“Those Who Feel It, Know It”: Centering Racial and Climate Justice via Ethnic Studies

By Dr. Jason Ferreira

July 6, 2021

While calls for climate justice may seem recent, movements against climate injustice and living in “right relation” with Mother Earth have a deep and rich tradition within communities of color and Indigenous nations. The weather may be changing, but these communities have long forecast that a society that has historically viewed their lives as expendable (and in the case of African Americans, property) is one that unsurprisingly will equally exploit the natural world without any regard to its cost or consequences. Racism, settler colonialism, and—as Naomi Klein recently defined it—an escalating ‘climate barbarism’ all share common roots.

Yet, all too often, struggles for racial justice are perceived as distinct from those related to efforts to address climate change. But racial justice will never be realized in a world organized on the premise that the planet is an exploitable commodity. The marginalized—those with the fewest resources–have and will always pay the highest costs in such a world. The science and sociology are crystalline clear: without a systemic shift, future impacts will not only be shouldered by the poor but especially working-class communities of color, both within industrialized societies themselves and across the Global South.   

And, at the same time, we can never realize climate justice without racial justice. Without the participation of those most immediately impacted by climate chaos, any notion of climate justice is a phantom. Bob Marley once famously sang, “those who feel it, know it.” And without recognition of how it is the visionary leadership of those at the frontlines—those who have lived with the consequences of colonialism, the indignities of racial oppression and exploitation, the bitter knowledge that some people have only lived well because others were unable (as Eduardo Galeano famously put it in his classic Open Veins of Latin America: “Our poverty is your wealth”)—the monumental task of averting rapid destruction of the systems that support life on Mother Earth will fail miserably. Because of these ongoing experiences, these communities hold a lived knowledge and—despite the pain and suffering associated with colonialism and racism—have historically offered up sustainable and more humane alternatives to the present system.

Despite the protestations of the Right in this country, movements for racial justice have never been narrow or a matter of simply reversing the table on those who have benefitted from racism. In fact, the “freedom dreams” animating social movements within communities of color have often sought to lift all boats. During Reconstruction in the United States, for instance, the demand for education by newly freed African Americans ultimately brought public education to the South. Before the Civil War, there was no semblance of public education for most whites who often labored in dire poverty as tenant farmers. When the South Carolina Constitutional Convention was organized to regain admission into the Union, it ratified a proposal for universal education and proposed $1 million in expenditures in public schools. While white supremacy would dismantle these democratic advances in short order, with poor whites violently betraying their fellow poor African Americans, the lesson should not be lost: demands for racial justice are not inherently narrow. Instead, they are premised upon a fundamentally emancipatory vision that encompasses all.  

Likewise, when Evo Morales, the Indigenous (Aymara) President of Bolivia, was elected to office in 2006, it was not merely a victory of Indigenous people within Bolivia. It was not a moment in which, again, the same dominant playbook would be used with the tables simply reversed. Instead, Morales facilitated “Buen Vivir” into the Bolivian Constitution in 2009, a principle intended to benefit all. He would explain in 2014:

“In Bolivia, the historic struggles waged by social movements, in particular the indigenous peasant movement, have allowed us to initiate a democratic and cultural revolution, through the ballot box and without the use of violence. 

This revolution is rooting out exclusion, exploitation, hunger, and hatred, and it is rebuilding the path of balance, complementarity, and consensus with its own identity: Vivir Bien.”

In speaking of Buen Vivir, Morales concludes with specific reference to the expansiveness of this vision:

“In the past, we were colonized and enslaved. Our stolen labor built empires in the North. However, our liberation is not only the emancipation of the peoples of the South. 

Our liberation is also for the whole of humanity. We are not fighting to dominate anyone. We are fighting to ensure that no one becomes dominated.

Only we can save the source of life and society: Mother Earth. Our planet is under a death threat from the greed of predatory and insane capitalism.

Today, another world is not only possible; it is indispensable.  

Today, another world is indispensable because, otherwise, no world will be possible.  

And that other world of equality, complementarity and organic coexistence with Mother Earth can only emerge from the thousands of languages, colors and cultures existing in brotherhood and sisterhood among the Peoples of the South.”

While these linkages between racial justice, decolonization, and climate justice are appreciated in the Global South, these connections are also intentionally being forged here within the United States by organizers on the ground. 

Much work is being done to resist the fragmentation that prevents us from seeing our interconnections. One such dynamic initiative is that of the Red Nation’s “Red Deal.” The Red Nation is a grassroots Native organization whose “Red Deal” is offered to expand upon the more well-known “Green New Deal” of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others. While it supports the effort to create jobs in renewable energies and protect access to clean air, water, and food, the “Red Deal” goes much further. It proposes a plan which centers upon the lived realities and knowledge base of those who have been on the frontlines for well over 500 years: Indigenous communities. It ties together the struggle against the fossil fuel industry and an extractivist civilization with mass movements dedicated to a deep and expansive democracy—one that the great African American scholar W.E.B. DuBois referred to as “abolition democracy”—as well as a decolonial future. 

Not only can there be no climate justice without decolonization, they correctly argue, but Indigenous liberation itself holds the key to a sustainable future. Another example of this dynamic movement work includes It Takes Roots, a “multiracial, multicultural, intergenerational alliance” of 200 organizations across Turtle Island. Centering the wisdom of frontline communities—poor and working-class communities of color—the work of these organizations which are “often near toxic, polluting industries such as oil refineries, fracking wells, coal mines, power plants, and pipelines; rails, ports, and other major transportation corridors; landfills and incinerators; and industrial agriculture…are experimenting with broader strategies to defend the earth, build place-based power, and advance transition toward healthy, just, regenerative economies and communities.”

The work of Frontline Catalysts accompanies and complements this important grassroots work by focusing on youth within frontline communities. On the one hand, youth are the ones destined to inherit the world we create: one spiraling deeper into climate barbarism or one shaped by principles of balance, sustainability, reciprocity, responsibility, and respect for all (Buen Vivir). But they are simultaneously those who will help determine that outcome. They are our future leaders. So partnering with frontline youth—within working-class communities of color—investing in their leadership capacities, sharpening their ability to make connections between their local and lived reality with others within the global community is a crucial endeavor.

Frontline Catalysts pushes against the fragmented view that sees community struggle to simply survive within, if not against, the indignities of racism as something separate from our collective survival and the protection of our relative: Mother Earth/Pachamama.

Ethnic Studies is one of the critical pathways to achieve this. First and foremost, it centers on the historical and cultural experiences of communities of color. It draws upon the deep well of wisdom that lies within each community that has been forced to confront the deadly mix of racial oppression, cultural degradation, and economic exploitation. In short, it starts with where youth are at, with the realities they confront daily. But it also asks questions. It compels students to think deeply about how to grapple with this history that has brought us to this juncture. It asks what does it mean to build a just and sustainable future? It queries what does a society look like that centers on those most marginalized? It poses the question of why do people live in specific neighborhoods and others don’t? 

Why do ‘food deserts’ exist in specific communities, and many options to eat healthy exist in others? 

Why is there clean air for some while others—again, predominantly working-class communities of color—find themselves living next to toxic sites?

Predictably, this type of critical engagement faces opposition. It is not a coincidence that those who rail against Black Lives Matter as being “anti-white” or against climate scientists and the overall climate justice movement as nothing more than an elaborate “hoax” by a liberal elite will also find a bogey-man in Ethnic Studies. We see this in the latest screeds against Critical Race Theory. But make no mistake, what they oppose are the asking of questions, the honest engagement with the history of this country, the decentering of the usual characters, and the democratic and emancipatory impulse that lies at the heart of Ethnic Studies. Whether it is the African (Bantu) concept of Ubuntu [“I am because we are.”] or the Mayan notion of In Lak’ech [Tu eres mi otro yo / You are my other me], Ethnic Studies is premised upon understanding the complex ways in which we are all related, our fates fastened together—as Dr. King once argued “in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny”—and of our profound responsibilities to one another. It is an approach that is deeply historical, sharply analytical, and committed to self and societal transformation. It builds the capacities of its students: principally critical thinking and a life-long commitment to the collective good.

Ethnic Studies pedagogy, in short, can unleash the power that resides within frontline communities, especially amongst youth, to successfully address the ensemble of crises (racial, economic, climate) confronting our society and their future. As Morales implored nearly a decade ago, “another world is not only possible, it is indispensable.” Investing in the leadership and critical capacities of working-class youth of color, those living in the center of these crises, as Frontline Catalysts is dedicated to, is a required step in the birth of that world.

Dr. Jason Ferreira teaches in the Department of Race and Resistance Studies within the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University. In 2019-20, Dr. Ferreira served as a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University in the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History. Currently, he is a Board Member of Frontline Catalysts and a member of the Community Advisory Board of the Center for Political Education.