Black Mothering and Environmental Justice Activism: A Black Ecofeminist Framework

Hi friends,

Today I am sharing my Environmental Studies undergraduate thesis! The thesis is called Black Mothering and Environmental Justice Activism: A Black Ecofeminist Framework. I am very excited to share this work with you because it is representative of everything I have become passionate about while studying away at college. This work is only the beginning of my hopefully extensive study on the role of Black women in the Environmental Justice Movement and in the ever-expanding field of Ecofeminism(s).

The thesis is entirely too long to copy onto the website, so I'll just be including the introduction on the blog in addition to atttaching a pdf of the 80 page piece of work. Lord. Thank you so much for reading as much as you choose to read. I would love to hear any thoughts or questions that may arise for you while reading! Scroll to read the introduction to the thesis.

Please do not re-upload my work anywhere else, claim it as your own, or do anything else shady. All rights reserved!

Kayla Miller Thesis.pdf

Download PDF • 21.37MB

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Introduction

“The radicalism of ‘merely’ envisioning a future–while American, while Black, while female, had not become a part of my consciousness.” (Parable of the Sower, Jemisin, viii)

I have always loved imagining what the world of my dreams could look like. As a little girl, I spent my Saturdays playing with my dolls creating stories and new worlds for them. I gave my dolls careers I hoped to have when I was older, like an author or a fashion designer. I created versions of my future family–a partner who’s madly in love with me and does whatever I say and creative kids with a killer sense of style. And, I molded my Barbie Dreamhouse to resemble a house I could one day own. I let my imagination fill in the parts that reality did not manifest. Never did I think that envisioning my future through my dolls as a little girl was a radical act.

Back then as a naive child, I knew so little about the history of this nation and only that leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. helped us overcome injustice in America. Yet, I understood why I was uncomfortable being the only Black girl in my dance class on the white side of the train tracks separating Bushwick, Brooklyn from Ridgewood, Queens, and why it felt strange that none of my teachers looked like me. Now, none of my Barbie dolls were ever environmentalists. My earliest memory of a natural disaster is Hurricane Sandy that shook the New York-New Jersey area when I was in elementary school. I remember going to stay with my Great-Aunt Jean, who lived on the other side of Brooklyn, with my mom while we waited out the Hurricane. I was more excited about the sleepover at Aunt Jean’s house, than scared about the impacts of the Hurricane.

In seventh grade, my all-girls school took an end-of-year trip to New Orleans. This was about ten years after Hurricane Katrina pummeled New Orleans in 2005. When we were there, we took a tour of the city and we were able to talk to locals who lived through the Hurricane. We visited a daycare center that was run by a Black woman; I remember her sharing with us how devastating it was experiencing the force of Katrina. I remember seeing the Superdome in the skyline as we traveled around the city and it wasn’t until college that I learned about the horrors that the majority Black, low-income population sheltering at the Superdome faced at the hands of the police and the city government following the devastation of the hurricane. Looking back, Hurricane Katrina and her lasting impacts on people’s lives are some of the earliest memories I have about so-called ‘natural’ disasters, our government’s racist disaster response, and the life-long impacts on vulnerable Black and low-income communities.

At the beginning of high school, as global warming took over the news, I found myself very concerned about climate change. The planet is warming and I might not have a future? Hold on. As a high school junior in 2019, I attended the Global Climate Strike, an international event where students walked out of class to demand global leaders to take climate change seriously. I had a very “green” understanding of climate change, and by this I mean that I understood that climate change was a serious threat for human life and for the natural world, but I was not at all aware of its ‘environmental justice’ impacts. Environmental Justice (EJ) establishes that every being no matter their race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, species, etc. is entitled to a safe, healthy, and clean environment and quality of life. Historically, this has not been the case because of racism and other forms of domination that this society champions. It wasn’t until college that I learned about environmental injustice through a course called, Environmental Justice: Theory & Action, taught by my mentor, Professor Giovanna Di Chiro.

As a first-year student, the class introduced me to the environmental injustices facing the residents of the city of Chester, a smaller city in Southeastern Pennsylvania located a short 3 miles from Swarthmore College. Chester is a majority Black and brown city that for over 30 years has been burdened by the largest, and one of the oldest, trash incinerators in the nation. The toxic emissions from the incinerator have poisoned Chester’s air and water and have led to the city residents suffering from disproportionately high asthma and cancer rates. But, the community residents have not sat by idly as ‘victims’; they have fought tooth and nail spearheaded by Chester Residents Concerned for Quality Living, a trailblazing environmental justice organization–better known as CRCQL (pronounced “Circle”). Established in 1992, CRCQL was co-founded and is currently led by the illustrious Zulene Mayfield, a nationally and internationally recognized EJ activist born and bred in the city of Chester.

After being introduced to the environmental racism occurring in Chester in my Environmental Justice class through our course’s community engagement projects in collaboration with CRCQL, I found my way onto the leadership team for Campus Coalition Concerning Chester (also known as C4). C4 is a student-run environmental justice organization that works alongside CRCQL to redistribute resources from our privileged college campus in order to achieve environmental justice in Chester. Working with CRCQL and C4 over the last four years has been the experience of a lifetime. While leading C4, I’ve helped with social media campaigns, I’ve created literature on environmental justice that is distributed into the community, I have testified at numerous public hearings, I have helped organize the group’s annual Environmental Justice March recruiting over 120 students to attend, I have worked with youth in Philadelphia to teach them about environmental justice and solar energy, I have written numerous blog posts about our EJ work, I have led panels, I have TA’d the Environmental Justice course twice, I have received the Udall Scholarship–a national award commemorating my EJ work, I have presented Dr. Angela Y. Davis with an award for her climate justice activism, and I have had the honor to be in the room with Zulene Mayfield and witness an EJ legend at work

Over the course of the last four years, I’ve worked with and observed Black women environmental justice activists–many of them mothers–whose love for their communities powers their rage against polluters that slowly kill their communities. Ms. Zulene is the first environmental justice activist I’ve ever met. I remember the first time she walked into my class and I was surprised because she felt so familiar. I always envisioned environmental activist types to have a very earthy, hippie vibe, but this was a lady I could see on the bus in my Brooklyn neighborhood. I nervously asked her how she manages to juggle her work and her activism. She answered back, “If someone came into your house and slapped your mother, what would you do?”

Reflections on My Personal Environmental Justice Story

This question about the importance of protecting one’s own mother, and one’s own family, posed to me by Ms. Zulene early in my college career, led to me reflecting on the way my personal life is connected to Environmental Justice. My maternal great-grandparents met in Edenton, North Carolina, and migrated to Brooklyn, NY, in December of 1959 with their six children and later would move to Bushwick, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, and resided on Moffat Street. Years later, my grandparents, Ronald and Carol, met and together, my great-grandparents, grandparents, my mom, aunts and uncle all lived in two units in the apartment building above the corner store. My mom grew up on Moffat St. and the block became family.

From the early 1990s up until 2004, the year after I was born, my family lost what feels like an entire generation to cancer or other illnesses. Starting with Carol, cancer ravaged my family, followed by my great uncles, then taking my great-grandparents, and then my grandfather, Ronald. It is eerie that multiple of my family members died of cancer back-to-back. This kind of loss feels all too familiar to Black Americans living in urban environments that are home to major environmental injustices. How do you lose an entire generation to cancer or chronic illnesses? My grandmother, Carol (born under the sign of fiery Leo), was originally from Harlem and she had the attitude to match. Carol was a modern woman. Differing from my great-grandmother, who was a housewife, Carol had a job working at a clothing factory in Manhattan with my Aunt Cleo. Carol cursed like a sailor and she was big on tough love. Carol, which is what everyone including her children called her, died of ovarian cancer.

Whenever my mom compares something I do to Carol, I try to hide my excitement. From the repeated stories I’ve heard about Carol, she was respected because she was outspoken to a fault. The biggest fear on Moffat St. was for someone to get into it with my mom or one of her siblings and for Carol to find out, because if she did, you’d have to deal with her wrath. Though at times feared, Carol was a ‘community mother’ and offered her generosity in many ways. My mother, Nicole, models this generosity and moral understanding that we look out for the people around us. I know now that I was raised by community mothers. The Black woman scholar-activist I am today is the product of my grandmother, Carol, my mother, Nicole, my mentor, and Ms. Zulene’s wisdom, reassurance, and guidance.

In regards to my pursuits inside the classroom, it is my goal to synthesize the fields of Environmental Studies, English Literature, and Black Studies. This body of work aims to marry these fields in order to stimulate new ways of thinking on how we create an environmentally just world. My academic pursuits are informed by Black authors and national treasures including Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Octavia Butler and bell hooks (just to name a few). My work is rooted in storytelling, empathy, identity, and notions of home–particularly in Black cities. I would also like to think of this work as being an expression of and a contribution to the field of Afrofuturism. I am invested in work that heals this world and allows it to be a safe place for Black children and Black adults’ inner-child. The ones who spent weekends playing with dolls and imagining who they’d be when they grow up, before the violence of the world crept in and made us believe our futures were impossible.

Chapter Overview

In Chapter 1 of this thesis, I explore how the Environmental Justice Movement (EJM) and the Black Lives Matter Movement (BLM) center around the “right to breathe”. Informed by Christina Sharpe’s In The Wake, I explain how environmental racism, police brutality and Black maternal mortality, exist in the ‘wake’ of slavery, and how our democracy is dependent upon Black death. I anchor this in Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ analysis that she develops in Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, where she teaches us the ways to breathe in the unbreathable circumstances under which Black people, other marginalized peoples, and our non-human co-inhabitants of the earth have had to exist.

Chapter 2 explores the concept of “community mothering” and the connection between mothering, caregiving, and environmental justice. Many Black women environmental justice activists are mothers, and even the ones who are not mothers themselves assumed the role of “community mother”. These women bear responsibility for the health and survival of the children in their community. Their activism is motivated by ensuring Black children are able to have prosperous futures. Dating back to slavery, the ability for Black women to have reproductive agency has been compromised, and in turn, the ability for Black people to have futures at all has been attacked repeatedly. I assert that Environmental Justice activism allows Black women to take the future of the Black community into our own hands. I encourage us all to take heed to the love ethic that powers Black women environmental justice activists in their work for a more environmentally just future.

In Chapter 3, I interrogate the meaning of “love” in EJ movements and activism. Because the Black women environmental justice activists I have studied and learned from are motivated by love, I reflect on this as a powerful strategy for change in a world historically constructed through violence of all kinds: racial, environmental, gender-based, homophobic, ableist. I examine how ecofeminists compare these systems of violence that create “death worlds”, with the marxist-feminist concept of social reproduction or “life-making activities”, as Tithi Battahcharya puts it, that aim to create “living worlds”. I discuss how social reproduction has been denied for Black people throughout the history of the United States and how activists are fighting for their right to create “living worlds” and flourishing communities. This chapter crystalizes the ways our world fails to provide frameworks of care required for social reproduction and challenges us to imagine an environmentally just world motivated by love and community, not economic profit. I conclude with a call for us all to take imagination seriously in our everyday lives and in our activism. Imagination is a critical tool of activism. We can only fight for the world we want to see by acting as if it already exists.

Read the full thesis here:

Kayla Miller Thesis.pdf

Download PDF • 21.37MB