We Have a Responsibility to Support Black, Brown and Indigenous Climate Justice Leadership

Growing up in Providence, Rhode Island in a mixed-Black, bi-cultural Southern family, I took in a lot of misconceptions about the South. Both sides of my family (my father is from El Paso, TX and my mother is from Marietta, GA) enthusiastically moved north during their twenties and have never looked back. I was told […] The post We Have a Responsibility to Support Black, Brown and Indigenous Climate Justice Leadership also appears on National Committee For Responsive Philanthropy.

We Have a Responsibility to Support Black, Brown and Indigenous Climate Justice Leadership
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Growing up in Providence, Rhode Island in a mixed-Black, bi-cultural Southern family, I took in a lot of misconceptions about the South. Both sides of my family (my father is from El Paso, TX and my mother is from Marietta, GA) enthusiastically moved north during their twenties and have never looked back. I was told that Southern people were closed-minded, racist, and didn’t care about the environment. We did not talk about my conservative Southern Baptist cousins in Georgia, and outside of my grandmother, I did not grow up knowing any of my family in Texas. I was raised firmly as a vegetarian, and my dad would usher me into the living room on Sunday evenings to teach me how to separate the recycling, lining up four separate bins on the living room floor for plastic, paper, glass, and metal. I went to Girl Scout sleepaway camp during the summer and hiked through the woods every day, pocketing all the cool rocks I could find. I spent much of my time reading or playing outside. By the time I hit the eleventh grade and was able to take Advanced Placement Environmental Science, I decided I wanted to save the planet when I grew up. 

 

This context is important to me in understanding the inherent contradictions that plagued not only my upbringing, but also the narratives around the cultures, attitudes, and environments that make up the states below the Mason-Dixon line. We see this not only on a political scale, but also on a frontline movement and funding scale. We cannot talk about environmental and climate justice without talking about the South. In 1979, the first civil rights lawsuit related to environmental injustice was the Bean V. Southwestern Waste Management in Houston, TX, filed to halt the construction of a landfill in a middle-class Black community. Community residents were fed up with  landfills being built in predominantly Black neighborhoods in Houston between the early 1920s and 1978, despite Black folks only making up 25% of the population at the time. 

 

Still today, we see the impacts of extractive industries, landfills, chemical plants, caged animal feeding operations (CAFOs), shipping warehouses, (to name only a few) being built and operating in low-income Black and brown communities in the South: there are higher rates of asthma, cancer, heart disease, premature births, heat stroke, and diabetes,  and these are only being exacerbated by climate change. Yet all of this was conveniently absent from my environmental education. I learned how driving an electric or hybrid car was going to solve the transportation problems of the world (this was in the mid-2000s before Tesla came onto the scene), but not about how to build equitable public transit infrastructure; how green roofs and solar panels, and going vegan, and planting trees in my backyard were all viable individual solutions to systemic problems and that I would not have to challenge my worldview at all to implement them. There was no justice component. My understanding of the climate crisis was not only greenwashed, but whitewashed, and arguably middle to upper middle class centric.  

 

The author on the bayou

Recently, I had the incredible pleasure of attending the HBCU Climate Change Conference in New Orleans, LA, hosted by the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice. I was humbled by the student attendees furiously taking notes as Dr. Robert Bullard (often named the “father of environmental justice”) seamlessly wove together the intersections of racism, housing injustice, and climate justice, citing dozens of studies in the span of fifteen minutes. When he finished his keynote speech, the room erupted in a standing ovation. As I left the room to go get some more coffee, I heard a student remark  “Yeah, it’s really nice to have climate justice not framed in such a white context.”  

 

During the remainder of the conference, I listened to community organizers such as Sharon Lavigne, founder of RISE St. James and 2021 recipient of the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize talk about living in St. James Parish, LA. St James is surrounded by 12 petrochemical plants, part of a region in the Gulf South along the Mississippi River nicknamed Cancer Alley because of the more than 150 petrochemical plants within the 84-mile region. Sharon spoke about watching her friends die from cancer due to chemical exposure, and about not being able to enjoy the land because she cannot breathe when going outside. She started RISE out of necessity and organized in 2018 to stop yet another petrochemical plant, Formosa Plastics, from being built.  

 

Stories like these remind me why I do this work. And I have heard hundreds. The tenacity of Black, brown, and indigenous organizers throughout the South are why we have grassroots environmental and climate justice movements, but the region remains chronically underfunded by philanthropy, and the narratives buried in favor of cleaner, more technical ones that offer us false business as usual approaches to climate change mitigation. We need to listen to the frontlines, who have been screaming for decades that they are quite literally being buried because of environmental and climate injustice. The stark inequities are devastating and uncomfortable, but if we are going to have any hope of a true just transition for all, we need to level the playing field and resource the grassroots groups at a much greater rate than we have been.  

 

This Earth Day and everyday we owe Black, brown and Indigenous frontline climate justice leaders their due. You can start by following some of the National and Southern U.S. based organizations below: 

 

Climate Justice Alliance 

Indigenous Environmental Network 

Deep South Center for Environmental Justice 

Cooperation Jackson 

Gulf South Center for Law and Policy 

Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services 

 

Senowa is the Senior Movement Engagement Associate for Climate Justice at NCRP.

The post We Have a Responsibility to Support Black, Brown and Indigenous Climate Justice Leadership also appears on National Committee For Responsive Philanthropy.