Read The Signs

“Black Lives Matter” protesters in front of Borough Hall on June 8, 2020 in New York City. Photograph by Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images.

BY: HALEY GLOVER, SUMMER 2020 COLLABORATOR AT POWER IN PLACE

Getty Images VIA Cosmopolitan.

We have asked for change in Ferguson, Baltimore, and Minneapolis. We have protested the systemic injustices of the government we live our lives by. Yet every new wave of protests highlights the American system’s cyclicality that repeatedly condemns rage, specifically Black rage, and instead legislates complicity. Politicians routinely disqualify protests and instead call for votes for change. However, today’s revival of the Black Lives Matter movement demonstrates the failure of traditional modes of legislation, such as voting, for Black citizens. One of the founders of the BLM movement, Alicia Garza, identified similar systemic flaws in the beginning of the movement stating, “What we’ve seen is an attempt by mainstream politics and politicians to co-opt movements that galvanize people in order for them to move closer to their own goals and objectives. . . . We don’t think that playing a corrupt game is going to bring change and make Black lives matter” [1]. Every protest shut down, condemned as a riot, or transformed into the political campaign of a politician is the “corrupt game” in action. It is systemic silencing of Black voices and is an attempt to dilute the energy of the BLM movement. 

Since 2013, when the movement began, legislative flaws have survived numerous reforms and are reflected today in calls for “law & order” [2] and the dismantling of organized protests across the U.S. through state National Guard deployment. In response to these efforts by elected officials to turn peaceful protests violent, the BLM movement's resilience and determination to protest will be vital in beginning to make the institutional changes necessary until the Black political voice is heard on Capitol Hill. While voting is a start, it is not a guarantee for change when the very system of voter registration is flawed across America. In commenting on past BLM protests in Ferguson, historian Dr. Barbara Ransby speaks on the “dead-end” results of traditional modes of legislation stating, “Organizers have already experienced the dead-end political results when social movements working in marginalized communities forfeit their agency and simply deliver votes to politicians without a strategy or a plan for ensuring accountability” [1]. Such results have silenced the black voice in the past and will continue to mute the marginalized if the momentum of protests slow. Such momentum makes headlines and amasses followers who are essential in making the grassroots initiatives necessary to work toward change from the inside out. Protest is the starting point because political participation relies on feelings of political efficacy within citizens, particularly Black citizens. Through cultural restrictions and institutional hindrances in education, law enforcement, and voter registration, the Black American’s participation in politics has been seriously limited [3]. In the face of these restrictions, protest has emerged as one of the Black American’s few means of political participation that in its purest form is not tied to the system; a system that has actively worked to decrease the Black individual’s sense of effectiveness in not only politics but everyday life [3].

Kyle Robertson/ The Columbus Dispatch via AP.

White supremacy in modern day America is reflected in the systemic silencing of Black citizens. Whether it is the criminalization of Black political participation or the interpretation of protests and rallies as violent riots, America’s collective imagination has been conditioned to flinch at shouts for justice and resist any disruption to the foundations of the country. A country that Congresswoman Joyce Beatty reminds us is rooted in the oppression of Black Americans. Beatty tweeted late last month: “The history & trauma of racism and Jim Crow is not a memory of the past, but is a reality still today, reinforced by the fact that Black Americans are disproportionately the targets of injustices ranging from mass incarceration & police brutality, to the War on Drugs & COVID-19” [4]. Shortly after tweeting this, U.S. Representative Beatty took her words from Twitter to protests in downtown Columbus where she was maced by police officers after attempting to subdue an altercation [5].

Kyle Robertson/The Columbus Dispatch via Twitter.

In choosing to participate in protests, Congresswoman Beatty removed the veil between a government and its people. Actively protesting the system she operates within, Beatty’s action is one of the first steps towards increasing black political engagement in America. Scholars John Pierce and Addison Carey describe the degree of black political efficacy stating, “The degree to which the black citizen feels he can influence political decisions is linked to… the response he receives when he attempts to gain access to the participation channels of the system” [3]. Beatty is actively opening up these channels using the route of protest. As a black woman first and politician second, Beatty protests the racist institutional arrangement she is involved in. In response to the system’s failure in the wrongful death of George Floyd, Beatty tweeted: “America is watching. Where is the justice? How do we heal from the past memories of racial terror and lynchings when they are still alive today? I support peaceful protests for change, action and a path to restorative justice because now more than ever is a time of urgency” [6]. Beatty reminds us that the moment is here. It is time for the restoration of a system that devalues black voice and life. In protest, voices are amplified over the noise of the system and can be instrumental in increasing Black political efficacy. I ask everyone to read the signs of racial injustice in America and continue to march until the slogan “Black Lives Matter” is reflected not only in the actions of politicians, but in the American political system as a whole. Rep. Beatty pursues this constructive form of political engagement through protest as she marches toward justice and fundamental change. I’m following her.

References

[1] Ransby, Barbara. "Black Rage and Blacks in Power: Baltimore and Electoral Politics." In Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century, 81-95. Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2018. Accessed June 18, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/2783927.

[2] Trump, Donald. Twitter post. June 15, 2020, 10:19 a.m. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1272534307303755776?s=20 

[3] Pierce, John C., and Addison Carey. "Efficacy and Participation: A Study of Black Political Behavior." Journal of Black Studies 2, no. 2 (1971): 201-23. www.jstor.org/stable/2783927.

[4] Beatty, Joyce. Twitter post. May 29, 2020, 12:31 a.m. https://twitter.com/RepBeatty/status/1266225506803945472?s=20 

[5] Mena, Kelly. “African-American congresswoman gets pepper sprayed during George Floyd protest in Columbus.” CNN, May 31, 2020. Accessed June 18, 2020. https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/30/politics/joyce-beatty-ohio-pepper-sprayed-columbus-protest/index.html

[6] Beatty, Joyce. Twitter post. May 29, 2020, 12:32 a.m. https://twitter.com/RepBeatty/status/1266225969628667904?s=20 

Godfrey, Elaine. “The Congresswoman Pepper-Sprayed by Police.” The Atlantic, May 31, 2020. Accessed June 18, 2020. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/05/congresswoman-pepper-sprayed-joyce-beatty/612436/

Note from author: Haley is always listening to other voices and acknowledging her whiteness when writing on the Black Lives Matter movement and is always open to further discussions or edits on any of the material discussed above. Thank you. 

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Haley is a senior at Middlebury College. She is majoring in English and Political Science. On campus she works as the president of the MiddLaw club where she helps students gather resources for careers in law. Haley is from Ohio and is particularly interested in the political climate of the Midwest and legislative reform.

No Environmental Justice, No Peace

BY: LYDIA WIENER, SUMMER 2020 COLLABORATOR AT POWER IN PLACE

Millions across the globe have taken to the streets and opened their minds (and wallets) to combat the systemic racism that has historically plagued Black and Brown communities. Outraged, and rightfully so, over the wrongful deaths of George Floyd and the many before him while in police custody, protestors have championed the phrase “No Justice, No Peace,” indicating that unrest will not cease until Floyd’s killers are convicted and major police reform is made. The Black Lives Matter organization has spearheaded this movement by demanding police budgets be cut, demilitarized, and the resulting money be invested into marginalized communities. But police brutality is merely one symptom of foundational racism. The meta mantra “No Justice, No Peace” calls for environmental justice, education justice, economic justice, and everything in between.

The Environmental Protection Agency defines environmental justice as “the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income, with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulation, and policies,” calling into question the blatant environmental inequities faced by Black and Brown communities in the US and around the world since the colonial era [1]. Colonial discourse, canonized by Edward Said’s book Orientalism, framed white men and the Western world as the picture of progress, civility, and rationality, while people of color and the global East were framed as the barbaric, savage, primitive, “other” [2]. This mentality, paired with lingering sentiment from the 1800s movement to preserve American wilderness (which was largely a response to immigration and the emancipation of slaves), culminated in the Wilderness Act of 1964—a racially charged foundation to the “golden era” of environmental legislation. Section 2c of the Wilderness Act prescribed “a wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain,” turning wilderness into a racialized “purification machine” where Native American and Black communities were evicted from their residential lands [3].

These Black and Brown communities were relocated to vulnerable, degraded, and largely unwanted lands. Whether it be lands geographically predisposed to bear the forefront of climate burdens (think the Lower Ninth Ward during Hurricane Katrina), or lands that are riddled with calculated placements of locally unwanted land-uses such as landfills, superfund sites, and highways (think the Warren County PCB Landfill circa 1982), these Black and Brown communities face intensified health, economic, and development vulnerabilities not experienced by their white counterparts, reinforcing the historical cycle of disenfranchisement and oppression. 

It’s no wonder why the collective memories of Black communities hold ambivalent connections to wildlands. Prior to the civil rights movement, wildlands provided spaces for escaped slaves to develop medicinal practices with plants, perform spiritual practices, form resistance movements, and feed families, while also serving as grounds for rapes and beatings. Over time, this relationship only became more convoluted as imposed restrictions on historical and cultural lands encouraged an influx of wealthy, white visitors, skewing local understandings of sense of place associated with those spaces and causing many Blacks to feel alienated and unsafe. Just this past Memorial Day, white New York City resident Amy Cooper highlighted the manufactured doubts surrounding the place of the Black body in the natural space when she reported and threatened Christian Cooper, a Black birdwatcher and board member of the New York City Audubon Society, to the police. 

Carolyn Finney, an environmental justice scholar, author, and activist who has been targeted by unsettling racial perceptions herself, calls on predominantly white-led environmental organizations and academic institutions to “recognize that systemic racism exists on both the streets of our cities and inside our national parks” [4]. According to Finney, there needs to be “full representation at every level in the environmental sector,” including reparations for disproportionately impacted Black and Brown communities, to induce “fundamental, consequential, and absolute change.”

The Black Lives Matter movement and activists like Finney are forcing whitewashed America to grapple with its place in building this racist and oppressive system, and pushing the environmental movement to reassess its mission as well. Within the last month, paramount climate change activism and advocacy groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council, 350.org, and the Sierra Club have publicly pledged to support Black-led justice initiatives, build inclusive, multiracial climate coalitions, and divest from systems of white supremacy. During a Black-led 350.org webinar on dismantling racism in the climate movement, Executive Director of Minnesota 350, Sam Grant, implores listeners to “live at the intersection of abolition and ending climate apartheid” [5].

References

[1] OP US EPA, “Environmental Justice,” Collections and Lists, US EPA, November 3, 2014, https://www.epa.gov/environmentaljustice.

[2] Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 1st Vintage Books ed (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).

[3] Janae Davis, “Black Faces, Black Spaces: Rethinking African American Underrepresentation in Wildland Spaces and Outdoor Recreation:,” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, December 14, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848618817480.

[4] Carolyn Finney, “The Perils of Being Black in Public: We Are All Christian Cooper and George Floyd | Race | The Guardian,” accessed June 15, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/03/being-black-public-spaces-outdoors-perils-christian-cooper.

[5] “Pledge to Act in Defense of Black Lives,” 350.org, accessed June 15, 2020, https://350.org/in-defense-of-black-lives/.

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Lydia Wiener is a recent graduate of Middlebury College , where she majored in Environmental Policy and minored in Geography and African Studies. She is fascinated with the social, economic, and political nexus that underscores environmental issues, and is committed to creating equitable environmental change.