Ethnography, Interviews and Analysis

This chapter presents data gathered in the field through semi-structured interviews, as well as desk research related to Flint. I use the concepts from part one, in particular recoil, to present detailed sociological analyses of the lived surround of residents of Flint, focusing on the city’s north side (historically where African American residents lived). These maximal interpretations allow the text to explore self-understandings of Flint residents that take the form of a kind of self-recoiling, where the subject of study takes their “people” or their “city” as a typified object that is not expected to figure in certain futural expectations. I also explore various breaches of trust and corporal security experienced by Flint residents as a result of the crisis. In interviews with Flint residents, institutions—local, state, federal, and non-governmental—were generally distrusted. The exception was, broadly speaking, the church. I present a close reading of a Black Church service and discuss it using the phenomenological categories already developed as well as research from the literature associated with the Black religious experience.