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combating racism

Baltimore Resident EXPLODES at BS DEI Propaganda

How Black and White Alabama Coal Miners Organized in the Depths of Jim Crow

That Time When Radical Black and White Southern Farmers Fought the KKK & Government Together

UAW President EXPERTLY DISMANTLES Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric

Alabama’s Prisons SUED for Slave Like Conditions by Unions, Prisoners

SEA CHANGE: UAW Signs on to Calls for Ceasefire

The Importance of International Solidarity: Mexican Auto Workers Supporting the UAW

Laid-off Sierra Club Staffers: ‘We Can’t Give Up on United Fronts’

By Brooke Anderson, Hop Hopkins, and, Michelle Mascarenhas - Convergence, August 8, 2023

For the last decade, climate justice organizers have seen the Sierra Club as a critical lever for moving a climate agenda that centers equity and just transition. It has the largest grassroots base outside of labor, the most substantial infrastructure of any national green group in the US, and roots in a movement that at times was not afraid to go toe-to-toe with large corporations or development-oriented pro-business government entities.

But beginning in May, the organization accelerated a restructuring process that included layoffs of the entire equity and environmental justice teams and of senior staffers, several Black women and other women of color among them. At the same time, numerous new executive-level staff with high salaries were brought on to usher in a new organizational direction. This move, led by new BIPOC executive leadership, pulls back years of steady progress towards aligning the organization with the more progressive climate agenda. It is a harbinger of a shift away from equity and towards green capital just as the 2024 election nears—and reflects an anti-woke backlash occurring in liberal organizations across many sectors of the movement.

To better understand these shifts, movement journalist Brooke Anderson interviewed two longtime climate justice organizers and veteran social movement strategists, Michelle Mascarenhas and Hop Hopkins. Prior to being laid off from the Sierra Club this spring, Mascarenhas was its national director of campaigns, and Hopkins resigned as its director of organizational transformation.

Hopkins and Mascarenhas had been working to align the Sierra Club with the frontline-led climate justice movement, as part of an intentional effort to shift the organization from its racist roots and practice. Founded in 1892, the organization led the creation of the National Park Service, expanding on a legacy of dispossession and genocide of Indigenous peoples by insisting that protecting land meant removing it from Indigenous stewardship. “The Population Bomb,” which the Sierra Club published in 1968, was weaponized against poor people and people of color. It placed blame for the global ecological crisis on those least responsible: poor women of color and immigrants. This contributed to the anti-Black, anti-immigrant, anti-single mother attacks that continue to this day. 

The sophisticated analysis Mascarenhas and Hopkins offer of “what time it is on the clock of the world” (to borrow from the late, great Grace Lee Boggs) doesn’t just speak to happenings inside the Sierra Club. Rather, it holds deep-rooted and durable wisdom for left organizers attempting to make critical interventions in larger, liberal or centrist spaces in the non-profit industrial complex—and clarifies the sides and the stakes in today’s debates over climate policy. 

Storytelling on the Road to Socialism: Episode 16: A Teacher Speaks

By Candace Wolf - Storytelling on the Road to Socialism, July 4, 2023

On this episode, a teacher and former president of the Washington DC Teachers' Union tells the story of her work in the classroom as a radical teacher

Music:

  • The Internationale - Alistair Hulett
  • To Be Young, Gifted and Black - Nina Simone
  • Socialism is Better -words & music by Bruce Wolf; performed by Bruce Wolf, Noah Wolf, Gaby Gignoux-Wolfsohn

Our Green Transition May Leave Black People Behind

By Rhiana Gunn-Wright - Hammer & Hope, Summer 2023

I’m an architect of the Green New Deal, and I’m worried the racism in the biggest climate law endangers our ability to get off fossil fuels.

This summer, the earth raged. Fires in Maui and Canada, floods in Delhi and Beijing, heat everywhere — this is the beginning of the climate impacts scientists have long predicted, and the U.S. is unprepared in terms of everything from infrastructure to public health. And if I’m honest, I raged, too. Never in my life have I wished more to be a cyclone, blowing away everything in my path, or an earthquake, shaking everyone to their core until they take seriously the concerns of Black and Indigenous frontline communities.

August marked a year since the Inflation Reduction Act passed, arguably the most significant climate legislation in U.S. history. But the racist compromises and the marginalization of Black people and their demands that facilitated the bill’s passage have seeped into the climate movement, sowing division and narrowing discourse in ways that not only threaten to keep Black people at the bottom of a new green economy but also undermine efforts to address thornier issues, such as who owns energy resources or how to navigate conflicts about resource distribution and land use, questions that money alone cannot answer.

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