Ain't Nobody Got Time for Climate Change
A Black Woman Speaks about Race and Climate Grief
The following was adapted from a talk on a panel at the Sustaining All Life Climate Grief Workshop at the United Nations Global Climate Action Summit in New York, New York, USA, in September 2019.
My connection to climate change and the environment has been shaped significantly by my identity. I am a mixed-race Black female USer. I’ve worked in the outdoor education world for twenty years. I care deeply about the environment, and yet I’m pretty [quite] new to taking action on climate change. I’ve come to realize that much of that is because the climate movement didn’t feel accessible to me. It felt like “a white thing.”
A lot of my experiences in nature were with white people. Many of the organizations working on climate change were run by white people, peopled with white people, and didn’t always seem to care or understand how my community was being affected by the crisis. The racism I experienced in those organizations made it difficult to stay in there. It became yet another barrier to getting engaged. The primary reason I’m engaged in this work now is because of connecting with Sustaining All Life and being brought by it into People of the Global Majority spaces in which people are working on the environment and using the tool of Co-Counseling.
My grief about climate change is really grief about the loss of relationship to the land that happened because of my heritage. My ancestors were not only taken from their Indigenous lands, they were also intentionally separated from anyone who remembered what those lands looked like, or felt like, or smelled like. Our connection to the land here in the United States was fraught [filled with anxiety] to say the least. It was a history of forced labor and chronic terror.
In my personal experience, my great grandfather was literally driven from his farmland in Georgia. He was forced to drive through the night, with his children huddled terrified in the car, while being chased by the Ku Klux Klan because he’d had the audacity to vote and register others. In the 1980s when I was a child, my grandmother pressured my father not to visit the countryside where she had grown up because she was afraid that if he returned there with his white wife and biracial children, he would be lynched like so many Black men before him. And lest we think that this is about a faraway place, that it only takes place in the U.S. South or in another time, the examples continue. When I was a young adult working with children of color in the 2000s and taking them hiking in the woods in Maryland right outside of Washington, D.C., on multiple occasions beer cans were thrown at us, epithets yelled, and threats made because of our race.
Growing up in the inner city, I was raised to think that nature, that the environment, that “Earth” was out there somewhere. It was out where white people lived. No one ever talked about the things that grew in our neighborhoods as complex and beautiful examples of non-human life. There’s a tree called the tree-of-heaven. It actually has a lot of medicinal properties and has been used in Chinese medicine for thousands of years. We called them “trash trees” because they grew around dumpsters and in alleyways and the cracks in our sidewalks. They grew in Black folks’ neighborhoods. I thought that they, and everything else that sprouted in my neighborhood, were all “weeds.” They didn’t count [qualify] as nature, because why would anything of value be growing in the neighborhood where we grew? That’s how deep the devaluation of my community was.
My experience in many of the outdoor organizations I participated in was that the white folks—many of whom I cared about deeply and were people who cared deeply about me—were very unaware that this is what I and other People of the Global Majority were going through while being out in nature. They found our fear, our discomfort, in being out in wilderness spaces amusing or quirky. For them, it was a simple case of “urban dwellers” who were just not used to [accustomed to] the great outdoors. Because what could feel more safe and peaceful than sleeping out under the stars, more restorative and rejuvenating than being in the countryside where cell phones don’t work? Furthermore, because of white supremacy, that mentality often turned into a sense that “Well, we just need to teach People of the Global Majority. We need to shepherd them into a connection to nature, instruct them in how to take care of the environment, enlighten them on how to go green.”
But that isn’t true at all. We don’t need to be taught. We need to be healed. We need the space to reclaim what is inherently ours.
Black folks and other People of the Global Majority, as full human beings, have an innate connection to the earth. Which is why, for me, climate grief is about the violence and injustice of having that connection so tampered with that it is sometimes difficult for me and many of my people to know that this world belongs to us, and that we belong to it.
This is not to negate the many African-heritage folks and other People of the Global Majority who have maintained close connection to non-human life both within and outside the climate justice movement and face different struggles around race and the environment. But for many of us, the tampering with our connection to nature has gotten in the way of taking on climate change. It has led to feeling like this isn’t our problem; this isn’t our thing. For a long time, I just felt like I wasn’t interested, like I didn’t care. I felt “lazy” about it or cynical because few of the solutions proposed seemed to address the needs of my community. But by digging in, in Sustaining All Life listening sessions, I was able to figure out that underneath the apathy and disconnect was a deep well of grief and outrage.
This has motivated me to want to meet other people in the place that I was in, in the place that I’m still getting out of. At the Black Liberation and Community Development Workshop this past year, I led a small group that I called “Ain’t Nobody Got Time for Climate Change: A Group for People Who Aren’t Sure They Want to Be in It.” And that’s who I really want to go after [pursue]. Because I think Co-Counseling allows us not only to heal ourselves but also to reach the people who aren’t at conferences like this one but who are so important and need to be a part of this movement. Because this is, in fact, our world.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
(Present Time 198, January 2020)