Photo by Chiamaka Nwolisa on Unsplash

By Sue Edwards, Southeast PA Group Ex-com Member

As a white environmentalist in Pennsylvania, I, like many of my fellow Sierra Club members, am coming to grips with what it means to put equity and justice at the forefront of our work and to build alliances that center the Black experience as we fight to confront the climate emergency. I want to give an overview of readings and videos which have grabbed and shaken me and made me look at the profound depth and long history of systemic racism in the U.S. and calculate anew how these two crises can and must be fought together. I hope you will take a look at any of them that you are drawn to.

For a long time I have aspired to be an environmental justice champion, but it has been challenging for me and for many of us. Now, the bold-faced and brazen murder of George Floyd and the way it has galvanized so many to action has contributed to the Sierra Club’s making a strong statement of common cause with The Movement for Black Lives, a coalition representing over 150 organizations nationwide, and urging members to support it in whatever ways they can. One thing we can clearly do is to better educate ourselves about racism. I would say “structural racism,” but as Ibram X. Kendi writes, “all racism is structural and systemic.”

For those who may not have yet been convinced that climate activism must be intertwined with justice demands, a key article to read is by Hop Hopkins, Sierra Club's Director of Strategic Partnerships, “Racism Is Killing the Planet.”  planet It appeared in Sierra Magazine on June 8, 2020. He says, “Just as the settlers had to believe and tell stories to dehumanize the people they killed, plundered, and terrorized, today’s systems of extraction can only work by dehumanizing people. Back then we had the Doctrine of Discovery, and today it’s the doctrine of neoliberalism that says it’s OK to value some lives more than others, that it’s OK for some people to have clean air while others struggle to breathe....All I know is that if climate change and environmental injustice are the result of a society that values some lives and not others, then none of us are safe from pollution until all of us are safe from pollution.”

The tragic but potentially transformative exposure of long-standing racial injustice in policing and racism at the center of the United States' governance and the subsequent ongoing mass demonstrations give me hope that our country can experience a new era of greater justice. It's especially encouraging that the protests have been fueled by so many people of all backgrounds, races, and generations. What had been invisible to many white people has now led to an urgency—to understand, to better know US history, and to show support for our Black brothers and sisters. The New York Times best seller list recently showed that 4 out of 5 on this list were books about race and racism. I'm among those who have been devouring analyses of how we got to this point. Does this mean letting up on our determination, as climate change activists, to transition to a renewable energy economy as fast as possible? I'd say no, it gives us a more awakened path forward.

It is crucial that we pull back all the curtains that have kept white people ignorant of how living in the US has kept us blind to injustice and deep-seated racism—in ways both personal and institutional. So I join many others in reading essays, watching documentaries, searching out videos of late-night TV commentaries on YouTube, sharing book recommendations, and taking part in Zoom gatherings on this subject. I tuned in for hours on June 19 th for the Movement for Black Lives' Juneteenth observance as well as the June 20 th Poor People's Campaign's National Call for Moral Revival. (My husband and I also took a break from our isolation from the COVID-19 virus to take part in a few local rallies, masked and well-distanced, for the Black Lives Matter movement.)

What has stood out? I would lift up Ava DuVernay's documentary, “13th,” which is a history we all should have learned but mostly didn't. The 13 th Amendment, passed in 1865, was a pivotal moment. It is known for legally ending slavery, but with a huge loophole that gets scant attention. It actually allows involuntary servitude for anyone who has been convicted of a crime. This sleight-of-hand led to continuing unpaid labor, chain gangs, and the tragedy of mass incarceration. This and so many other aspects of the history of formerly enslaved humans in the US constitute a seemingly never-ending barrage of abuses, which the documentary lays out in harrowing detail. Both Republican and Democratic administrations have promulgated policies such as the war on drugs, mandatory sentencing, and 3 strikes measures that have resulted in a mushrooming of the US prison population, now particularly vicious due to the spread of the Coronavirus in prisons. These policies have continued the assault on the Black family that began with breaking up families as a feature of enslavement. And it has resulted in thousands of Black people disenfranchised (including 30% of Black people in Mississippi), since many states do not allow the formerly incarcerated to vote. To understand the realities of the ongoing injustice of the U.S. prison system, one excellent source is Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, which has now been made into a movie.

A couple of videos have also put into clear perspective our current situation. Trevor Noah responds in a well-reasoned monologue to criticisms of the looting that occurred as part of the recoil from George Floyd's murder by police. He shows that an implied social contract has been repeatedly broken by the powerful, who then criticize the powerless when they violate expectations.

A disturbing but must-watch video is by Black author and activist Kimberly Jones. Comparing the Black experience in the U.S. to a completely stacked game of Monopoly so that most Blacks can never accumulate any wealth, she refers to the smashing and burning of the rising Black middle class community in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921, which took approximately 300 Black lives. She concludes with the observation that our society is lucky that Black people are seeking equality, not revenge! Building on that observation, I would strongly recommend an essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones, Director of the New York Times “1619 Project” titled “What Is Owed,” it appeared in the June 28, 2020 issue of the Sunday Times Magazine. It makes a compelling case for reparations. Many white people, myself included, may not have known all of the myriad ways in which the accumulation of any wealth was prevented and stripped from Black families over the centuries. To quote the article: "To this day, the only Americans who have ever received government restitution for slavery were white enslavers in Washington, D.C., who were compensated for their loss of human property."

The much-lauded book, How to be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi, tells the story of his developing understanding that the key to ending racism is to focus on what it will take to actually change how things are, which is not through trying to change every heart, but through policies. He points out “Americans have long been trained to see the deficiencies of people rather than policy.”

Before this summer, I had read several books that I heartily recommend for anyone who needs to fill in their understanding of how racism has been doing its dirty work. The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander has become a classic that all should read. It lays out a litany of ways in which Blacks were excluded from benefiting from government programs and thus prevented from building wealth, while also being harmed in numerous ways for generations, starting with reneging on the promise of 40 acres to all the enslaved persons at the end of the Civil War. Anyone who wonders if Black people are responsible for their poverty and poor health should read Alexander's book.

There is also Robin DeAngelo's White Fragility, which focuses on the white liberal's avoidance of discomfort around race. It teases apart conscious racism, which most people reflexively deny having, and the invisible racism which we need to constantly bring ourselves to notice in our own reactions and experiences. Like a drill sergeant, she tells whites (ever so gently) to toughen up! I've been there, so I can relate.

There is a need for us to be confronted with the specific ways in which environmental racism is embedded in our society. Dr. Robert Bullard, noted African American climate scientist, pointed out that after huge storms, whites have gained wealth while communities of color have lost, widening the wealth gap and causing “climate gentrification.” (my notes on a 5/19/20 webinar of the Climate Reality Project & the Poor People's Campaign.) On the same webinar, the Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis said “You can buy unleaded paint and unleaded gas, but you can't get unleaded water” in Flint, MI. And she added that pollution takes 9 million lives every year, and poverty takes hundreds of millions. She declares this fight is for what ought to be.

A key reading, to understand the day-to-day experience of one family over a number of years with racism, is When they Call You a Terrorist by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and Asha Bandele, founders of the Black Lives Matter movement. Things that shouldn't happen to anyone do happen to Cullors' family, and we see the results in lives and health. This personalizes in a profound way the policies and statistics found in other sources.

For those for whom novels can pierce the heart in ways untouched by non-fiction, I recommend Kindred by Octavia E. Butler, which combines historical accuracy with an injection of time travel. It fictionalizes a modern-day Black woman being transported to a 19 th century plantation in the South several times over the years so that we can see how horrific the experience of slavery could feel through eyes unused to that form of intense brutality. She took my heart with her, and I felt a new understanding and determination. In particular, the threat of having one's children sold to an enslaver far away was a gut-wrenching tool to enforce compliance. Who could resist any depredations of a plantation owner who could ship out one’s children at any time?

I still struggle with what it will mean to be more supportive of front-line communities' issues and to not simply push our own agenda of zeroing out fossil fuels. I fully endorse the importance of building connections in a mosaic of communities, trying things, and making inevitable mistakes. Hopefully we will receive feedback, will get called out (or in), and will learn how to respond--not by trying to explain our good intentions but by acceptance and an open willingness to attempt to do better! As they say, if you're not making lots of mistakes, you're not trying enough potentially uncomfortable things.

I also encourage all of us to allow ourselves to feel how awful it is that poor people and people of color have been made to suffer with ill health and even death to preserve the continuing profits of the 1%, who are making our beautiful planet unlivable. “I can't breathe” expresses more than one truth. There is a very moving song that emerged from the Poor People's Campaign, and it can be heard on YouTube. It goes “Somebody's hurting my brother and it's gone on far too long, and we won't be silent any more.” Another verse says “Somebody's poisoning our water and it's gone on far too long...” There is grieving to do, if we can allow ourselves to acknowledge it. We can grieve, but we must act.

  This blog was included as part of the 2020 Fall Sylvanian newsletter. Please click here to check out more articles from this edition!