The Environmental Justice Movement, North Carolina Environmental Justice Network, and the Role of Students
Saladin Muhammad, Black Workers for Justice, November 16, 2014
Student research, while important, can and should not be the basis for determining the focus areas of the struggles and social movements of the oppressed and exploited.
Our movements are not laboratories for students. Students should be allies using their access to resources to help develop strategies and tactics that expose, isolate, and weaken defenses used by corporate and state forces to justify their actions and policies that serve greed and profits vs. human needs and rights.
The North Carolina Environmental Justice Network (NCEJN) and 2014 EJ Summit
What I felt and believe I saw at this year’s EJ Summit was a reflection of multifaceted EJ forces and young base communities coming together to constitute a more united social movement to exercise mass-based people’s power.
I thought the panel on Moral Monday and Ruben Solis’s presentation during lunch helped to create a climate of discussion that stressed the need to identify, organize, and mobilize power that strengthens the basis for exercising the transformative power of impacted communities.
Building a coordinating committee whose majority are representatives of organizations from impacted communities and workers should be a main goal of NCEJN. This will move the EJ Summit to the level of an EJ movement venue and not mainly an NCEJN event. This is not meant to suggest that the EJ Summits and the work of NCEJN have not been very important. It is to point out that we should recognize the need to focus on new contradictions of the U.S. and global capitalist crises where strategies and tactics cannot be originated from what foundations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are willing to fund. NGOs must function to strengthen the leadership, confidence, and power at the base of the impacted communities, and not mainly on NGOs and service organizations composed of professionals who do not belong to impacted communities.
The Role of NCEJN in the Global EJ Movement
I am hoping that the commitment to leadership of impacted communities in the EJ movement is embraced by the NCEJN and that its work will be informed and guided by this principle, which needs further development in concrete ways. An EJ school for people impacted by environmental injustice, outside the walls of academia, would be important in helping to further develop this principle by contributing to the strength of diverse forces representing a majority from base communities.
The NCEJN must see its role as helping to develop an EJ leadership from impacted communities that is grounded in struggles against environmental racism, bringing to it resources and connections that strengthen working-class Black and people of color leadership and infrastructure to guide the wider EJ movement. This will place climate justice within the context of EJ, and it will anchor the leadership in the most impacted and oppressed communities.
Discussions about raising funds which are greatly needed must not distract from the transformative mission to build power. Approaching major banks that finance polluting corporations for funding does not strengthen, and can weaken, efforts to build base community consciousness about the relationships of forces in the struggle. These forces will bring pressures on NGOs, service and base organizations to comply with corporate and state interests in the actions of the EJ movement.
These issues must be discussed by participants and allies in the EJ movement. Ways need to be identified that prevent and reduce compromises in key areas of the EJ movement’s program and strategy.
While being clear that the NCEJN is not itself a revolutionary organization, it should be viewed as a part of a battlefront in the struggle for human rights that is connected to a broad, international movement towards a transitional civil society. Base communities must become exposed to participants in this movement so that they expand their perspectives beyond their immediate experiences and the priorities of the NGO and service organizations whose politics and priorities are too often shaped by foundation funding.
How NCEJN defines the base communities of the EJ movement infrastructure is very important. As EJ experts based on their life experiences, as people who have no choice about living with contamination (unlike outside professionals), the base community members need to lead and give permission to the outsiders, and especially privileged professionals, who come into their communities. This goal is undermined if communities are turned into research laboratories that bring funding to researchers and NGOs. This kind of exploitation encourages base community members to see themselves as victims and dependent souls with no power to wage a struggle against the forces and systems of oppression and injustice.
