Abolishing Ecological Apartheid

 

Abolishing Ecological Apartheid: A Community-led Response to Climate Inequity            

If you grew up in the 70’s and 80s’ like I did, the word “apartheid” probably evokes very specific feelings and memories. As a teenager coming of age in the Reagan era of “Trickle-Down” Economics and racist “welfare-queen” dog-whistle politics, I distinctly remember the competing narratives around what was happening in South Africa. I remember Reagan and his supporters’ narrative(s) that Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) were radical extremists who “engaged in calculated terror.” I remember the battles between the Reagan White House and Congress over the types, and severity of sanctions that would be levied against the South African government; including a presidential veto of a 1986 sanctions bill and the overwhelming 313-83 House of Representatives vote to override said veto.

But I also remember my parents (still a few years away from settling down and starting our family during the rise of the Black Power Movement of late 1960’s) who interpreted Mandela and the ANC through a different lens. I remember them talking about Mandela with the same respectful tones with which they spoke of Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, Fannie Lou Hamer, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X.

I remember calls from church elders and other Black folk I respected, not simply to impose sanctions, but to completely divest from South Africa until the government dismantled the oppressive apartheid system that kept the Black South African majority living in the margins of their own culture and society.

As I was preparing to graduate from high school, Nelson Mandela was released from Robins Island Prison in February 1990 and his release offered a beacon of hope that the oppressive system, which had unjustly imprisoned him for 27 years and had marginalized his people for nearly a half century, might finally be dismantled. Of course, it took a few more years beyond his release but, legislatively at least, apartheid as a formal political system was abolished in 1994 with Mandela’s election as South Africa’s President. Informally however, many of the same oppressive conditions that defined Black South African existence from 1948 to 1994 persist to this day.  

A few weeks ago, In the lead-up to a panel discussion in which I was invited to participate, the agenda  shifted from event logistics to how we should frame the climate conversation.  Some panelists pondered whether we should use “climate change” while others offered “climate crisis” as a more appropriate description. Eventually, it was agreed that “Climate Crisis” was the best way to frame the issue(s) at hand. But after the meeting, as I worked on my portion of the presentation, I was left with the feeling that both “climate change” and “climate crisis”, while indeed apt descriptions, were passive designations that do not fully capture the essence of the predicament in which we find ourselves.

“Change” and “Crisis” are overly broad terms that let us off the individual and collective hook a little too easily. In the face of “change” or “crisis” we are too often tempted to throw up our hands in weak resignation to the often-overwhelming realities of where we are and how we got here. And it’s that “how we got here” part that has me revisiting my adolescent memories of Mandela and the fight against the brutality of South Africa’s apartheid regime.

In the same way that South Africa’s government engaged in a deliberate and decades-long racially motivated campaign of segregation and subjugation, the United States government has engaged in sustained local, state, and federal public policy actions that have disenfranchised Black people, poisoned Black communities, and divested resources from Black institutions. Going back to the establishment of the Federal Housing Administration in 1934, which is a good starting point for the current climate conversation because the formal practices of redlining and racial covenants which were woven into the fabric of America’s burgeoning housing and urban development policy became the primary factors in determining which neighborhoods received investment and which neighborhoods were deemed “risky” and “undesirable.” While America was working overtime to build beautiful suburban oases to which white families could flee, redlined Black neighborhoods were rated in such a way that lenders would not write mortgages and insurance companies would not write policies for aspiring Black homeowners.

Combine those realities with city and state policy decisions to under invest in tree canopy, parks, and other green spaces in Black neighborhoods, and the result is a toxic stew of generational wealth deprivation, adverse public health outcomes, poorly funded schools, and hotter, less safe, and less livable communities. Like South African Apartheid, every outcome of American urban decay and suburban sprawl has been engineered by public policy. And like South African Apartheid, the only way toward justice is abolition. As Bishop Desmond Tutu so pointedly proclaimed in a 1986 speech at Stanford University: “We are not interested in reforming Apartheid. You don’t reform a Frankenstein. You destroy a Frankenstein.”

However, as history has taught us, Frankenstein-esqe oppressive systems and structures like Apartheid are only abolished through sustained, targeted, deliberate acts of resistance. Furthermore, successful abolition campaigns have always been conceived, led, and implemented from the ground up by the very people most impacted by the oppressive system. While America, and other Western nations’ law makers took victory laps and patted themselves on the back for finally ending Apartheid in the mid 1990’s, it was the Black South African people, on the ground in Soweto, and Johannesburg, and Cape Town who ensured that a political revolution took place.

For over three decades the climate conversation, domestically and on a global level, has largely been driven by white people and white organizations. Their prescriptions for how to “right the ship” have far too often ignored the voices and lived experiences of those who bear the disproportionate brunt of Eco-Apartheid’s devasting effects.

As dire as things might seem, however, there is still hope that the world can reverse the effects of Ecological Apartheid and build safe, sustainable ecosystems for our children’s children. If that hope is to be realized we all must take a page (or two, or the whole manuscript) from the playbook of marginalized people around the world who have, in all places, and at all times, innovated solutions to problems they did not create while simultaneously building systems, structures, and institutions that benefit the world.

 

Rev. Dr. Jon Robinson is the Senior Program Manager for the Metropolitan AME Church/Smart Surfaces Coalition eco-justice program.  For more information on this initiative visit https://smartsurfacescoalition.org/