Demographics
Well Jackson, Mississippi is only the state capital and the largest city.
Some 180,000 residents in Jackson, Mississippi have “indefinitely” lost access to reliable running water after excessive rainfall and flooding.
That happened to New Orleans after Katrina, too. Remember? People desperately begging reporters for water to drink. Many people died because there was no drinking water.
Rising floodwaters over the weekend breached the city’s main water treatment facility, bringing it to the brink of collapse.
…Both the city and state are distributing bottled drinking water to residents as well as non-potable water via tanker truck.
I hope they’re distributing the drinking water in mass quantities and very fast. Death from dehydration is swift.
The southern state’s capital is more than 80% African American.
Could that have anything to do with an underfunded infrastructure? Anything at all? Hmmm?
Mississippi is our worst state in many ways. It was the best state for growing cotton, so it had a huge population of enslaved people, and then of people who were theoretically free but in reality still enslaved via “vagrancy” laws and similar that forced them to work on plantations just as if nothing had changed. It’s not an accident that that’s where Emmett Till was murdered or that that’s where Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were murdered. I doubt it’s an accident that Jackson has a weak infrastructure.
When I was working in Oklahoma, we had a mantra: Thank God for Mississippi. No matter how bad things were for state employees (or others) in Oklahoma, Mississippi was always worse.
I mean, I don’t know how local infrastructure is funded, but if 80% of your population is black (and in Mississippi I assume that directly means dirt poor) presumably you have a shitty tax base to fund that. There certainly are federal grant programs and similar to drum up the dosh and in that sense you may lack the political will to get the money, but assuming anything more nefarious than poor people = poor infrastructure seems a bit much. If anything you can say Jacksonians are the victims of historical inertia.
Except that Mississippi has a long history of being exactly that nefarious and worse. It hasn’t become “a blue state” in the years between Freedom Summer and now.
Well yes, Mississippi is a horrible place with horrible peoples, but isn’t it poor and gross everywhere? There isn’t a secret white spires and togas city where all the whites live, there’s just bad but still functions infrastructure where the better off live. All this is the legacy of building your economy on an unsustainable and peculiarly cruel feudal agricultural industry then fighting a war against the Industrial Revolution to keep it (and getting dicked in the process).
Sherman should’ve finished the job.
Yes, it is, as far as I know. I’m not sure what the disagreement is. Mississippi was the worst of the worst, and it still lives with that horrible legacy. I didn’t mean Jackson was exceptional for Mississippi but that it’s all too typical.