Ghostbusters in Environmentalism: Black Women (Re)Shaping Environmental Justice
Like all canons, mainstream environmental literature is no exception: white folks monopolize a degree of authoritarian Truth without citing or creating space for black, brown, queer, indigenous, or feminist voices. White environmentalists ubiquitously cite Henry David Thoreau, Andrew Dobson, Arne Naess, and the countless other white men who comprise the canon. They do not center Carolyn Finney, Dorceta Taylor, MaVynee Betsch, Majora Carter, Brenda Palms Barber, Rue Mapp, or Harriet Tubman.
Through diverse mediums including books, TED Talks, op-eds, research papers, poetry and art, I analyze the way in which black women are revolutionizing environmental justice despite their historical and persistent systematic exclusion from the environmental literary canon and job sector. Using various frameworks including critical race theory, ecofeminist theory, quare studies, queer ecologies, and indigenous environmental narratives, this paper seeks to address why and how black women have long been ghosts in the environmental machine and erased by dominant narratives of white environmentalism.
Carolyn Finney’s and Dorceta E Taylor’s scholarship elucidates systematic exclusion of black women from the environmental cannon. Carolyn Finney’s 2014 book — Black Faces, White Spaces — provides a critical analysis of the role fear plays in black Americans’ historical and current relationship to their environment. Finney’s analysis of the way in which trees have become a symbol for black death helps to deconstruct dominant stereotypes that black folk aren’t invested in the environment.
Dorceta Taylor’s “The State of Diversity in Environmental Organizations: Mainstream NGOs, Foundations, and Government Agencies,” as prepared for the Green 2.0 working group in 2014, provides a statistical analysis of the systematic exclusion of black women from mainstream environmental organizations. Taylor’s research reveals that black Americans exclusion from environmental organizations is pervasive and multifold. Taylor’s most compelling findings elucidate the way in which environmental organizations discriminate in their hiring process.
Taylor also shows that marginalized folk that are involved in the environmental workforce rarely hold positions of authority in their organizations. People of color, or “ethnic minorities” (to use Taylor’s language) “occupy less than 12% of the leadership positions in the environmental organizations studied.”[1] Most notably, although unsurprisingly, Taylor’s study underscores how environmental organizations have made strides in terms of gender diversity, but that these advances does not sufficiently diversify and include silenced perspectives into the environmental workforce. Taylor’s report adds a critical perspective to the American environmental canon. Her scholarship elucidates black folks systematic exclusion from environmental organizations through biased recruiting tactics and the absence of people of color in positions of authority.
Yet, Finney and Taylor are far from the only black feminist pioneers that are revolutionizing the environmental movement. The work of many black women, including (but NOT limited to) MaVynee Betsch, Majora Carter, Brenda Palms Barber, Rue Mapp, and Harriet Tubman, is transforming the way in which black Americans, and especially black women, conceive of, relate to, and advocate for their environment.
MaVynee Betsch, widely known as “Beach Lady,” has dedicated her life to protecting and memorializing her childhood beach American Beach, Florida. Betsch’s standard conceptions of environmental protection, like other black ecofeminists, is centered the racial history of American Beach as one of the only public beaches available to blacks in the Jim Crow era to enjoy “relaxation and recreation without humiliation,” as the entrance to the beach reads.[2] For Betsch, the racial history of American Beach is integral to its preservation.
Majora Carter is a primer urban environmental consultant, the founder of Green for All, Sustainable South Bronx, and Majora Carter Group, LLC. Famous for invigorating her local South Bronx environment with environmental justice perspectives, policies, and practices, Carter has revolutionized environmental justice starting with the South Bronx and stretching to the U.S. at large.
Brenda Palms Barber’s research reveals how the pervasive incarceration economically devastated black and brown communities in Chicago. In response, Palms Barber founded Sweet Beginnings, a small bee-keeping business that employed previously incarcerated folk to help build confidence. Barber’s business “takes green to a whole new level” in that it combats traditional models of rehabilitation, outreach, and diversity.[3]
Rue Mapp is the Founder and CEO of Outdoor Afro, “the nation’s leading, cutting edge network that celebrates and inspires African American connections and leadership in nature.”[4] Outdoor Afro has evolved into a national leadership program that both shapes young leaders and disrupt dominant conceptions that black folks are incapable or unwilling to establish a relationship with nature.
Harriet Tubman is perhaps the oldest and original black ecofeminist pioneer. In her TEDxYosemite talk, Rue Mapp pays homage to Tubman and calls her an original “wilderness leader.” Mapp rhetorically asks: ““How else did [Tubman] lead hundreds to freedom in the cover of night in the dark?” Reframing Tubman as a wilderness pioneer interrupts mainstream environmentalist narratives that attribute black Americans isolation from their environment.
In the same way that black feminist practices center black women’s oppression in an effort to improve inequality for all peoples, environmental justice centers the oppression of black humans and non-humans to radically restructure mainstream, white environmentalism. Such an intersectional approach is a necessary antidote to the exclusion of black folk from the American environmental movement.The sanctity and success of the future of the American environmental movement is rooted in the collapse of environmental justice and ecocentric discourses and the integration of radical black ecofeminists into positions of power within the mainstream environmental movement.
[1] Dorceta E. Taylor, The State of Diversity in Environmental Organizations, 4.
[2] Russ Rymer, “Beach Lady,” Smithsonian Magazine, June 2003, accessed May 08, 2018, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/beach-lady-84237022/.
[3] Carolyn Finney, Black Faces, White Spaces, 117.
[4] “OutdoorAfro | ABOUT,” Outdoor Afro, , accessed May 08, 2018, http://outdoorafro.com/about/.
