Skill Share 2016: Maximising diversity in grass roots activism - workshop summary

By Monique Ewan of Thread Equality Agency

On Saturday I gave a workshop about maximising racial diversity in the grass roots environmental movement, sparking some great conversations.

The key questions I wanted to address were: what are the inequalities? Why do they exist? And how do we change it?

It was part of the CAG Oxfordshire skill share for community groups working on environmental action. Topics ranged from dealing with the media to building group dynamics, and attracting volunteers to organising events. An incredible buffet was served using ingredients saved by the Oxford Food Bank prepared by Donnington Doorstep.

Looking around the room full of white people of mixed age and gender, I asked everyone to look inward, questioning how they themselves became involved in the environment movement, before trying to understand what might motivate other people to join. In telling stories of our own lives, we identified common factors: family, friends, travel, tertiary education, early exposure to nature and/or environmental justice issues, community, films and books, and lifestyle choices.

The group identified a shared sense of familiarity, of connecting with people based on a common lifestyle or values, of privilege in our ability to travel and access education but also, importantly, in the invisibility of our whiteness. White people can relate easily to other white people without having to negotiate the barriers and challenges of racial inequality.

Key factors for our personal involvement in environmental activism

Whereas the case studies we looked at of African American as well as indigenous American and Australian individuals showed that the key factors for these groups were access to clean air and water, the right to live in clean and safe communities without being forced to face the worst impacts of climate change, and the right to be treated equally with white people.

Key factors from the case studies for involvement in environmental activism

There was a shared concern over identity, belonging, historical oppression, and local community, as well as questions about how we use language.

The question of language is a big one as it shows up massive differences in perspective.

In the early nineties there was a wave of academic research into the “birth of a black American environmental movement”. This was based on the large scale mobilisation during the eighties of African American, Asian immigrant and native American activism against toxic waste dumps in America. This activism was spurred by U.S. government reports showing that most toxic waste dumps were in majority black and ethnic minority areas, and culminated in two summits in the early nineties for people of colour involved in environmental justice. The terms “environmental racism” and “environmental justice” were used for the first time.

In the late nineties the research shifted towards a more sensitive recognition of the way people of colour had in fact always fought for environmental concerns but on their own terms, in their own way, and using different language.

The striking thing to come out of the research is that we cannot ignore cultural differences and racial injustices. If you’re white it is easy to dismiss race, because it is not something you ever have to

question or think about, whereas if you’re black, Asian, indigenous or any other ethnic minority, race is not something that can be ignored.

If we are going to improve racial diversity in the environment movement, and in society in general, we cannot ignore the impact that racial discrimination has within our society, providing vastly different access to resources, culture, community, land and sense of continuity.

We must also remember that our concepts of LAND, EARTH, and HOME vary greatly across cultures, and our way of using language changes depending on our position in society and our sense of humour.

A 2007 study found a great example of this conflict between black and white members of the same environmental justice group fighting to stop hog factories being built in their local area. The whites wanted to call it HELP (Help Environmental Loss Prevention) and the blacks wanted to call it SHIT (Swine Habitat Is Terrible). The whites were focused on an abstract idea of “the natural environment” whereas the blacks were interested in the direct impact on people.

This difference in perspective led many of the participants in the same study to reject being called “environmentalists” because they associated the word with privileged white people hugging trees and fighting to save whales rather than dealing with the social justice issues that real people are facing. When the concept of the environment could be localised to mean “where we work, where we play, where we live” they were happy to take it on.

So what can we do as white people to welcome greater diversity in the environment movement?

Seek out groups we want to reach and allow them to set the agenda. Ask them what the major issues are and really listen to what they have to say. By doing so, we can find common interests and develop a shared sense of moral outrage, instead of expecting them to get on board with our agendas. We need to listen to other perspectives and priorities, otherwise we’re just perpetuating colonialism.

Acknowledge that we might not know what issues are most important to people who’s background and social experience is different to ours.

Think carefully about the language we use and be aware of the barriers that race and class divisions might impose.

A couple of people in the workshop said that one of the barriers they had encountered to including people of different backgrounds was that some cultures did not value the idea of volunteering. It was difficult for them to understand why anyone would want to work for free.

This raises an interesting point about accepting the consequences of years of colonial oppression.Perhaps it is a little too much to ask migrant Pakistani and Nigerian migrants to volunteer their time to fix white people’s mistakes. Perhaps it’s time for us to make up for the injustices imposed by European empirical expansion that have divided and oppressed the rest of the world’s population and created huge green house emissions through an unsustainable way of life that is destroying the planet. In this respect, perhaps it’s ok that our grass roots movements in Oxford are all white.

The trouble is how we ensure people of colour are adequately represented in the paid environmental positions, and therefore in a position to help set the agenda, to help decide where the funding goes. And that is a much bigger problem that we could solve in a one hour workshop on diversity.

Resources

Allen K, Daro V, Holland D (2007) “Becoming and Environmental Justice Activist”, in Sandler and Pezzullo (eds.) Environmental Justice and Environmentalism: The Social Justice Challenge to the Environmental Movement, Cambridge Massachussets and London: The MIT Press, pp. 105-134

Gomez A, Shafiei F, Johnson GS (2011) “Black Women’s Involvement in the Environmental Justice Movement: An Analysis of Three Communities in Atlanta, Georgia” Race, Gender & Class 18:1/2, pp. 189-214

Krauss C (1993) “Women and Toxic Waste Protests: Race, Class and Gender as Resources of Resistance” Qualitative Sociology 16; 3, pp. 251-253

Taylor DE (2014) The State of Diversity in Environmental Organizations: Mainstream NGOs, Foundations, Government Agencies, http://vaipl.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/ExecutiveSummary-Diverse-Green.pdf [Accessed 9 Nov 2016]

Telford A (2014) “Five questions to Amelia Telford: this week on IndigenousX”, The Guardian, 6 June 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/06/five-questions-to-amelia-telford-this-week-on-indigenousx [Accessed 9 Nov 2016]