Students addressed the issues of race and environmentalism surrounding the Flint water crisis and how individuals might provide assistance to those in urban or underserved areas in a panel discussion on Wednesday. The event, titled “From Ford Hall to Flint: A Conversation On Environmental Racism and Activism,” was moderated by Saren McAllister ’18 and Roger Perez MA-SID/MBA '16 and was sponsored by the Brandeis Pluralism Alliance and Brandeis Climate Justice.

The event featured a panel of students and leading community members, including American Civil Liberties Union staff attorney Carl Williams, Brontë Velez ’16, vice president and chief program officer for the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee Rachel Gore Freed, Sophie Warren ’18 and Nicole H. McCauley (Heller).

McAllister and Perez began the event with the screening of a student-made informational video on the water crisis. McAllister then contacted Danielle Brown — the director of the nonprofit Christ Enrichment Center in Flint, Michigan — over Skype, projecting the call for the entire room to see.

“For a long time, we didn’t know what was going on,” Brown began the call, reflecting on the water crisis. She added that her community has “lost a lot of faith in our community leadership” throughout the past few months.

Brown then gave a brief background on the water crisis, discussing how, in April 2014, Flint decided to switch its water source from the Detroit River to the Flint River. As Brown noted, the officials in Flint had not overseen a water plant in over 50 years and thus failed to add an anti-corrosion agent to the water to prevent it from eating away at the city’s aging lead pipes. As a result, she said, the water’s parts per billion of lead have risen far beyond the safe level of 0 ppb.

Brown then began to describe a typical night in her household, noting that she must boil and purify the water she uses to cook her dinner before it is safe to consume. “You never just think that you can’t use your tap,” she said. “I know as a homeowner, I am really, really struggling.”

Additionally, while she noted that the Environmental Protection Agency has begun to give its approval for limited consumption of the Flint water, “There’s no way that I’m going to drink that water [if] they say it’s okay for me but not okay for small babies.”

Perez then asked Brown about the state and local response to the crisis, and Brown responded that state and local officials initially attempted to minimize the damage and keep the true extent of the crisis under wraps. However, she added, the EPA’s groundwork and regular water testing has garnered them trust in the community, though in her opinion, their use of longer, more technical words or phrases when instructing the community can lead to a divide, especially when the community has “low-level learners” who cannot understand the EPA’s instructions, according to Brown.

“There are so many things that happen when poverty happens in a community,” Brown continued, citing the lack of individuals with college degrees and the lack of a “quality range of politicians” who are in touch with the community’s needs. She also spoke about the need for mental health education and support in Flint, noting that the water crisis has had an emotional impact on the community. “You feel so hopeless,” she said.

Ford Hall 2015 leader Christian Perry MBA/SID ’16 then asked Brown how students could help the Flint community.

Brown responded that Flint has enough donated clean water but still needs hand sanitizer, body wipes and above all else, volunteers to help hand out and deliver donations to those who cannot come pick up the supplies themselves.

One audience member asked Brown about the effects the water crisis has had on her community’s trust in politicians. “I don’t know if it’s about trust so much as people feeling they don’t have a voice. … Creating a new political environment — that’s scary as well,” she responded.

Brown then asked audience members how they planned to be more active in urban communities. “I need you all to be responsive to this. … The revolution is now,” she added. Audience responses included plans to teach in inner-city schools, as well as plans to move back to urban neighborhoods after college.

Velez then briefly discussed urban culture, noting that it was “not built with the land but against it.” She added that the water crisis — and other forms of environmental racism, where people of color are the victims of poor environmental conditions more often than white people — are especially devastating to urban communities because “time is a commodity in urban space,” and individuals working several jobs for minimum wage are unable to fully enjoy and fight for their environment the way wealthy individuals or those who don't live in a city are.

Before signing off from Skype, Brown issued the audience a call to arms: “This is such a great opportunity in time in the world right now … to be actively and thoughtfully engaged. Use your voice and power within to find injustice and fix it.”

Next, the panelists addressed the audience. Most touched briefly on access to clean water being a natural right — to be a human being is to “have the right to life” and clean resources, Velez stated. The panelists also noted that Flint is not a singular event in environmental racism; Warren argued that society is “not remotely getting to the root of any of this [issue]” by sensationalizing Flint and presenting it as an isolated occurrence.

Williams elaborated that environmental racism is “the structure of the community” and that it is necessary to talk about environmental issues as issues of white supremacy.

Velez agreed, continuing, “We have to start centering black and brown folks in environmental injustices. … Humans are in danger.”