Race for a Cure

How Flint closed the gap between Black and white suffering under covid

- EDWIN RIOS

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.