This is a complex and expensive problem to fix, but experts say it dates back decades — to when White residents began fleeing the city of Jackson, leaving it with a smaller, lower-income tax base and a declining ability to keep its utilities working. The city is now 82 percent Black, which many people there believe explains the state’s lack of interest in maintaining the city’s infrastructure. For a month, residents have been under an order to boil their water because of possible contamination, and now many have no water at all.
A similar story played out in Flint, Mich., a few years ago: A poor, majority-Black city’s water crisis was ignored by a Republican-run state government until it reached a point of catastrophe.
Some will object that infrastructure problems can be found everywhere in America, not just in red states. Poorer communities — regardless of their racial makeup, including rural ones — are more likely to be ignored by both Democrats and Republicans in power. That is absolutely true.
But it’s also true that, at the very least, Democrats can say they want to confront the problem. It took a Democratic president and Congress to pass an infrastructure bill last year, a bill that included nearly $55 billion to upgrade the nation’s water systems.
And when you look at places such as Mississippi, what you see can only be described as malign neglect. State lawmakers killed the city’s efforts to fund infrastructure with a sales tax hike. And when tens of thousands of city residents went without running water for weeks, Republican Gov. Tate Reeves called for better collection of water bill payments, rather than support from the state.
A 2021 bill that would have authorized a bond issuance to assist Jackson with making repairs and improvements to water and sewer systems died in the Republican-controlled state House Ways and Means committee.
As one expert told The Post when the infrastructure bill passed, “you have to be worried that this money going to statehouses will not actually get to places like Jackson” as long as the White power structure has a hand in distributing it. After all, Republicans who control the state’s government have more pressing things to worry about, such as chasing the phantom of critical race theory, outlawing abortion and suppressing the votes of Black people.
Meanwhile, next door in Alabama — another state run entirely by White Republicans — there are rural areas where Black residents have no working sewage system, and run PVC pipes from their toilets out to open pits in their yards. When a United Nations poverty official visited there a few years ago, he said he had never seen anything like it anywhere in the developed world.
Now ask yourself: If this was a problem most urgent and visible in states run by Democrats, how eager do you think Republicans at the national level would be to address it?
Back in Mississippi, Reeves declared a state of emergency; it’s hard not to suspect that it was the sudden wave of media attention, more than the suffering of his constituents, that prodded him to act. President Biden declared his own emergency, directing federal resources to the state.
There was a time when politicians of every party knew they couldn’t get reelected if they didn’t provide basic services. All the things we take for granted in a modern, functioning society — electricity, water, sewage, roads — are supposed to become volatile campaign issues if they stop working.
But today’s polarization and the nationalization of every office — where even people running for dogcatcher have to take a position on Donald Trump and abortion — have in many places broken the link between the basic obligations of governance and victory at the polls.
Reeves doesn’t have to care about whether Black people in Mississippi have water to drink. His state is 38 percent Black, but because the state’s White voters are so emphatically Republican, every statewide elected official is a White Republican, and the GOP has a bulletproof state legislative supermajority. If he wants to declare April to be Confederate Heritage Month — as he has done twice — he knows the only votes he’ll lose are ones he wasn’t going to win anyway.
And he knows the only thing that might stand between him and reelection is a primary challenge from the right. So like many other Republican governors, while he can ensure that the infrastructure that serves his constituents keeps working, until a crisis hits, he doesn’t have to.
Similarly, even a systemwide failure, such as the one the Texas power grid suffered last year, might only be a speed bump on the way to reelection. Republicans there can just whip people into a rage about dangerous books at the local library or a trans girl who wants to play softball.
So if you’re looking for public officials who’ll make a good-faith effort to solve these infrastructure problems, you might not want to rely on the Republicans who run the states where those problems are most urgent. They might get around to it — but only if they decide they have nothing better to do.
