Interview with Watie White
In this interview conducted on November 9th, 2023, Watie White, a local artist in Omaha, discusses his work with Healthy Housing Omaha (formerly, Omaha Healthy Kids Alliance) that resulted in the creation of the Lead Stories Project. After having discussions with community members affected by lead, White created prints overlayed with quotes about what lead in Omaha means to individual people. Throughout this conversation, White shared what he learned from having conversations with local advocates and families and how we are all interconnected when it comes to the issue of lead.
Watie White has experienced lead in more ways than one. His first encounter with lead came when his baby son was poisoned through contaminated water when living in Washington D.C. Years later, as an artist living in Nebraska, he worked with Omaha Healthy Kids Alliance to create a series of portraits of those in Omaha’s community that have experienced lead in some capacity. Each wood carving was turned into a woodblock print with quotes from the individual it represented. They were later displayed in public and published online. Through this project, Watie was able to connect with people from all walks of life and highlight the effects of lead in the community. He summarized this sentiment saying “Nobody really gets away from it.”
Whether it be his own child, a custodial worker, or a family in North Omaha, lead affects each person in this community even in ways we are unaware of, but there seems to be a disconnect between those who need help and those who want to help. Yet, White described how difficult it can be to get people to trust government organizations or even scientific research. This is where he felt that his Lead Stories shined. “It was much more about looking for actual people who could talk about their actual experience in a newspaper that people who live in that area would trust a little bit,” White said. With Lead Stories, the portraits acted as sort of a campaign to build trust between people affected by lead and those trying to help them.
Building trust is essential in addressing long-standing, complicated societal issues. This begs the question, how can art solve a problem even government officials are struggling to change? White described how creative work can be the missing key. “Being an artist means that I’m not a politician, I’m not a social worker or a public health official so my reactions to things are very different than what theirs are.” These ideas can then form into more productive conversation between officials and community members.
White emphasized that this conversation between individuals and organizations is valuable because the issue of lead is not going to go away. Regardless of how much remediation occurs and or how large the Superfund site is, there are still kids suffering from lead exposure and communities (including Council Bluffs, which is outside the OLS) that will deal with lead related problems for years to come. “It’s impossible to not feel the effects of it forever,” White said.
A review article of White's project that was published by the American Medical Association echoed the notion that lead is now engrained in our social structures. It concluded that racism is at the root of numerous environmental injustices. This rings true for many of the people that we talked to throughout this project. For them, lead is just as much part of their community as their next-door neighbor.
To that effect, remediation efforts need to suit the culture and society that they are targeting. The history of distrust between the government and marginalized communities suggests that there must be a feeling of collaboration between those wanting to help get rid of lead and those that are experiencing it in order to move towards a common goal. Currently, according to White, “we don’t see how we benefit from other peoples’ benefit.” Future remediation efforts should attempt to break down these barriers in order to complete more productive change.