This is a sequel to my earlier post critiquing Ibram X Kendi's How to be an Antiracist. You'll recall that it was a section from a review essay of books by Kendi, David Pellow and Robin DiAngelo. This piece is a revision of the concluding section of that essay. Again, if you wish to read the complete review essay, shoot me a message.
The Academic Study of Environmental Justice
David Naguib Pellow is Dehlsen Chair and
Professor of Environmental Studies and Director of the Global Environmental
Justice Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He began his
career doing dissertation research on the environmental racism faced by African
American sanitation workers in Chicago in the 1990s. Since then, he has examined the race and
class dimensions of environmental justice and even animal rights in a number of
single and coauthored books.[1]
Across that time he has served on the boards of several community-based,
national, and international environmental organizations.[2]
Interest in the environmental social sciences is often accompanied by some
level of activism, and Pellow has marked himself as a W.E.B. Duboisian-like
scholar activist in the field of environmental justice. In What is
Environmental Justice? he has delivered an assessment of the state of
scholarship in the field as issues of systemic racism have gained unprecedented
visibility across American society.[3]
Pellow reviews the first two waves of environmental
justice (EJ) studies and calls for the establishment of a third wave thrust he
labels as “Critical
Environmental Justice Studies.” As the framing suggests, Critical EJ Studies
draws upon the approach pioneered by critical legal studies in the 1970s and
quickly expanded upon by critical race and feminist studies. Established by
scholars influenced by the civil rights and identity politics of the 1960s,
critical legal studies is grounded in a variety of leftist tendencies including
Marxism and post-structuralism.
Intersectionality, the convergence of more
than one type of oppression, or marginalization in the human actor, or at a
site of social interaction, was brought to critical legal and race studies by
theorists of race and feminism. EJ studies has always been intersectional. It
grappled with the race/class nexus in addressing toxic waste dumping from its
inception, and second-generation scholars added gender and sexuality into the
mix. In another vein, first generation EJ scholarship was preoccupied with
distributive justice as it related to which communities suffered most from
environmental pollution. In the second generation, attention began to center
more on the lack of inclusion of community members in policy making processes,
or procedural justice. Pellow is calling for a third generation
of scholarship he names Critical
Environmental Justice (CEJ). The CEJ agenda deepens the intersectional
commitments of EJ studies and moves beyond distributive and procedural justice
in environmental politics, toward social justice and sustainability for the
planet and all of its human and “more than human” inhabitants. In doing so he
champions a new paradigm that
incorporates not only critical race and feminist theory, but “Ethnic Studies,
Gender and Sexuality Studies, Political Ecology, Anti-Statist/Anarchist Theory
and Ecological Justice Studies” (Pellow 2018, 18).
The Centrality of Race
in the Quest for Ecological Justice
I
think most Black people, in general, are really not interested in dialogue at
this point from White
people ... I think most Black
people think of the request of White people for dialogue as being basically
analogous to stalling, stalling for time ... I think what most Black people
would like from White people
is some kind of action ... Now you
can do it while you talk to us ... I think what most Black people, what most
people in the Seneca Nation, what most people in the Mohawk Nation would like
is some activity, massive amounts of it!
-The Fire Next Time (1991)
Because the health of the planet impacts us all
the environmental movement has long suffered from an arrogance that says
environmental protection and restoration is the most important political issue
of our time. From the movement’s perspective the problems of patriarchy, homo
and transphobia, classism, racism, war imperialism, etc., troubling as they may
be, cannot be addressed, if we don’t get all hands-on deck to save the planet.
Of course, environmentalists are right about that. The proliferation of extreme
weather events and the impact of ecological change causing climate refugees,
are not lost on anyone who doesn’t have their head in the sand.
There are two points to make here. First,
environmentalism is the foremost of what Immanuel Wallerstein called the new anti-systemic
movements (along with racial identity movements, feminism, and LGBTQI rights). He calls them anti-systemic, because bringing true equity
to the aggrieved identity groups would require a drain on profits that is
tantamount to a complete transformation of the global capitalist economy
(1990). The other movements all certainly require greater levels of state
intervention and taxation, and massive politically incentivized shifts in
patterns of investment, especially where racial inequality is concerned. But
reversing global warming and climate change necessitates that all major
capitalist enterprises responsible for environmental degradation clean up their
practices (which in some cases may be impossible) or go out of business.
The industrialization that
we have known so far (capitalist and socialist) has been based upon the
destruction of nature. Engaging in practices to protect the environment simply
cost too much money and would undermine capitalism as we know it. Secondly,
since the environmental
movement, like the women’s and LGBTQI movements, has always been dominated by
educated White people, it was unmindful of the bread and butter and racial
issues affecting communities
of color. And when those communities raised environmental justice
concerns, the White mainstream reacted defensively and slowly.
So the ecological
imperative is the most universal human problem, and it is simultaneously the
most threatening to capitalism as we know it. A fully mobilized global
environmental movement might be able to create the conditions for a new world
socioeconomic order. But recalling the chant from the People’s Climate March in
2014, “to change everything we need everyone.” Educated and affluent White
people might have first been in a position to sound the global alarm, but most
of the people on the planet are POC, working class, and live under less than
democratic regimes with dysfunctional economies. Many of them live in the
places most vulnerable to climate change.
Pellow points us toward “including everyone” in
his text, by focusing on movements where people are too busy trying to survive
harsh material conditions and brutal state security practices to prioritize the
rise of the global ocean or the growth of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Yet Pellow finds visionary leadership, especially in the BLM and
mass incarceration movements that have already begun to connect the dots
between their issues, and environmental and ecological justice. If the conditions for
human existence can’t be sustained, over the long haul the species’ demise is
certain. But if Black and Brown communities do not have decent life
opportunities today, if dictatorships currently terrorize citizens who speak up
against injustice now, then White environmentalists must add those “ecological
issues” to their agenda to garner support amongst the POC majority of the
world. If it takes everyone to change everything, it
will take a CEJ agenda that sees all people and their issues as indispensable.
In this historic enterprise, the on
racial justice by Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi are likewise, indispensable to
sustainability progress. DiAngelo also talks about how
White people tend to see their experiences as universal for humankind. They
often become incredulous when POC report that they have different experiences
and different issues because they live in different worlds. In this global
system of White supremacy where White people most often live in segregation and
with greater affluence, they must accept that they do not always know what is
going on with most of humanity and they must learn how to take leadership
from people of color. Letting go of White fragility is a critical first
step along that journey.[4]
For his part, Kendi does
not condemn the entire White race as irrevocably racist, nor does he see all
POC as automatically not racist. He shares his own stories of how he was racist
against Black people at some points, even as he fought against racism. In a
similar vein he has witnessed many White people going along with racism in some
instances yet calling out racism at other times. The challenge Kendi throws
down to each of us is to do our level best to try to be antiracist all the
time. Kendi is certainly an exemplar in this respect. He is interested in changing policy and
gaining institutional power.[5] Toward those ends he founded the
Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University in 2017.[6].
All three authors have walked their talk when it comes to taking action. DiAngelo and
Kendi are much in demand as public speakers to the full gamut of corporate,
university, religious, and nonprofit organizations, and DiAngelo is an
antiracist trainer. Kendi has become a major institution builder. And at the
outset we mentioned David Pellow’s participation on environmental justice
nonprofit boards. All of them thus, have been around the world of collective
action and community organizing. While Pellow does offer
the charge for a community of scholars to usher in a third wave of
environmental justice research, DiAngelo and Kendi mostly offer prescriptions
for individual action; but they provide little in
the way of counsel to community organizers.[7]
Models for doing
multiracial community organizing have evolved over the decades. In my
trainings I have used the “Anti-Racist Organizational Development” model first
devised by the
Exchange Project of the Peace Development Fund and adapted by the Western
States Center in the 1990s. These are organizations long involved in
multiracial community organizing. They offer some practical tools for assessing
organizations on a continuum from “All White Club” to “Anti-Racist Organization.”
The organization striving to become anti-racist helps whites learn the
following (Johnson and Benslimane 2017, 26-29):
- to work together
and challenge other Whites around issues of racism
- to share power
with people of color - to take leadership from people of color
- to be
accountable to people of color.
The
same organization helps POC become more empowered by:
- taking
leadership
- sharing power in
the organization
- transforming the
organizational culture by challenging Whites and other people of color
- healing the
remnants of oppression through collective wellness
- prioritizing
issues of concern for communities of color and following their lead in
addressing
those issues.
In such a setting, organizations are being
asked to take on these efforts collectively, but individuals also must be
required to consciously pursue these objectives. Individuals must change for
systems to change. We would go further and add that working on issues of racial
justice and in communities of color around those issues is an indispensable way
for White people to build understanding and trust. The model also includes
ongoing anti-racist training; but training in the context of real work on the real
issues confronting communities.
For years I taught Race and Public Policy and
included an option for students to volunteer with organizations in communities
of color. I eventually added that ‘service-learning’
component to classes I taught in South Africa as well. In the US and in Africa I
advised students not to come in “too White” (i.e. assuming they know the
solution to the community’s problems, and can fix them), but to listen, watch,
and ask questions with humility. This is the kind of interracial organizing
that can build the basis for multiracial democracy. But the point is to
undertake the substantive work of dismantling systemic racism, which itself
begins healing, and continue that healing and personal growth while working
together in multiracial settings. In multiracial America and in a world where
most people of color are generally more vulnerable to environmental
degradation, White environmental activists must acquire these antiracist
organizing skills to the movement to be ‘sustainable’ for humanity at large. Taken together, the texts by Pellow,
DiAngelo and Kendi provide a framework for sustainable development on a global
scale. With the inclusion of the insights from Johnson’s model for practical
representation, the critical environmental justice paradigm can become the
framework for many movements seeking a more humane way of life on this planet.
[1]
Here is a sampling of Pellow’s scholarship. 2011. The Slums of Aspen:
Immigrants vs. the Environment in America’s Eden, with Lisa Sun-Hee Park. New
York: New York University Press; 2008. with Kenneth Gould and Allan Schnaiberg,
The Treadmill of Production: Injustice and Unsustainability in the Global
Economy. Baltimore, Paradigm Press;
2007.Resisting Global Toxics: Transnational Movements for Environmental
Justice. Cambridge, Ma: MIT Press; 2000. with Adam Weinberg and Allan
Schnaiberg, Urban Recycling and the Search for Sustainable Community
Development. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; 2005. Editor, with
Robert J. Brulle. Power, Justice, and the Environment: A Critical Appraisal
of the Environmental Justice Movement. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
[3] David Naguib Pellow, What
is Environmental Justice? Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2018.
Boston, MA: Beacon
Press, 2018.
[5] Ibram X. Kendi, How to
be an Antiracist. New York: One World, a division of Penguin
Random House, 2019.
[6] Kendi has had a volatile career
lately. In 2020 he moved to Boston University to establish the Center for
Antiracist Research. Allegations of his mismanagement of the Center in
2023 led to a university investigation, which cleared Kendi’s name. But the
ensuing malaise surrounding the Center precipitated his resignation and
appointment to head the newly established Howard University Institute for
Advanced Study in early 2025.The BU Center closed it’s doors in June, 2025.
[7] DiAngelo does suggest ways to get
involved in collective action in What it Means to be White, chapter 18.
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