Introducing Black.Brown.Green: A Website for Anti-Racist Enviro-ing!

by Guest Contributor Thea, originally published at the Shameless Blog

If you read this website at all regularly, you’ve probably heard me moan about how marginalised groups fighting for their rights rarely seem to recognise their commonality. Whether it’s feminists having trouble reconciling with anti-racists, or green anarchists distancing themselves from anti-ableism activists, the whole thing gives me the weepies. Wouldn’t things go much faster if we all recognised how ultimately linked all of our causes – like feminism, queer rights, indigenous rights, racial equity, anti-poverty efforts, ability activism – are linked, and then work together? Instead, what seems to happen more often than not is a competition to see who has it worse. I tell you, it’s enough to tire a girl out.

One thing in particular that’s always stuck in my craw is the green movement’s tendency towards racism (or at least racial obliviousness) and classism. While feminism and environmentalism have managed to make the happy marriage of ecofeminism, anti-racism movements and environmental movements haven’t always gotten along.

That’s why I was thrilled to find out about Black.Brown.Green., “a web portal of resources and information that integrate people of color and our needs and issues with the movement for environmental sustainability.” As they say most eloquently:

We hope to spread the understanding that all things are connected and that we are stronger when working together than we are when we are tearing each other apart.

I love this site. Where else would you find the 12 Principles of Permaculture integrated with Malcolm X? Excellent! Incidentally Black.Brown.Green was started by damali ayo, who also created the hilarious (and useful) I Can Fix It! guides for ending racism.

What do I mean when I say that the environmental movement can be racist or classist? The mainstream green movement (which often encapsulates the anti-corporate and anti-consumerism movement) tends to primarily represent the experiences of middle class and white folks.

[For e.g.: (and this is an answer to a question Catherine asked me ages ago, sorry this took so long!) Adbuster’s famous Buy Nothing Day (BND) campaign rests on the assumption that North Americans spend lots of money every day, and spend thoughtlessly. While this can be true for middle class folks like me, is it really true for people who don’t have a disposable income? In behaving as if all North Americans have problems with excessive spending, BND and Adbusters is implying that working class folks don’t exist. BND has been criticised for righteously positioning itself above the middle class, and this positioning is plain silly when its assumptions reveal it to be firmly rooted in middle earth. I appreciate what BND is trying to do, but I’d feel much fonder towards it if it had a better class analysis and recognised just who it’s pandering to.]

While this is bad enough in and of itself, it’s particularly awful when you consider that it’s poor folks and people of colour who often bear the brunt of environmental degradation. In the words of the amazing Youth Environmental Network:

Nobody wants toxic facilities in their neighbourhoods; this is referred to as not-in-my-backyard or NIMBY. However, race- and class-privileged communities are able to enforce NIMBY while some communities are not. These communities are most often communities of colour, First Nations and low income communities.

This is from the Green Justice Guide, which you can download on this webpage (scroll to the bottom. unfortunately it’s a hefty doc and you might have to be patient.)

If you’d like to learn more about the connection between environmentalism and racism, and the movement to make things better, I’d highly recommend the article “Green is not the only colour” which my associate Beenash Jafri co-wrote.

(Image taken from the Black.Brown.Green website)

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It’s not just white environmentalists who don’t want to give up their meat « Vegans of Color on 12 Mar 2008 at 6:03 pm

[...] Filed under: Uncategorized — vegansofcolor @ 6:03 pm Tags: environmentalism, race, wtf Via Racialicious, the Black. Brown. Green. website, which links environmental & racial justice issues. Sounds [...]

Comments

Claudia wrote:

I’m glad you posted about this. Environmental justice is SUCH an important crux of two major issues and will only become more so as racial disparities and climate and pollution issues become more heightened.
If you want to see some exciting work that is going on in this area, check out the Ella Baker Center’s Green Collar Jobs campaign, which seeks to create vital jobs for poor people and people of color in booming green industries and integrate marginalized communities in urban areas into pushes for ‘green-collar’ job training and development in urban areas: http://ellabakercenter.org/page.php?pageid=5

Posted 12 Mar 2008 at 1:49 pm ¶
Sarah wrote:

There’s also the amazing work of Van Jones, to be found here: http://www.vanjones.net/

The Sun Magazine also recently published an interview with him: http://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/387/bridging_the_green_divide

Posted 12 Mar 2008 at 2:22 pm ¶
Jennifer wrote:

I’m so glad you posted on this issue. I became aware of this issue a year or two ago when I discovered Majora Carter.

Posted 12 Mar 2008 at 4:52 pm ¶
Torontonian wrote:

Thank you for this post. This is exactly why “Buy Nothing Day” disgusts me.

Posted 13 Mar 2008 at 12:02 am ¶
Elizabeth wrote:

Thank you so much for this. I went to a medium sized public university with just over 11% Black students, and 12% Latino students. I was one of two Latinas in my graduating class of environmental studies majors. There were no Black students or any other students of color. Classes outside my major were more diverse, and I always wondered why.

Posted 13 Mar 2008 at 5:56 am ¶
kat wrote:

i loved this piece the first time round at shamelessmag.com, and i’m thrilled to see it on racialicious. thanks thea!

Posted 13 Mar 2008 at 11:31 am ¶
Gregory A. Butler wrote:

The thing is, environmentalism SHOULD be a natural issue for communites of color.

For instance, my neighborhood, West Harlem, is home to the largest sewage treatment plant on the face of the Earth – the NYC Department of Environmental Protection’s North River Waste Water Treatment Plant.

They process 30 million gallons of raw sewage A DAY (basically, if you pee in Manhattan, your waste comes to my neighborhood – we also get the excretions of large areas of Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx as well – the noxious bodily fluids of 2 million residents and 4 million commuters all come up here every day)

Originally, this plant was going to be only 6 mm gal/day – and it was supposed to be on West 59th St, in a much Whiter and more affluent part of town.

But, they made it five times bigger – and put it on West 138th St (just a few years after this neighborhood shifted from being White to being Latino and Black).

And, Riverbank State Park, the only full service non school related public recreation facility in our whole neighborhood, is BUILT RIGHT ON TOP OF THE PLANT – the smokestacks literaly come up right in the middle of the park!

That was intended to “balance” us having the waste plant put up here!!!

Big suprise, ever since the plant opened in 1988, our asthma rate has skyrocked (especially the rate of athsma in folks who were born since the plant opened!)

Now, if that’s not environmental racism, than I don’t know what is!!

Posted 13 Mar 2008 at 11:40 pm ¶
Craig Hubley wrote:

I agree this is a serious concern but not just because of very localized NIMBY effects. I think it’s much deeper and arising from a wholly obsolete supply-side rich-people-rule mindset that ignores innovation by the poor.

Unfortunately the plain wrong beliefs of many “environmentalists”, mostly arising from the time when they learned the doctrines they quack (without comprehension), are often racist or at least hopelessly biased. “Overpopulation” for instance was such a refrain in the 60s and 70s because of supply sided “peaker” type arguments and incomprehension of the horrifying effects that emissions from the rich, not just extraction around the poor, were already having. We know where they got the God’s-eye-view assumption that the world is going to be owned, measured, cut up and sold off by somebody. We don’t know why they argue against this one day and blindly assume it the next. They’ll question GDP as a measure of progresss but never question inflation prevention as a monetary goal, for instance.

More specific is the absurd blind preference for “renewable” sources like hydroelectric power or dirty-fabricated solar panels which evict helpless people from river valleys and result in ewaste and toxins dumped in countries where silicon solar panels are made – a recent scandal about this caused the solar index to drop a few percent. And is shutting down existing nuclear plants really a top prioritywhen carbon is on the rise, and it was anti-nuclear activism that caused the coal renaissance in the first place? I say no.

Then there’s the wacky idea that all trade is inherently bad, despite the path out of poverty it provides when done right. Or the total failure to recognize when a small non-white country like Bhutan gets it right: “Gross National Happiness” is ok for them somehow but “won’t work” here. Why not? Because racists assume racism?

China, also, gets uniformly treated as an environmental villain despite some of the most innovative and bold green projects in the world including designating whole cities as experiments in green building. Even in Tibet they’ve managed to make some serious progress in management of the critical Four Rivers region that they rarely get credit for. Odd how this dovetails with the military-industrial complex desire to demonize China.

And what about all this wrongheaded focus on the Canadian seal hunt or fur trapping, which is usually carried out by poor or native people, followed by protests against the oil exploration and extraction and gas pipelines that become their only source of income. What are these people supposed to do? Remain subsistence hunters plus satellite TV and gasoline sniffing?

But probably worse than all of this is the total ignorance and total refusal to learn how the money and capital asset system work. Somehow it’s fine to require everyone to upgrade their house, or even pay them to, but no defensible policy ever emerges to fix monetary or mortgage policy. Say require green mortgages to make the money for this available to the working poor, and punish builders of lousy leaky housing that can’t be operated by poorer people. Somehow it’s fine to let energy prices skyrocket including adding taxes, but instead of figuring out a rational transition strategy for the transport or other sectors affected, most want to put up a few windmills in visible places and then subsidize them to prevent wiser ways of doing things, like energy-efficient technologies that exist now, from being installed with that same capital investment. Most of the green movement is committed to hopelessly inefficient subsidies and promotion of symbolic visible boutique solutions.

At the root I’d say the difference is this: The green movement has tended to attract self-righteous “white” people who think they are educated enough to be better than others, often neurotic types, focused often just on out doing each other, while the people who joined anti-racist and defense-of-the-poor groups did so usually because they had to. As generations change this too will change, because now we all “have to” worry about the horrific damage being done to the basic life support systems of the Earth. And leaders like Wangari Maathai emerge who are from other traditions. And science establishes a lot more terrifying scenarios, like anoxic oceans (see National Geographic’s “Six Degrees”) or methane clathrate gunshots that cause them to occur at more like two.

In the science-driven debate we have to have now, there’s really no room for absurd biases arising from old formulations of the problem and old expectations that one’s interests will be ignored. Whatever elements of the “green” movement don’t get this and continue to preach dead doctrines must be bypassed. Thankfully they are, look at the fate of the Green Parties for instance. They don’t learn, they rarely respond to the issues of the day, and so, they don’t elect anyone.

Reaping the very few people who understand these problems and moving them into a new movement altogether, hopefully one focused on achieving real power through existing parties and institutions, would be advisable.

Posted 15 Mar 2008 at 10:59 pm ¶