WE, THE PEOPLE OF COLOR, gathered together at this multinational People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, to begin to build a national and international movement of all peoples of color to fight the destruction and taking of our lands and communities, do hereby re-establish our spiritual interdependence to the sacredness of our Mother Earth to respect and celebrate each of our cultures, languages and beliefs about the natural world and our roles in healing ourselves to ensure environmental justice to promote economic alternatives which would contribute to the development of environmentally safe livelihoods and, to secure our political, economic and cultural liberation that has been denied for over 500 years of colonization and oppression, resulting in the poisoning of our communities and land and the genocide of our peoples. In October 1991, the Delegates to the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit drafted and adopted the “Principles of Environmental Justice,” which became a defining document for the growing grassroots movement for environmental justice. Racial and ethnic disparities are prevalent throughout the country.” 3īetween the two reports a global movement for environmental justice had emerged.
The report demonstrated that “three out of every five Black and Hispanic Americans lived in communities with uncontrolled toxic waste sites.” 2 Twenty years later, the United Church of Christ published another report confirming that “people of color make up the majority of those living in host neighborhoods within 3 km of the nation’s hazardous waste facilities. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration’s practice of cutting the budgets of federal environmental agencies had aggravated racist decisions. 1 It showed that race was the single most important factor in determining where toxic waste facilities were sited in the United States and that the siting of these facilities in communities of color was the intentional result of local, state, and federal land-use policies. The publication in 1987 of Toxic Waste and Race in the United States, a report by the Commission for Racial Justice of the United Church of Christ, was a turning point. Environmental racism became a site of struggle. This analysis rests on past struggles, such as the organization of farmworkers led by Cesar Chavez in California in the early 1960s for workplace rights, including protection from toxic pesticides, and of African American students in 1967 to oppose a city dump and in 1979 to oppose a landfill in Houston. In the debates on the “Anthropocene,” global warming, and climate change, voices of the South and of minorities - the prime victims of these phenomena’s consequences - have developed an analysis that brings together race, capitalism, imperialism, and gender.
Included in the collection is the essay by Françoise Vergès reprinted below. Vergès examines how most theories of the anthropocene have failed to reckon with the ways in which racism and imperialism structure the uneven distribution of climate catastrophe. Robinson and the contemporary flourishing of black political movements.
Futures of Black Radicalism, edited by Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin, brings together 17 essays on the development of the black radical tradition, all informed by both the groundbreaking work of Cedric J.
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