When someone brings up lead poisoning, many minds might jump to Flint, Mich.—a city that made headlines more than 10 years ago, reminding us that even in a country as prosperous as America, not all people here have safe drinking water.
Unfortunately, this is not an isolated story and lead poisoning is not limited to contaminated drinking water. My home and hometown of Milwaukee, Wis., is an example of another such chapter and I am now bringing this living history to screens across the nation with my film Something in the Water.
According to a 2022 study by the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, Black children in Wisconsin under six are four times more likely to test positive for lead poisoning than white children. Most lead poisoning cases in Milwaukee are in Black neighborhoods with high poverty rates on the north side.
Additionally, water is only one vehicle for lead exposure. Other common vehicles include paint, soil, and dust. People who live in homes built before 1978 are more likely to be exposed to lead paint and dust because that’s when the sale of paint containing 0.06 percent or more lead was banned.
Lead poisoning is a serious issue because of its impact on the body, especially in children. Lead poisoning can have adverse effects on a child’s growth, cognitive development, behavior, and nervous system. According to the World Health Organization, no amount of lead is safe in the body.
And it’s not just one factor that contributes to children’s risk, according to a study by public health researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Risk is a result of layers of systemic racism at work—including redlining practices that segregated Milwaukee’s neighborhoods to concentrate Black people on the north side and exclude them from wealth building opportunities—making homeownership and poverty contributing factors to the highest average blood lead levels in Milwaukee County.
The lead crisis not only disproportionately impacts Black Milwaukeeans, but also Black people across the U.S., especially in the Midwest. The majority of the top ten cities with the most lead pipes are in the Midwest and are cities with high Black populations: Milwaukee, Wis.; Chicago, Ill., Cleveland, Ohio; Detroit, Mich., and St. Louis, Mo.
I first learned about categorizing lead poisoning as slow violence in 2019 as a criminal justice undergraduate in a Criminology class taught by an adjunct professor who was also a police officer.
Slow violence is harm that occurs gradually over time and is often invisible. The professor explained a hypothesis that lead poisoning at a young age can lead to an increase in impulsive behavior, and can thus be a predictor of more crime. And as we see from many statistics, including the cities listed above, we know Black people disproportionately experience lead poisoning. This adds another layer to slow violence because of the harm to Black people’s health over time.
In this class we learned about the nature, extent, and distribution of crime as well as theories behind the causation of crime. Social disorganization theory is a criminological theory that explains how neighborhood characteristics influence crime rates.
This shifted my thinking about crime, about how Black people are criminalized and stereotyped as innately criminal without giving a thought to the environments and social structures that commit violence against their bodies first.
There are also limits to this theory. Research from the Niskanen Center reveals, “Those with high exposure to lead also tend to live in poorer communities, with lower-quality schools and less access to health care. It is thus difficult to tell if worse outcomes are due to lead exposure or to these other factors.”
Still, after this class, these ideas about the connections between racism and health stuck with me.
In June 2023, I was selected as an Artist in Residence with Milwaukee Water Commons for a year term. During my tenure, I was given funding to create a project on any water justice issue of my choosing. I brainstormed ideas about what project to create by conducting research on the water justice issues Black Milwaukeeans were facing. Up until this point, I had not followed the lead crisis since I was a college student in 2019, but I found that lead poisoning was still a prevalent issue, especially during the pandemic.
I remembered what I learned about lead poisoning in my Criminology class, and decided to create a short documentary film about Black Milwaukeeans’ experience with lead poisoning and its impact on their health.
As a result, Something in the Water was born.
Something in the Water Film poster
When I set out to do this film, I knew I wanted to center Black voices. Knowing that Black people are most impacted by environmental injustice—such as lead poisoning—it was important for me to pass the microphone to those who are most impacted by the issue.
Milwaukee Water Commons connected me with Black leaders and organizations in Milwaukee addressing the ongoing lead crisis. Coalition on Lead Emergency (COLE) and MacCannon Brown Homeless Sanctuary are two organizations I worked with that are on the frontline of this issue.
We started production of the film in April 2024. I conducted video interviews of five water justice leaders, each about 30 minutes long. I captured their stories, successes, and frustrations pertaining to the lead crisis not only in Milwaukee but across the United States. I was thankful for the vulnerability and time each interviewee gave in sharing their experiences on a sensitive topic.
Behind the scenes photos from the Something in the Water Production
In September 2024, we had our first screening at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee as part of their Share the Earth Environmental Film Series. Since then, we’ve had two film festival screenings in Madison, Wisc., and Lansing, Mich.
Photos from the 2025 Capital City Film Festival in Lansing, Mich.
At the Wisconsin Film Festival screening in April 2025, the Wisconsin’s Own Programmer Mattie Jacobs shared that he selected Something in the Water for the festival because lead poisoning was something that hit home for his family.
“It was a really personal thing seeing that movie,” Jacobs explained. During the COVID-19 pandemic he moved to Madison for graduate school, and was unaware there was lead paint on the radiators in his apartment. Then his one-year-old tested high for lead.
Jacobs described the difficulty in accessing lead testing during the pandemic.
“At the time it was during COVID and most of the Dane County county services had shut down… The lead testing service in the county had shut down, and it shut down for over a year.”
As a result, Jacobs bought at-home lead tests from Lowe’s to monitor his child’s lead levels which have since decreased.
Hearing how the film resonated with Jacobs and reflected his own life experiences was validation for me as a filmmaker as I strive for people to be seen through my work. Even though the film is focused on Black Milwaukeeans’ experiences with lead poisoning, Jacobs, who is a non-Black person, still relates to the film. I believe this shows that the lead crisis is something that connects all people and can impact anyone.
I also launched a social impact campaign for the film to address the lead crisis beyond film screenings. As part of the campaign, my colleagues and I created a 15-page resource guide that details the history of redlining in Milwaukee, other forms of lead exposure, and how to support solutions to the lead crisis in Milwaukee through our Water Filter Fund.
My short term goal is to raise enough funds to provide all households impacted by lead poisoning with water filters in Milwaukee and to provide resources for families to have lead abatement services done in their homes for free. We recently launched the water filter fund, so fundraising is still in the beginning stages right now. If you’re interested in donating, here is the donation page for the Water Filter Fund.
My long term vision is to see the City of Milwaukee —and all cities across the U.S.—take a stronger stance against lead poisoning and act with more urgency. I hope the film can eventually be seen by government officials who can make the policy changes necessary to keep families safe. I envision more city budgets that reflect people and not profit by allocating city funds to address public health concerns such as lead poisoning.
Even if you are not in Milwaukee, the resource guide identifies nine other cities with the most lead pipes and how each is addressing lead pipe removal. Even if the city you’re living in is not listed, you can find out how lead poisoning is impacting your city or state and get involved.
The film has upcoming screenings in Stoughton, Wis., Washington, D.C., and Charlotte, NC.
Because the film is currently in the festival circuit, it is not publicly available yet. However, if you want to stay up to date about future screenings to find out when the film is playing near you, visit www.naesthetycs.com/film and sign up for the newsletter—and keep following us here on ChangeWire for more stories of lived experience as I continue to report on developments in Milwaukee.