Race for a Cure
Just five minutes away from Debra Furr-Holden’s cluttered home office in Flint is the house she lived in as a teenager, on Pontiac Street, in a zip code that now has among the lowest life expectancies in the city: 73 years. I learned that last bit from Furr-Holden herself. She cited the figure the way you or I might describe a neighborhood by mentioning a famous building or some movie scene that was shot there. Furr-Holden is the associate dean for public health integration at Michigan State’s College of Human Medicine, and she sees the world through an epidemiologist’s eyes. Life and death are bound up in the particular conditions of place—in what Furr-Holden and her colleagues would call the social determinants of health. “Zip code,” as she put it, “is a stronger predictor of how long you can expect to live and the quality of life you can expect to live than even your genetic code.”
Furr-Holden spent a few years in Flint in the 1980s. “Things were just starting to get bad right before that,” she said. The heart had been cut out of Vehicle City. Between 1973 and 1987, Flint-based General Motors slashed 26,000 local jobs; the unemployment rate in 1988 was 19 percent. Depopulation and deindustrialization—white flight and pink slips—had reshaped what was once a booming factory town. Still, some traces of Flint’s heyday remained, Furr-Holden recalled. She got a “world-class education” in what we’d now call the STEM disciplines at Northern High, part of the pipeline that conveyed new generations of engineers into the auto industry. Today, Northern’s windows are boarded up, and its grounds are full of weeds—a monument to lost opportunity.
“I watched the city come apart at the seams,” Furr-Holden said. “This was not a place that I would have ever envisioned living again, let alone raising my children.” And yet, in 2016, Furr-Holden moved back in the midst of a new calamity: the water crisis. “That catastrophic grave human injustice called me back to Flint in a way that nothing else has ever called me forward professionally,” she said, speaking in a rasp that was the result of a bad bout with strep throat in high school. “I simply couldn’t believe what was happening in Flint—the fact that nobody was really being held accountable for it. And to this day, nobody’s really been held accountable.”
Then came the coronavirus. Furr-Holden’s time in Flint, as a teen and as an adult, had been a longitudinal case study in how and why certain populations disproportionately feel the effects of civic disasters. In a way, few people in America were better prepared than she was for the arrival of a pandemic. The coronavirus presented a different kind of threat, of course. But the toll it would take, the path and shape of its destruction, would turn out to be grotesquely familiar to someone who had witnessed the uneven distributions of pain across industrial Michigan over the past half-century.
When I met Furr-Holden one May afternoon in downtown Flint, she was standing in line for crepes, wearing a KN95 mask. Over the previous year, we’d talked on and off via Zoom, where she struck a bold and imposing presence, a favorite auntie spelling out how the world works. In person, she was smaller than I’d expected. She’d traded her suit jacket and
