Home » Black people are the key to stopping the climate crisis — we just don’t know it yet 

Black people are the key to stopping the climate crisis — we just don’t know it yet 

by The Grio

A house sits along the long stretch of River Road by the Mississippi River and the many chemical plants October 12, 2013. “Cancer Alley” is one of the most polluted areas of the United States and lies along the once pristine Mississippi River that stretches some 80 miles from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, where a dense concentration of oil refineries, petrochemical plants, and other chemical industries reside alongside suburban homes. (Photo by Giles Clarke/Getty Images.)

Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.

Back in 2014, two years into the second term of the first Black president, I made the fairly audacious claim in a column that “… President Obama could be the only Black person on the planet who cares about climate change. Let’s be real about it: The ill-fated climate change debate is as white as late-night talk shows. Most egregious is a pervasive lack of any urgent Black political action on the subject.”  

This prompted eye rolls, spasms and even counter columns from noted voices in the environmental-justice activist class. Strangely enough, the column mysteriously disappeared. Still, that statement stands as true today as it did nine years ago, even as Black communities nationwide find themselves virtually defenseless on the frontlines of environmental catastrophe and existential threats such as climate crisis. Indeed, anything environmental easily tops the list as our No. 1 challenge. Against the backdrop of every problem we consider a uniquely — or disproportionately — Black problem, there is something gravely environmental triggering, aggravating or exacerbating them.  

Black communities have always been the first warning signs of environmental and climate disasters. Our trans-Atlantic enslavement, the impetus of modern capitalism, is what caused and accelerated it, as Penn State University…

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