the toxicity.

In “Are We All Flint,” Catherine Fennel describes toxicity’s relationship to infrastructure in the context of Flint, Michigan. In a town imagined as “staggered by waves of deindustrialization, disinvestment, and abandonment,” the image of crumbling infrastructures is how this place become essentialized. Fennel troubles this narrative, but we can see the damage. If something is crumbling or in decay, there’s justification for revival for interference. In the case of Flint, there’s justification for state oversight.