Thirsting for Democracy

How are a poisoned water supply in Flint and water shut-offs in Detroit connected? Tommy Airey, co-editor of RadicalDiscipleship.net, talked with Detroit activists Monica Lewis-Patrick and Cecily McClellan to get the story behind the story.

LONG BEFORE water shut-offs and poisoning in Flint, democracy in much of Michigan had been hijacked. By the time a governor-appointed “emergency manager” was foisted on Detroit in spring 2013, every large black-majority city in Michigan—from Flint to Benton Harbor to Highland Park to Saginaw—had been appointed an EM, stripping all powers from elected leadership while possessing the authority to renegotiate or cancel union contracts, hire and fire government employees, and sell, lease, or privatize local assets.

Two years ago, about the same time that Flint’s EM transferred the city’s water source from Detroit’s water system to the highly toxic Flint River, Detroit’s EM ordered the city water and sewerage department to begin shutting off the water of all Detroiters who were two months or more behind on their water bills.

Today, in a city with 40 percent of its population surviving below the poverty line, Detroit water rates are twice the national average, and an estimated 100,000 residents, including many elderly folks and children, have had their water shut off by the city. The measures are forcing many longtime, low-income residents, the majority of them black, to leave the city.

Since 2008, the grassroots organization We the People of Detroit (WPD), led by five African-American women, has been creatively resisting emergency management—first of the school system and then the entire city—with a steady campaign of awareness-raising, canvassing, water delivery and advocacy for shut-off victims, and a comprehensive mapping project soon to be released.

Monica Lewis-Patrick is the charismatic, energetic point guard of the group, fueled by the Holy Ghost and her morning standard: a cup of coffee sweetened with four sugar packets. Lewis-Patrick, who’s a grandmother and the mother of two teenage daughters, lost her bid for city council two years ago by a few hundred votes. A few weeks later, she lost her only son to gun violence.

Cecily McClellan, the quiet, confident, all-business power forward of Team WPD, is a retired city employee and former vice-president of the Association of Professional and Technical Employees.

I spoke with them at WPD headquarters on the third floor of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church—a stone’s throw from a downtown getting a corporate facelift financed by public bonds, subsidies, and tax abatements to draw companies in from the suburbs, while many residents struggle just to survive and keep their homes.

Tommy Airey: Let’s get this straight: Are you advocating for free water for low-income Detroiters?

Monica Lewis-Patrick: Free water has never been the ask. Personally, I’m not opposed to free water. I believe that water is a human right, and that everyone should have access to it. But the ask here in Detroit has always been for affordable water.

What are the mayor’s objections to an affordability plan in Detroit?
Lewis-Patrick: Over the last 11 months, water shut-offs have led to more foreclosures and pushing people out of the city. We believe [city officials] do not want to participate in a water-affordability plan because it would allow more people to stay in the city, especially in communities they want cleared out for future development.

Is this a conspiracy?
Lewis-Patrick: Conspiracy, in my mind, isn’t the appropriate term, because a lot of times people marginalize conspiracy as just somebody’s idea or accusation. What I would say is that it has been a collaborative, well-orchestrated system of evil. We know for a fact, through all the political analysis and economic research that has been done, that the city bankruptcy didn’t have to go down. People saw it as an opportunity to be able to divest from the water department, to weaken the water department intentionally.

Flint was actually advised by the governor and his emergency managers to come off of the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department system and then to become a part of another water system called KWA [Karegnondi Water Authority]. Flint was the largest external customer of the Detroit water system. How is it that you are advising us to become financially solvent, while at the same time all your deeds are making us insolvent?

Some have claimed that this is not just about economic austerity measures but about white supremacy. What do you think?
Lewis-Patrick: I would agree that white supremacy plays a significant role. We see it play out definitely in terms of Detroit vs. the rest of the state. We constantly hear this narrative of Detroiters being characterized as children, that the state had to come in and manage its affairs. Of course, they’ll never say, “Black folks can’t lead themselves,” but it’s implied with their language. There are other cities across Michigan that are majority white that have worse financial conditions in terms of their municipal governance, but they haven’t even been threatened with emergency management, whereas all of the communities in the state that have more than a 51 percent African-American population have some form of “consent agreement” or emergency management.

When did you first hear about possible lead poisoning in Flint’s water, and when did you start to publicly raise awareness about it?
Lewis-Patrick: In July 2014, we participated in a joint mobilization effort here in Detroit to do a protest called Turn the Water On. A couple of people from Flint that we invited showed up with bottles of water. They were asking us to help them identify people who could test that water. We took on a major role when my colleague and co-founder Debra Taylor took on a project with the Michigan Roundtable for Diversity and Inclusion. In March 2015, Debra brought together about six organizations from Flint to help them mobilize a community story-telling process, to help them tell what they knew about these situations. Debra had been working on this for six months at that point, to help them gather their stories, identifying who could tell their stories safely.

Are you concerned that all of the attention that Flint is getting is leaving Detroit high and dry?
Lewis-Patrick: Not at all. Flint always lifts up the fact that a lot of what they learned, in terms of responding to their own crisis, they learned from Detroit. And we always lift up the fact that when we were in the highest point of our crisis, Flint consistently showed up for us. We see this as a collaborative effort. We see this as not separate water crises, but as one water crisis, as part of the world water crisis.

Cecily McClellan: The poisoning of Flint is just elevating the issues that are going on in Detroit. We recognize that we have been hurt financially, devastated as a community economically, suffering from assets getting sold off. But you are talking about devastation on another scale when you’re talking about the lead poisoning of children. The governor has not hired a plumber, but instead a public relations firm so that they can do all the spinning, to keep the attention off this issue.

We are all in this together. If they get away with doing it here, they are going to do it everywhere. We need to keep the main thing the main thing. And the main thing is emergency management. If you had people that could speak and vote for themselves, none of this would have happened.

A lot of folks inside and outside of Michigan are asking how they can be involved in this fight. You [Lewis-Patrick] recently commissioned a crowd of community organizers to deputize themselves. What did you mean?
Lewis-Patrick: It is a phrase and a concept that I adopted from Detroit City Councilmember JoAnn Watson. She would never leave a meeting without fully explaining to people their responsibility to get involved in their own lives and be a part of saving themselves—that you couldn’t wait on government, couldn’t wait on your religious leaders, you couldn’t even wait on your block club captain to respond to your needs. No one knows better about what you need than you. That, for me, was speaking to the vastly different fronts of this fight: to the artists and to young people who do not know where they fit. That was clearly defining for everyone in the room—that there was space for you in this struggle, in this movement.

A lot of times, people don’t understand all the intentional structuring of incidents to make people believe it is their fault. We the People has a phrase that we use: “It’s not your fault, but it is your fight.”

What is the connection of Christian faith to the struggle for clean and affordable water for all?
Lewis-Patrick: Christian faith? Woooo! It’s knee-deep in this! When I advocate for someone to have water, it is not based on whether I like them or not. I believe that every human being has a right to water. That is a core part of my faith. The Word talks about how we are to plead for the fatherless and motherless and to defend the widow and to visit those in jail and we are to feed the hungry. That’s the charge that we have.

You can’t tell me you love me and when I’m hungry you don’t show up. You can’t tell me you love me and when I’m thirsty you don’t give me something to drink. We want love to show up in us. I believe God is love, and because of this I must care if people have water and I have to do all I can do to be a part of that solution.

You’ve said that the city must go beyond philanthropic “do good in the hood” projects. What’s Detroit’s comeback look like, from your perspective?
Lewis-Patrick: A true comeback would look like equity. It would not look like the corporations that are being invited in and touted as saving the city, while they are taking advantage of resources that they are not paying for. It would not look like the communities where people are suffering due to disenfranchisement and loss of jobs. It would not look like our children being shuffled monthly from school to school or having to be in schools with no heat or limited access to toilets, no notebooks, no teachers.

It would look like equity. When the police show up, instead of them shooting us, they would talk to us and treat us as human beings. It would look like contracts and job opportunities being afforded to everyone. Those are things that we see as differences between this touted “comeback” and what we see in the communities. It is not equitable. It is not a broad inclusion of everyone in the city.