Protecting working class children from lead poisoning is not a priority for a U.S capitalist class in disarray and decline. The lead water crisis that has poisoned workers from Flint, MI to Newark, NJ has hit New York City’s school system and the local ruling class has no real plan to protect children here from ingesting this toxin at thousands of water fountains and sinks across the five boroughs.
Over the summer, the Department of Education (DoE) inspected the fixtures that funnel water to our children daily. Instead of accurately checking the lead levels, the water was allowed to run for long periods of time, which allowed a lot of the lead to be flushed out before measurement. These bogus ‘tests’ have ‘proven’ that the water which 1.1 million kids drink is ‘safe.’ However, even by their own admission, the DoE admits that their safety inspection did not involve switching out lead plumbing fixtures with non-toxic alternatives (WNYC, Aug 2018).
Hot on the heels of the DoE’s summertime water inspection subterfuge, locally-based capitalist Sarah Kauss (CEO of S’well bottles) decided to donate over 300,000 bottles to provide every high school student in the city with a re-usable S’well brand water bottle. The liberal political establishment is pushing for a youth campaign to “BRING IT” which “challenges New York City students to reduce waste through advocacy and activism.” By their estimates if each high school student in the city foregoes disposable water bottles waste will be reduced by up to 54 million plastic bottles (NYT 9/18).
Such ‘activism’ – where crises that capitalism makes necessary are viewed as results of ‘individual’ choice – is a type that liberal mis-leaders like NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio champion. They would have our youth believe that racism in our schools comes from ‘microaggressions’ that we carry out against each other as individuals, not from a ‘school choice’ system that has for decades cast schools with too many Black youth as undesirable.
Consumption of bottled water has exploded since the 1970s and is a major contributor to plastics production and pollution. Today’s mounting plastics crisis was entirely predictable decades ago but the pursuit of maximum profit has meant cities have been built up with no plans to supply quality water to workers who live there. Under communism access to clean water would be treated as a true human right. It’s beyond a doubt that the unbelievably huge portion of society’s wealth which imperialists have poured into arms races and war since the 1970s could have, by now, provided workers worldwide with access to clean water in an environmentally sustainable way. We have needed communism for a long time.
On top of a festering lead crisis, New York City students endure a long-running segregation crisis. Racist policing of Black and Latino youth mean that they pass through a metal detector/scanning procedure to enter school each day. (see letter). These students are routinely prohibited from bringing any liquids into school. They will be forced to fill their environmentally-friendly S’well bottles at water fixtures fed by lead pipes while their more middle-class white and Asian peers are free to bring their bottles to school with water that is (perhaps) safer.
Speaking of the rise of her company, Kauss once proclaimed:
“We’ll be a billion-dollar company,” she says. “It’s easy. I know what to do now. We have the people and the processes in place, and the market is just there.” The alternative? “We could just be a $50 million company,” she says, “but that seems kind of boring.” (Inc. Magazine, July 2016).The iron rule of capital, which spawns imperialist rivalry and requires racism to divide and super-exploit the working class, has positioned Kauss to solve the ‘easy’ problem of creating a billion-dollar company.”
Her naïve, ostentatious and self-serving campaign to expand her firm’s visibility and help ‘fix’ a plastics crisis that clogs the oceans of the globe has run up against the hard reality of segregation in New York City schools. Only liberation from the rule of capital through a communist revolution gives us a shot at clean water and integrated schools for all.
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Student Letter
We are students, not suspects!
Every high school student in New York City received a free metal S’well water bottle. This was an initiative to eliminate the single-use plastic water bottles. The highly-policed and over-surveilled high schools with metal detectors, in New York City force their predominantly Black, Latin and Asian, low-income students to dump out their water bottles before entering school premises. This effectively denies clean water to nonwhite students. Denying students their right to bring water and drinks from home forces them to drink the lead-contaminated water present in many of the city’s public schools. The inability of these students to get through school security with their water bottles lies at the intersection of three of the city’s structural, unresolved problems: the policing and criminalization of Black and Latin students, segregated schooling, and lead contaminated water in “more than 33,000 water fountains” in New York City public schools (WNYC, 3/6).
WNYC, a New York City public radio station, completed an analysis finding that despite the city’s claims of replacing all lead contaminated fixtures, only 20 percent of schools have been notified of the water being safe to drink. Despite the dangerously high levels of lead being found in school pipes, not all students have the right of bringing their own water to class.
The denial of students to bring their own bottles of water to classes feeds into the racist and anti-working class violence students are subject to in the city’s public schools. Students are not only stripped of their autonomy but also criminalized under school security and surveillance technologies. This creates a hostile, unsafe environment not conducive to our student’s education. It is harmful to their mental and physical health. Students should not be suspects in their own schools. This inequality and denial of the basic right to clean water is a critical sign calling us to fight back against school housing and segregation.