What We Talk About When We Talk About Environmental Justice

The intersection of culture and democracy drives the Hip Hop Caucus’s theory of change

By Jonathan Hahn

April 27, 2017

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Dee-1, Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Amanda Seales, and Raheem DeVaughn at the International Civil Rights Center and Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina. | Photos courtesy of the Hip Hop Caucus

When we talk about climate change, we often do so in sweeping vocabulary that reflects the worldwide, multi-issue consequences this crisis poses to us as a global people and an interconnected planet. Extreme weather events, historic droughts and floods, species extinction—the “nightmare scenario” of rising sea levels and disappearing neighborhoods, cities, island nations—these are just some of the ways we think about how manmade impacts from wanton fossil fuel extraction are leading to epic changes in our planet’s ecosystem.

But what does it mean to talk about the fight for a healthy planet as a fight for social justice?

For Reverend Lennox Yearwood, a prominent leader in the climate movement and the president and CEO of the Hip Hop Caucus, the answer became clear all over again this past Earth Day. On his way to the March for Science in Washington, D.C., Rev. Yearwood was doing nothing other than crossing the street when he was, he says, detained and roughed up by police in the shadow of the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture. 

In an interview about the incident, he says that what happened was cut and dry. “It was racial profiling,” he says. “He grabbed me, because it felt normal to grab a person of color. It felt easy. When he saw that I was VIP or clergy, it changed. But if I was just Joe Schmo coming to the march or on my way to work, it would’ve been too easy to do what he did and get away from it.”

Rev. Yearwood was at the corner of 14th and Constitution Avenue while an officer was directing traffic, he says. When the light turned from red to a walk sign, he started crossing with other pedestrians. The officer told them all to clear out of the street. Rev. Yearwood was farther along toward the other side at that point, so he picked up speed to get there and get out of the way. That’s when something as simple as walking to a march for science went horribly wrong. 

The officer grabbed Rev. Yearwood, swung him around while yelling, pushed him toward a food truck on the other side of Constitution Avenue, and shouted at him, “Didn’t you see me?” He asked Rev. Yearwood if he was on drugs or if he had warrants. He demanded his I.D. 

Bystanders who were there ignored what was happening. “They just kept walking,” he says, “while I was clearly being detained and could not move freely. Next to a food truck.” One young woman who recognized Rev. Yearwood did stop and ask if he was OK, but everyone else kept walking. 

“It was terrible for me, for this core reason: I was in the shadow of the African American Museum, as a person of color, in Washington, D.C.,” he says. “It was stinging for me, because there was a time when as a person of color, we couldn’t walk freely. We had to present papers. It felt like that to me. If I wasn’t who I was, if I had any kind of warrants or if I had back child support or whatever, it could’ve been terrible for me. He could’ve changed my life forever for just coming to a science march, all because he picked me out of a crowd and decided to do what he did.” (Read his personal account about what happened here.)

The context of the incident did not escape him, either: a Black man detained and mistreated by police on Earth Day. “We have to make our marches and the climate movement a safe place for vulnerable communities,” Rev. Yearwood says. “We have to create a place where even law enforcement personnel assigned to the march are educated.

“Our movement is not authentic if it is not connected to the issue of social justice, and racial justice. If it’s not, it means that we are marching in vain.”

At this Saturday’s Peoples Climate March, a broad coalition of civic, labor, and environmental groups, including the Hip Hop Caucus among many others, will mobilize in the nation’s capital. Front and center will be the “front line communities” that bear a disproportionate impact from a changing climate, including communities of color, low-income populations, immigrants, and indigenous peoples fighting to protect sacred lands. The answer to what environmental justice means today can often be found with them. It begins with acknowledging that, in the same way that many of the inequities that plague our society fall along racial, class, and gender fault lines, so do the impacts of pollution and climate change. 

“Climate change is a civil rights issue, because people have a right to clean air and a right to clean water,” Rev. Yearwood says. “People have been fighting for equality, equity, and justice. But the next step is to look at climate change as a civil rights issue.” 

“When we talk about environmental justice, what we’re talking about is the fuller story of what it means to be polluting our planet and our communities,” says Liz Havstad, the chief operating officer and executive director of the Hip Hop Caucus. “That fuller story has to do with the fact that the consequences of pollution aren’t the same everywhere, and aren’t the same for everyone. The ways in which they aren’t the same everywhere and for everyone track the very ways in which injustice happens throughout aspects of our society: across race and class. Without acknowledging the fuller truth of what pollution means—injustice for communities, and in particular, for certain communities—we can’t do a better job of solving it.”

And that, Rev. Yearwood says, means getting people as mobilized for climate justice as they were for social justice in the civil rights era. “We had gone through so much then,” he says. “We’d lost Dr. King on April 4 of ’68. We’d lost Robert Kennedy. There were people rioting in the streets, still fighting for Black lives, and the sanitation workers saying, ‘I am a man.’ There was so much upheaval going on in this country. It was a time when we kind of broke down. But that was a time when we did the most. That’s what’s so exciting. That’s the time when even though there was the Cuyahoga River fire in Cleveland and smog so thick in L.A. you couldn’t even breathe, we as a movement came together. We created more organizations: Greenpeace, and NRDC, and Union of Concerned Scientists, and League of Conservation Voters. That was a time when we pushed the president to create the Environmental Protection Agency. It was at that time, at a moment when we were at our worst, that we actually were able to do so much. We are at a similar moment now.”

The Hip Hop Caucus was founded on September 11, 2004, an election year, as a means for mobilizing the communities most affected by political and civic inequity, disenfranchisement, and environmental and social injustice. At the time, Rev. Yearwood was the political grassroots director for Russell Simmons’s Hip Hop Summit Action Network; cocreator of a series of voter turnout programs and campaigns, including P. Diddy’s “Vote or Die!” and Jay-Z’s “Voice Your Choice”; and served as executive director of the AFL-CIO’s “Hip Hop Voices.” Rev. Yearwood and others were working at the time to mobilize young voters to the polls and to get them more engaged in the political process. 

The lesson from that work, according to Liz Havstad, was to leverage the power of celebrity and entertainment as a means to shape political experience. “That’s why the Hip Hop Caucus was created,” she says. “To establish a sustainable organization that connected the power of culture with the power of celebrity and entertainment in ways that empower communities and help them be heard in our democracy.” 

It is that nexus between culture and democracy, and how the interplay of both can connect the dots for communities as to what they are up against, that in part drives the organization’s theory of change—especially when it comes to the climate movement.   

The Hip Hop Caucus’s People’s Climate Music project, for example, released an EP and full album in 2014 called Home (Heal Our Mother Earth) in the lead-up to the first Peoples Climate March. The album included both covers as well as original songs, featuring artists such as Ne-yo, Common, Malik Yusef, and Antonique Smith. 

The caucus also engages in traditional grassroots, door-to-door organizing and outreach. One of the best examples is its 2015 “Act on Climate” bus tour, which came about in part to rally interest in local efforts to address pollution and climate change, as well as to galvanize support for both national and international solutions, such as the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan and the Paris climate agreement. The tour launched at the caucus’ s 10th-annual Hurricane Katrina commemorative event in New Orleans to highlight the fact that Gulf communities are still dealing with fallout since the levees broke. They then took the bus and their message for climate justice to a host of other cities including Detroit, Philadelphia, Virginia Beach, St. Louis, and other front-line communities like Newport News, where Grammy Award–winning poet and producer Malike Yusef appeared. Newport News is a kind of ground zero for heavy environmental pollution and public health issues like high rates of asthma, heart disease, and lung disease.  

Liz Havstad says programs like these provide a central coordinate around which urban communities most affected by racism, social inequity, and pollution can come together, get more engaged, and feel at home, in the work and in the movement. “We know people want to be part of a movement where they feel like they can fit in,” she says. “The work of the environmental and climate movement has been so profound and deep over the past four or five decades in this country, and has seen a lot of victories, but we know that the movement needs to get much bigger to get into this next phase of achieving 100 percent transition to clean energy. Because we’re up against hugely powerful industries.” 

That’s why they took the Act on Climate bus tour to Ferguson, Missouri. Havstad says they wanted to make clear that issues like racism and environmental justice are related. “When we’re talking about issues like police violence, racial bias in our policing, and the deadly consequences for folks because of those issues, we have to connect the dots, just like when we talk about the deadly consequences of air pollution for communities of color.” 

“Our movement is not authentic if it is not connected to the issue of social justice and racial justice. If it’s not, it means that we are marching in vain.”

The caucus has brought on Mustafa Ali as senior vice president to direct a new program dedicated to revitalizing vulnerable communities. Ali recently resigned from serving as the head of environmental justice at the EPA after issuing an impassioned letter to administrator Scott Pruitt. In the letter, Ali reminds Pruitt that “communities of color, low-income communities, and indigenous populations are still struggling to receive equal protections before the law. These communities both rural and urban often live in areas with toxic levels of air pollution, crumbling or nonexistent water and sewer infrastructure, lead in their drinking water, brownfields from vacant former industrial and commercial sites, Superfund and other hazardous waste sites, as well as other sources of exposure to pollutants.” 

Government funding for initiatives that address the ills of environmental injustice will be hard to come by under the Trump administration, which has promised vast budget cuts for environmental programs. The work that organizations like the Hip Hop Caucus are doing in cities around the country, however, points to the fact that solutions are also about changing how we think and talk about the problem we're trying to solve. That when we talk about climate change, the conversation needs to begin with the people who are the most vulnerable to abuse, inequity, and racism; people who bear the undue burden of injustice on a day-to-day basis, whether that be in the form of racial profiling or a pipeline rammed over sacred land. 

For Rev. Lennox Yearwood, that means broadening the movement to engage and include those communities, and to make sure people know they are not alone.

“I felt alone,” he says about what happened to him on Earth Day. “I don’t care what the color of your skin is, your orientation, your gender, your beliefs—nobody in the movement should ever feel alone. If you are a part of fighting for our planet and fighting for humanity, and you’re on that great cause, you should never ever feel alone. If this situation that happened to me does anything, it should allow us to rethink how to broaden our movement, not just talk about doing it, and to make sure that it’s a safe place to do activism, so that nobody feels out of place.”

It’s a message Rev. Yearwood and the Hip Hop Caucus intend to bring to the Peoples Climate March this Saturday, in spite of what happened to him in the shadow of the African American Museum in the nation’s capital.

“When vulnerable communities don’t see something like this march as part of their march, that’s a problem. That’s when we have work to do to educate and inform,” he says. “We can see that, in everything from asthma and cancer and emphysema, from Sandy to Katrina, we see many of these communities are suffering. That’s why this march is so important. We have to catapult this march and go to communities like Flint and Standing Rock, but also to Spartanburg [South Carolina] and Detroit and Memphis, Oakland, and Richmond. These same communities know and respect the impacts of climate change. They understand clean water. They understand clean air. They understand what it means to miss work because your child is sick with asthma, or your grandmother has breast cancer and your mother’s mother’s mother had breast cancer, and you’re all living next to this refinery or a coal-fired power plant. They get it. 

“That means our job as a movement needs to be educating and broadening the movement for these vulnerable communities. If we do that, we will win. That’s the final peg, from we resist, to we build, to we rise, to we win. We will create the political will, and the political platform, to create change.”