Many of the same prominent whites who proudly attended well-funded public schools in Jackson before integration have, since abandoning the city, done everything possible to limit even “adequate” urban school funding or to redirect the money to legacy segregation academies — now usually called “private Christian academies.” They use the state legislature to control how much Jackson can tax our own citizens in order to pay for our own needs. They won’t support desperately needed flood mitigation for the city — unless it provides rich white people with valuable waterfront development. And Medicaid expansion in the time of Covid-19? Forget about it.
White state politicians are even trying to steal one of the few major revenue generators Jackson has left. In 2016, white Mississippi Republicans began a naked attempt to take over the Jackson-Medgar Wiley Evers International Airport — a name, by the way, that still displeases some of the Old Guard — by passing legislation to replace its city-appointed commissioners with a state-appointed governing board, only two of whom would come from Jackson. Black legislators called the move “Jim Crow legislation.” Primary sponsors of the bill didn’t try to hide that they have real-estate interests in the whiter suburban areas just outside the airport gates.
Make no mistake, the fact that low-income Jacksonians are living amid the stench of toilets that won’t flush is a direct legacy of white-supremacist thinking at the state level, not the failure of a few bill collectors in the city to collect on enough delinquent customers. Whether those who engage in that thinking have bothered to face that history or not, it is the state of Mississippi’s role to help fix this problem.
I get it, though: A racist political machine raised many white Mississippians to believe they were simply superior at running things, over any given Black leader in the state. They look at the world through white-tinged glasses and believe their power and wealth, or any power or wealth they might eventually be able to amass, is dependent on scrapping over scarcity. They think they don’t or won't get theirs if they treat the majority-Black capital city, its leaders and its residents with the respect and dignity our citizens deserve.
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/jackson-mississippi-has-water-crisis-because-our-state-legislature-has-ncna1259819
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