Complete Interview: The Temperature Transcends Race
(Page 6 of 7)
Mar-.Apr. 2008
interview by Hannah Lobel
Ever since we wrote “Death of Environmentalism” we’ve been in various debates about environmental justice. We decided to do the chapter in part because so many people said, Well, environmental justice is the expansive environmentalism. And we went and looked at it and read a huge amount and interviewed many dozens of people, and what you find is a movement that looks at the intersection of race, class, and pollution, which actually makes that movement smaller not larger.
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And frankly, you didn’t ask it, but I’ll say it anyway: We think that a race-based politics is toxic, and completely outmoded, and that we should not be organizing as different races. Race is itself a very dubious concept and construct. We’re a single human race and we’ll do far better organizing across race lines than within them.
If you look at where the environmental justice movement has gotten into trouble, it’s where you find a lot of infighting often between different “races,” different ethnic groups. It hasn’t actually served to be a unifying movement.
Now, that is all changing in large part because of younger leaders, which is very positive. But I think we need to say goodbye to that older form of environmentalism.
To say race is itself a very dubious concept and construct is one thing, but to say that it doesn’t play a role in how communities suffer is another.
Well of course. Of course there’s racism. And of course there are racial disparities, but that’s different from organizing as Latinos or as African Americans or as whites. I just don’t believe that that’s a positive expansive politics. It’s important to organize outside of racial and environmental categories. The fact that pollution is a problem does not necessarily lead you to creating a pollution-based politics. And the fact that racism is a problem does not mean that you should have a race-based politics. The goal of the original civil rights movement was to put an end to race-based politics not to reconstitute it.
What advice do you have for emerging environmental justice leaders?
One of the natural and totally understandable tendencies among social-change agents is to reduce their focus to a set of things that they decide are manageable. They’d say: If I’m going to deal with childhood asthma, I just don’t have the capacity to deal with all of the causes, so I’m going to focus on the diesel buses because that’s all I have funding for and that’s what environmental foundations want to support.
The challenge for this new crop of progressive leaders—I wouldn’t call them environmental justice leaders, by the way—is to constantly maintain an eye on the big picture and seek ways to focus that don’t require reducing multiple causes to singular causes.
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