If We Don’t Connect It to Race and Class, Then Green Politics Is Just High-End Consumerism
As environmentalism goes mainstream, corporations are marketing the word “green” as a panacea for the world’s climate crisis. Today the word describes a set of prescribed, mostly consumerist actions: buy local, organic and fresh; go vegan; eat in season; skip the elevator; take the stairs. “Green” has come to mean shopping at Whole Foods and possessing a Prius. Meanwhile, leading corporate polluters like BP and Exxon Mobil place commercials on CNN advertising their “green” practices.
It should come as no surprise, then, that “green” lifestyles don’t resonate with low-income communities; being “green” involves a set of behaviors that are financially or culturally inaccessible to millions of Americans. This presents a major problem for the environmental movement. If it is going to be successful, environmentalism simply cannot afford to be demographically segregated or isolated from the pathos of economic disparity.
The environmental movement needs to do a better job of connecting issues of race, class, poverty and sustainability; in short, it has to become a broader social movement. And people of color need visibility in the movement. By that, I don’t mean Barack Obama presiding over environmental policy from the White House or Lisa Jackson heading the Environmental Protection Agency during Obama’s first term. I mean the recognition that sustainable survival practices in poor communities are just as significant as solar panels and LED lights. Ultimately this is where the citizenry of the planet can and must come together in order to move forward.
For communities of color plagued by high rates of homicide, hypertension, cancer, HIV and imprisonment, it is far more urgent to ask people to sustain life than it is to pitch them green politics. In my adopted hometown of Oakland, an African-American male is as likely to be the victim of homicide as he is to graduate from high school at proficiency levels for a California state university. This tragic situation is both systemically entrenched and historically rooted (the destruction of the black home and family was integral to chattel slavery, as was the denial of literacy), making the present prospects for anything but survival bleak in our harshest urban environments. If we’re to talk about the environment in a city like mine, we must examine the impact of the death of another promising black boy on a local, social ecosystem.
https://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/02/17-9
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