There is No Climate Justice Without Racial Justice
“To white people who care about maintaining a habitable planet, I need you to become actively anti-racist. I need you to understand that our racial inequality crisis is intertwined with our climate crisis. If we don’t work on both, we will succeed at neither.”
I know that many folks are here for content regarding ways in which we can tackle aspects of the climate crisis from right here within our homes. An essential component of this topic that I haven’t addressed nearly enough is that the fight against climate breakdown is also a fight for justice.
Environmentalists have a special duty to speak out on racial injustice. I will continue to do so in a more proactive and productive manner from here on out.
People of color are more likely to live near polluters, and thus drink polluted water and breathe polluted air. (Despite this fact, the current EPA is in the process of rolling back regulations on pollution, even as the agency itself has confirmed these truths.)
“We see firsthand how these groups suffer disproportionately from industrial pollution, toxic waste, and other forms of frontline environmental hazard and harm. This, too, is the result of deeply entrenched racist patterns and policies, the direct upshot of which is physical suffering and premature death.” - Mitch Bernard, Executive Director and Chief Counsel of the National Resources Defense Council
I recently began reading: “A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind” by Harriet A. Washington. Last year, when the author, Harriet A. Washington, was asked by an NPR correspondent why people of color are disproportionately affected by environmental racism, Washington’s response was as follows:
“For the same reasons they're disproportionately affected by many things. It's various racist policies that have persisted for decades - and in some cases centuries - have herded them into areas where they are exposed to toxins. Segregation is a factor in many urban areas. In Baltimore, black people live in certain parts of the city because they can't go elsewhere. When lead was found to be devastatingly harmful - and it was harmful to everybody, white and black people - when that was found to be the case, whites were able to go to the suburbs to housing that had not - never been exposed to lead and live away from the hazards. But black people were not allowed to move into suburbs. They weren't allowed to move into white communities at all. They were trapped in these areas where they tended not to have ownership of their homes because of redlining and other racially - racial policies. So they did not have the force that a homeowner might have in terms of forcing some kind of government action. So a lot of racial policies conspire to create communities that are relatively powerless and have been concentrated in areas that are harmful.”
- Harriet A. Washington
While we cannot visit our beloved libraries to further educate ourselves on this topic at the moment, we can take the simple action of setting Google alerts for news on this issue. In the past few days alone there has been a flood of articles and posts highlighting experts discussing the intersection of the climate x social justice movements.
Let’s listen closely, and VOTE for candidates at local and federal levels who act with Environmental Justice at the top of mind when at the ballot box.
Below is a small sampling of outlets run by individuals or organizations whose work is either rooted in or overlaps with environmental justice:
National Resources Defense Council (Instagram + Newsletter + Racial Justice Statement)
NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice Program (About + Twitter)
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson (Instagram + Recent article from The Washington Post)
Heather C. McGhee (Instagram)
Green Matters (Instagram)
We Act (Instagram)
LALCV (Website)
Sunsrise Movement (BLM Statement + Instagram + Week of Action in Defense of Black Lives + Website)
Fibershed (Instagram)
UPROSE Brooklyn (Website)
Christiana Figueres (Instagram)
