We can hope for the future — and I do — but, meanwhile, we still live in exceptionally precarious times, Black people and POC more than most.
In These Times’ Camille Williams posted an article yesterday (November 25, 2020), “The Climate Movement’s Reckoning With Black Lives Matter” which says, to begin with:
Environmental justice has never been separate from racial justice, according to Elizabeth Yeampierre, co-chair of the national Climate Justice Alliance and executive director of the intergenerational, woman-of-color-led climate organization, UPROSE. Had she not been sick with Covid-19, she would have been in the streets with the thousands protesting the killing of George Floyd.
“We’ve been fighting for the right to breathe [clean air],” Yeampierre says. “So the fact that cops are literally [taking our breath away] is not surprising.”
CAMILLE WILLIAMS
Leah Thomas posted an article on Elle’s site in September that, unfortunately is no less true today: “‘I Can’t Breathe’ And The Inextricable Link Between Climate And Racial Justice”.
As a Black environmentalist, I find it impossible to separate my Blackness from my advocacy for our home planet. I’ve seen how social and environmental justice intersect with my own Black identity, how race plays a significant role in how BIPOC are able to safely experience the world around them. I’ve seen how these barriers—police brutality, environmental injustices, and health injustices—prevent Black people from not just living, but thriving.
Right now, we are living through the COVID-19 pandemic, a virus that has the ability to attack the respiratory system and cause breathing difficulties. And though we are all faced with the potential exposure to COVID, the reality is people of color have been disproportionately impacted in comparison to white Americans. Black Americans are dying from COVID-19 at more than twice the rate of white Americans, and it’s Black Americans who face bias in the healthcare system.
LEAH THOMAS
These problems CAN be redressed if we all make sure they’re ADDRESSED, and that won’t happen unless we know they exist and agree that they shouldn’t.
A WRITING PROMPT FROM ME TO YOU: Write about something made of three parts.
MA
kirizar
November 27, 2020 at 10:32pmThe writing prompt at the bottom made me look up and try to find the ‘Something Made of Three Parts’ you referenced in your post. I can see where Black Lives Matter Is in tandem with the concern for how COVID-19 is inordinately affecting black lives directly. It is a bit harder–without reading the attached articles in depth–to directly correlate it with the Environmental Crisis–unless you are including things like how people in Flint, Michigan–a predominately POC area–suffered from the callous disregard for their lives by policies that ignored the health risks of aging plumbing and contaminated water supplies leading to an entire generation being exposed to brain damage by lead in the drinking water. Then, I can see it . But boy, it can be hard to adjust one’s separation of each movement into a trifecta of causes. But I guess, that’s the privilege of not being part of the population so directly affected. It can be easy to miss the signs. Hopefully my words come across as intended–in sympathy and concern for combination of crises against other human beings–and not just serve to point out my ignorance and lack subtlety in grasping current events.
Marian Allen
November 28, 2020 at 12:01pmClimate change contributes to extreme weather patterns and the triggering of pandemics, and Black people and people of color are usually more at risk from both because of racial, environmental, and economic injustices. I don’t know that I would have made the three-way connection if I hadn’t been reading posts and reports of studies by people more directly affected and WAY smarter than I am. HUGS