The New Environmentalists: How to Make the Green Movement Less White

By Van Jones, ColorLines. Posted August 7, 2007.

In response to mounting ecological crises, the United States is going through its most important economic transformation since the New Deal. Unfortunately, the vital process of change along more eco-friendly lines is moving ahead with practically zero participation from people of color.

Hundreds of mayors and several governors are bucking the Bush administration and committing themselves to the carbon-cutting principles of the Kyoto treaty on climate change. The U.S. Congress is debating an energy bill this year that could be a watershed for alternative energy sources.

What's more, regular people are way ahead of these leaders. U.S polls show super-majorities want strong action on the climate crisis and other environmental perils. And consumers are reshaping markets by demanding hybrid cars, bio-fuels, solar panels, organic food and more. As a result, the "lifestyles of health and sustainability" sector of the U.S. economy has ballooned into a $240 billion gold mine. And total sales are growing on a near-vertical axis.

The Economist magazine calls it "The Greening of America." Indeed, we are witnessing the slow death of the Earth-devouring, suicidal version of capitalism. We're even seeing the birth of some form of "eco-capitalism." To be sure, a more "ecologically sound" market system will not be a utopia. But at least it will buy our species a few extra decades or centuries on this planet.

That's the good news. Here is the bad news.

The celebrated "lifestyles" sector is probably the most racially segregated part of the U.S. economy; at present, it is almost exclusively the province of affluent white people. Few entrepreneurs of color are positioned to reap the benefits of the government's push to green the economy.

We are seeing a major debate about the direction of the U.S. economy -- in which communities of color apparently have nothing to say. Our near-silence on such key issues has no precedent, at least not since before the Civil War.

How can this be? Black, Latino, Asian and Native American communities suffer the most from the environmental ills of our industrial society. Our folks desperately need the new economic activity, investments and opportunities that this major transition is beginning to generate.

To put it bluntly, people of color have much more directly at stake in the greening of America than white college students do. Why are they marching for carbon caps, while most of us just yawn and change the channel?

When these new formations and networks emerge, all racial justice activists will become, in some sense, environmental justice activists.

More people of color have not yet grabbed the microphone for three reasons: our long-standing pattern of viewing environmental issues as luxury concerns; the mainstream media's "whites only" coverage of the green phenomenon; and serious structural impediments to action within the racial justice movement itself.

First of all, too often we have said: "We are overwhelmed with violence, bad housing, failing schools, excessive incarceration, poor healthcare and joblessness. We can't afford to worry about spotted owls, redwood trees and polar bears."

But Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath taught us that the coming ecological disasters will hit the poor first and worst. More of us are beginning to see that there can be no separation between our concern for vulnerable people and our concern for a vulnerable planet.

Secondly, any U.S. magazine's "Special Green Issue" typically will not show many people of color, despite the incredible achievements of numerous environmentalists of color across the country. Many racial justice activists see this kind of coverage, shrug our shoulders and understandably assume that green equals white.

But this is a mistake. When did we start trusting the corporate media to fairly calculate our interests in any major topic or development in U.S. society? When have our activists and advocates ever accepted their frame and parameters in determining what is important or what we should do? It should not surprise anyone that the mainstream media does not reflect our deep and profound interests in the greening of the economy. And it is high time for us to make our own assessment and create our own strategy for shaping the process in accordance with our interests.

Finally, at least among committed activists, there is a deeper reason that we have not mobilized at the appropriate scale. And that reason can be found within the structure of our racial justice movement itself. Our present deployment of resources simply does not let us meet the challenges and opportunities that the green revolution is generating, simply because it is nobody's job to take them on.

Because no racial justice organization can tackle every issue and champion every cause, our groups have evolved a fairly strict division of labor. A single organization will ordinarily focus on just one issue -- criminal justice, immigrant rights, economic justice, violence prevention, educational equity, school reform, reproductive justice, what have you. Out of deference to each other (and to stay within funders' guidelines), our organizations bend over backwards to keep within their chosen issue areas and to stay off each other's "turfs."

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Van Jones is executive director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, California.

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