In a state capital city of 150,000 people in the heart of Deep South, U.S. residents face an “indefinite” shortage of safe drinking water. After a heavy rain deluge in late August, residents of Jackson have been queuing up on the streets for bottled water which has also spontaneously run out at times. The mayor of the city, Chokwe Lumumba, says that even after basic supply is restored the city will remain “in an emergency”. Even as water begins to flow again, the supply will likely remain undrinkable and require boiling.

The impact on the city’s residents reaches far beyond not taking showers or cooking meals at home. When the water crisis hit, local schools were forced to go back to virtual learning. Learning from home during the Covid-19 pandemic has proven to particularly fail low-income students. Further, these are the same low-income students who depend heavily on meals provided by the schools to have enough to eat. Many of these districts are composed of students so impoverished that all of them are eligible for free breakfast and lunch meals.

While prolonged disruption of safe water access has already been seen in similarly neglected American cities like Flint, Michigan, narratives in the developed world paint these as events occurring in the periphery: the poor “Global South.” The charged concept of a “third world” country was developed initially to signify Cold War non-alignment but now commonly refers to any nation which has not achieved western standards of living.

Within the United States, the term commonly refers to any city or local built environment that does not live up to the country’s self-conception of prosperous superiority. Filthy subway bathrooms in New York? Used needles on the streets of San Francisco? Towns in Appalachia that seem to have been forgotten by time itself? When a panelist on FOX News describes a “third world Democrat-run city,” they are comparing internal problems in the U.S. to this prejudiced concept. This point of view says that things like that should not be happening in the United States but in the abstract Third World: a concept that reduces countries as culturally distinct as Brazil, Nigeria and Pakistan, comprising a vast majority of the world’s population to an inherent inferior quality. The contrasting “First World” lifestyle of the United States and western Europe becomes a norm that the rest of the world fails to live up to.

Jackson’s crisis, while triggered by a flood, has been in the making for decades. The city is 80 percent Black and has lost one in ten of its residents in a single decade. White Republican leadership in Mississippi has refused to provide adequate state funding for the city’s critical infrastructure needs, yet blames ‘mismanagement’ for the degradation.

In fact, the mayor’s account of events is that the state has used control of the city’s airport as leverage for funding of necessary repairs. Allocation of federal infrastructure funding given to the state of Mississippi is controlled by the state government, which has allocated money to wealthier white suburbs around Jackson, rather than the crumbling inner-city infrastructure.

Mississippi is certainly not the only state government that will have its institutional racism come to light. Climate change will continue to make similar, previously rare rain downpours more common and further stress the U.S. water infrastructure. This infrastructure, in Jackson, Mississippi was rated a C- by the American Society of Civil Engineers. In response, some communities will have the money and social support structures available to rebuild, while others will face long-term suffering and rely on prejudiced state governments for any support.

On a global scale, the U.S. has contributed the most to global CO2 emissions throughout history, while countries like Pakistan that have remained within ecological limits face human displacement on a massive scale. Even within the U.S., wealthier and whiter suburban areas contribute more to emissions than any urban setting.

We should look beyond our traditional conceptions of “first world” and “third world” to redefine vulnerability and see all the different forms that institutional neglect can take. From racism-fueled funding misallocation to climate pledges giving nations like the U.S. a farcical savior role, global society is shortchanging the most vulnerable everywhere. We can work towards correcting this pervasive injustice by truly working to direct investment where it is most needed.