Flint resident Freddie Fisher shouts out "No justice, no peace!" as she joins more than 50 Flint residents rallying on the five-year anniversary of the Flint water crisis at the Capitol Building on Thursday, April 25, 2019, in Lansing, Michigan. Fisher is still afraid of coming in contact with the city's water, to the point that she has to force herself to take a bath to keep clean, but not without fear of what it could do to her body. She erupted with an impassioned speech asking for politicians to step up and continue to aid the city's residents until the issue is fully resolved.

Five years after the beginning of the Flint, Michigan, water crisis, residents are still feeling the impact of being poisoned by their state government. Lines for donated water remain long, the city is still working on replacing its antiquated, lead-lined pipes, and justice is still a long way off in both the civil lawsuits and the criminal court cases that have resulted from the negligence of former Gov. Rick Snyder’s administration.

But while Flint waits and works to be made whole again, there are positive signs that at least some state and local units of government may finally be tackling the systemic racism that made the Flint water crisis possible in the first place. Meanwhile, Flint’s chief public health advisor, Dr. Pamela Pugh, told Daily Kos that while she is cautiously optimistic, “horrible racism built this system, and it’s going to take us years—decades—to undo.”

And according to the executive director of Michigan Faith in Action, Eileen Hayes, people are “very hopeful” about the positive changes that seem to be coming from new Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s administration, but “If you’re still living with a filter on your faucet, you know things haven’t been fixed.”

The work to understand and start to confront the systemic biases in Michigan’s state government that led to the crisis was first tackled by the state’s Department of Civil Rights (MDCR), whose Civil Rights Commission held extensive hearings with Flint residents and officials in 2016.

The goal of the hearings was “to better understand the role decades of structural and institutional discrimination and racism played in quieting your voices and enabling the poisoning of your public water supply,” according to the commission’s 2017 report on those hearings. The report outlined seven principal recommendations to not just confront and start dismantling institutional racism, but also promote actual equity within Michigan’s state and local governments.

Pugh said the commission’s report “was to be commended.”

“Really looking at the historical and systemic racism that led to the Flint water crisis, and calling that out in writing has been critical to the work that we need to do to right the wrongs that were done to the residents of Flint,” she added.

The MDCR didn’t stop there. The agency created a study guide that schools and other groups can use to examine the role institutional racism played in creating the Flint water crisis. Other efforts include hiring the state’s first racial equity officer, placing civil rights inspectors on-site in different Michigan communities, and creating the Council of Local Governments and Education on Equity and Inclusion, a networking and information-sharing organization comprised of representatives from local governments and school districts.