Harper Lee
(May 2021)
“In our courts, when it’s a white man’s word against a black man’s, the white man
always wins.” (Excerpt from “To kill a mockingbird”)
“To kill a mockingbird” (which was not accurately, but beautifully translated in Brazil as “the sun is meant for everybody”) tells the story of Jean Louise Finch, a 6-year-old white girl living in the fictional "tired old town" of Maycomb, Alabama, during the Great Depression. While the first half of the book is an innocent tale of her child adventures with her brother, friends, and family, the second part turns into a dramatic narrative of racism and segregation. Through Jean Louise’s eyes, we watch the work of her father, Atticus, a lawyer who was pointed to defend Tom Robinson, a black man accused of raping a young white woman. Despite the weak evidence and lack of proof, the town people do not fail to show disdain against Atticus and prejudice against Tom. Jean Louise might not fully understand the complexity, but little by little she becomes very empathetic and emotionally involved. But let’s spare the reader from further spoil.
Harper Lee’s romance was published in 1960. A growing force of the black movement for civil rights was standing against an unbearable official segregation system. In 1955, in the racist and segregationist state of Alabama (same state where this book sets place), the brave Rosa Parks, who then became a symbol of resistance, refused to give up on her bus seat for a white person to sit, and for that she was arrested. In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr., in his famous speech “I have a dream”, standing beside the Lincoln Memorial, declared: ”I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”.
Over 50 years later, Luther King would possibly cry, knowing that people are still judged by the color of their skin. Racism still hunts our institutions, our police force, our minds. This year, we watched the tragedy of George Floyd, a 46-year-old African-American man killed during an arrest by a police officer who knelt on Floyd's neck for nearly eight minutes. That was one of many other similar tragedies. Floyd’s death triggered the global movement Black Lives Matter and, after nearly 60 years of Luther King’s death, black people are still fighting for equality. For justice. For respect. For the minimum. The dream hasn't come true yet, and the wait has already been too long.
How do we relate racism with sustainability and environment? First, sustainable development is not limited to the environment. We should care for forest conservation, clean development, and green growth, but that alone does not suffice. Development is also about humans. The richest land cannot name itself developed if it lies over poverty, famine, and social inequalities. There is no development without accessible education, health, and culture to all humans. There is no development, even less sustainable development, in a world where lives don’t matter.
Second, there is no environmental justice in a system with no racial justice. The right to a healthy and sound environment is a right to us all, but that frequently is not the case.
"The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in a courtroom, be he any color of the rainbow, but people have a way of carrying their resentments right into a jury box. As you grow older, you’ll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don’t you forget it—whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash."
(Excerpt from “To kill a mockingbird”)
In this passage, Atticus stands against racism, by defending that every man should receive the same treatment in court. In other words, the law, the institutions, and the political systems should guarantee that every man has the same rights and duties. However, what we really observe is an uneven regimen to white and black people, which might not be formally registered by the law, but it is present in our justice and socioeconomic system.
In moments of environmental crises, such as disasters, extreme climate effects, pollution, and even the COVID-19 pandemic, the consequences of such disturbances are unevenly distributed around different countries and communities. Since environmental, social, and economical aspects are intertwined, the impacts tend to be more dramatic in the most vulnerable systems, which means that socioeconomic inequalities are aggravated in such situations.
Environmental racism is a systemic social structure, in which the access to environmental rights (mainly the access to a healthy and sound environment) are not evenly accessible to all. In other words, environmental racism is a situation in which certain groups, already marginalized from socioeconomic benefits, carry a heavier burden for environmental damage without benefiting from the corresponding development.
The term was coined by African American civil rights leader Benjamin Chavis in 1982, referring to the “racial discrimination in environmental policy-making, the enforcement of regulations and laws, the deliberate targeting of communities of colour for toxic waste facilities, the official sanctioning of the life-threatening presence of poisons and pollutants in our communities, and the history of excluding people of colour from leadership of the ecology movements”. [1]
Environmental racism is one of the possible characteristics of poor, lacking environmental justice. We aim for justice when policies are designed to benefit all people, with no distinction of gender, race, sexual identity, or religion, and we aim for justice to reduce inequalities and create a more balanced system, supporting those who are more vulnerable and distributing resources.
Black people have been suffering with the cruel legacy left by the slavery system, followed by discriminatory policies. Years of segregation led to the current society, a society that still undermines black people by lower income, limited access to essential public services, and racist mindset.
In the case of the United States, the country with higher death rates due to COVID-19 pandemic, it was observed that black Americans are the major force in frontline of essential services, which means they are more exposed and more likely to work on site rather than remotely; black people are also less likely to seek care for COVID-19-like diseases because of high costs, and are also more likely to face racism from the health care system, which might result in lacking treatment or misdiagnosis. Additionally, black people often struggle with political and financial disempowerment, so people are pushed to live in degraded areas, with lower value, where higher rates of pollution and environmental degradation aggravated respiratory and heart systems of residents, increasing risk factors for the virus. [2]
“Before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that
doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”
(Excerpt from “To kill a mockingbird”)
The Black Lives Matter movement has received some opposition from people who propose, instead, that All Lives Matter, and this reaction is ridiculous, ignorant, or dishonest, to say the least. As much as the feminist movement does not say that females are superior to males, LGBT movement does not preach for heterosexual inferiority, and the Black Live Matter does not defend that only black lives matter. These are movements that claim for equality. These are groups of people that fight for the minimum that our society has failed to provide. As a white person, I am not in the position to speak up about black people’s suffering, but all people have the empathetic moral obligation to support a movement for equality.
Note: This article is dedicated in honor of the one-year anniversary of the movement Black Lives Matter, which arose from the tragic death of George Floyd on May 25th. Therefore, today’s theme focuses on racism against black people. However, it is important to notice that ethnical minorities are overall vulnerable to social, economic, and environmental issues, so no one’s grief and hardships should be ignored. |
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