Black and Thinking Green

We welcome Ana to our ever-expanding group of voices here at Moms of Hue. She is on a mission to live a green and better life. Read more about Ana “In the Spotlight“.

Thanks to the attention given to the environmental movement by celebrities and Fortune 500 companies, going green has become quite mainstream  in our conversations. However, Hollywood and Wallstreet aren’t the sole reason that environmentalism has been thrust into our common dialogue. It’s efforts by  consumers and everyday chatter at the kitchen table or the water cooler that have played the most integral part in leading the green discussion.

One of the main reasons this conversation has gained tremendous momentum is due to it’s economic impact. Consumers have been demanding better, safer products because it means improved health and a higher standard of living while permitting them to keep more of their hard earned income.  Huge corporations quickly gave their attention to unrelenting requests  for improved products when it had the potential to effect their bottom-line. This cause and effect relationship between consumers and  businesses is the foundation of our capitalism and the driving force behind much of the green initiatives.

However, the question begs whether or not people of hue, families of hue and more importantly  women of hue are being represented in the environmental round table. The importance of understanding the contributions that women of hue are having in these discussion is due to the fact that our dollars are having the greatest impact in the black community. According to the US Census Bureau in 2006, 56 percent of African-American families were single parent households. Black mothers with an overwhelming 91.4% were the head of households in these statistics. Women of hue have the greatest ability to change the financial mobility of the black community and hence why it’s vitally important to know the impact their voices have in the environmental discussions.

With the current state of the  economy on the forefront of the African-Americans’ minds, in addition to the many other afflictions in the community, some black people are left feeling there isn’t enough energy left over to deal with sustainability and environmentalism. Reducing carbon footprint or buying locally hardly seem important when the only means of transportation is a bus or when buying organic doesn’t make financial sense. The media plays on this misconception by portraying environmentalism as the act of radical hippies or the privilege of a certain social class.

Conventional marketing of eco-friendly products doesn’t make an effort to reach people of hue, as it appears they’ve concluded black people aren’t interested.  Truth be told,  women of hue have been speaking the language of environmentalism long before crunchies and treehuggers made being green a trendy thing.  Every black person can remember as a child having at least one member in the home (usually a mother) telling them to “Cut those lights off before you run up my electric bill!” We’ve been eating from the toil of the earth way before hippies made home gardens a public declaration of one’s green-ness. When it comes to pollution, blacks have been calling foul on urban city industries for decades.  It’s understandable that they would challenge inner city manufacturers, since they have suffered more severely than any other races from pollution. Reverend Jesse Jackson has had a powerful environmental platform on this issue for many years.

People of hue are interested in green friendly thinking. It directly impacts their health, their money, their lives. Black people above all other races have the highest rates of chronic illnesses like Lyme Disease, Fibromyalgia, Chronic Fatigue Immune Deficiency Syndrome, diabetes, Lupus,  Rheumatoid arthitis, Multiple Sclerosis and the list goes on. Studies have repeatedly shown that environmental issues are a contributing factor in the prevalence of these illnesses among black people.  However, there needs to be a restructuring of the dialogue about environmental justice with regards to the black community. It must be void of trendy eco-friendly jargon and overpriced brand named green products. It must be about green jobs, green-ing the infrastructure in the inner city, providing  better food options like community gardens and farmer’s markets and showing how environmentalism is frugal despite what big business would have them to believe.  Being black is thinking green; let the dialogue begin.