What do you do when you go back home from Eastern Michigan University to visit your family? For EMU students such as Razjea Bridges-Fordham, trying to avoid the water is a major part of trips home.
Her immediate family is one of the lucky households in Flint, Michigan that do not receive city water for their faucets, but she has friends and family in the city that are connected to contaminated pipes. Her grandparents are sick and tired of having to collect water bottles to use for everyday activities such as cooking and showering.
“The water crisis is not how I envisioned it, but I'm glad the conversation is had,” Bridges-Fordham said in an emailed interview.
She joined Raise It Up! Flint two years ago and worked with others to obtain social awareness about the water crisis that Flint residents were becoming aware of at the time. She began working on a spoken word poem with Destiny Shannon. Their performance, She Said Yes, at a fundraiser #JusticeforFlint, helped raise over $100,000 to help pay for replacement of lead water pipes. Their poem was a powerful piece on women, gender, and the power of saying “no.”
Factories started polluting the Flint River over a hundred years ago. Flint had received its public drinking water from the gargantuan Detroit Water Authority before switching to the Flint River water. It wasn’t long before residents noticed an odd color and smell to the water. Governor Rick Snyder, the Emergency Manager, said that the water was safe to drink – but it wasn’t.
The polluted water was not treated properly and when it flowed through the city’s antiquated lead pipes it corroded and went right into the homes of residents. Stories have been coming out for months about Flint children suffering from worsened attention spans, lowering IQ levels and behavior and developmental problems.
Bridges-Fordham said that the media’s coverage of the crisis was “pretty accurate,” but she said wants the media to come out with solutions, not headlines. The state legislature has already been appropriating millions of dollars for Flint. In the meantime, residents that live in the neighborhoods where the water is most contaminated are still forced to pay their water bills when they are no longer even running their faucets. They rely on the donations of water bottles.
“Water bottle donations are great, but it's a temporary fix,” Bridges-Fordham said. “The pipes need to be replaced and the water source needs to be changed. These people need to be paid back what is rightfully theirs and that’s security.”
According to the Detroit News, replacing the water pipes could cost anywhere between $50 million and $80 million. When the switch was made in 2013, the emergency manager estimated that the switch would save $5 million over two years.
Bridges-Fordham’s and Shannon’s performance occurred during the same time #OscarsSoWhite was trending on Twitter. This spat centered on the 88th Academy Awards nominating white actors and filmmakers, but not people of color.
Bridges-Fordham said she wasn't very familiar with that part of the story.
“People have watched the Oscars for decades now, the same things happen almost every time,” she said. “It's good to switch up the focus to more pressing issues.”
“I'd say the concert did exactly what the organizers had in mind,” Bridges-Fordham said.
