Centering and Amplifying BIPOC Voices:

What the Climate Justice Movement Could Learn from the Black Lives Matter Movement

With the recent, but clearly not at all new, horrific displays of police brutality in the US — resulting in the stolen lives of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and countless others — perhaps what has inspired hope and sustained those in the fight for racial justice has been the global galvanizing of protests against racial inequity and the centering of Black folks, leaders, and voices in this fight.

Considering that Black folks are disproportionately subjected to state violence, whether that manifests through police brutality and the violent prison industrial complex or through the continuous defunding of majority Black neighborhoods and schools, it almost makes too much sense that it is their voices that are to be centered and amplified by every ally in the movement. Following this logic, since climate change disproportionately affects Black and Indigenous people of color (BIPOC), it also makes too much sense for us to make concentrated efforts towards uplifting their voices and narratives in the fight for climate justice.

Sadly, this has not been the case. “The people most responsible for climate change historically — globally, as well as domestically — are not the same people who are feeling the pain first, worst and longest,” said Robert Bullard, a distinguished professor of urban planning and environmental policy at Texas Southern University in Houston. Director of the NAACP’s Environmental and Climate Justice Program Jacqueline Patterson speaks to the difficulty in centering human rights and racial equity in climate justice activism by citing that the “roots of the traditional environmental movement came out of conservation of flora, fauna and wild spaces.” Professor of American History at Harvard University Joyce Chaplin makes historical sense of environmentalists’ centering of forests and “wild spaces” by identifying the Euro-centric origins of the concept of environmentalism in the Middle Ages and explaining that conservation of forests have been historically valued because they served as hunting grounds for upper-class white male aristocrats and monarchs.

Fast forward from the Middle Ages to modern day, and the climate justice movement is still facing the same problems of white-centeredness. Don’t believe me? Ask yourself why Sweden’s 17-year-old climate justice activist Greta Thunberg sounds more familiar than the US’s 17-year-old co-founder of the US Youth Climate Strike Isra Hirsi or 19-year-old Earth Guardians Youth Director Xiuhtezcatl Martinez of the Mashika People. Interrogate why most high school and college courses in environmental science are absent of any critical race lens to approaching climate change and instead focus solely on scientific “objectivity”. Google images of climate strikes and BLM protests and think about why the racial makeup of those protests look so drastically different.

We cannot allow the white-centerdness of the climate justice movement to live on, because when we do, we tolerate a prioritization of property over human life, specifically BIPOC life. When we do, not only are we just valuing trees over BIPOC livelihoods, but also we are effectively communicating to Black folks who are dying at the hands of the police that we value the preservation of police departments, a racist institution founded historically for the patrolling of slaves and protection of property like plantations and parks, over the preservation of Black life.

We need to center and amplify BIPOC voices in the fight for climate justice just as much as we do in the fight for racial justice, because those two fights are the same. And to be clear, centering and amplifying their presence, narratives, and voices does not mean placing the heavy burden on BIPOC to educate everyone about the ways in which they’ve been oppressed. What it does mean though is that when they speak, when they expose their trauma, and when they show you how you can help, it is your job to shut up, listen, and embrace and wrap them in love and care. But most importantly, follow their lead.

Written by Gabrielle Langkilde for Map-Collective.com