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rev lennox yearwood jr
The Climate Movement and the Legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.
In a divided America, there is at least one universal left, and that is the shared world we inhabit.
Aug 31, 2023
It may not surprise readers of this newsletter when I say that my great American hero is the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. To mark the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington, I’ve been reading Jonathan Eig’s very fine new biography and re-reading for the umpteenth time the unsurpassable three-volume account of King and the civil rights movement by Taylor Branch.
And as ever I come back to the same place: King’s heroism came from his unmatched ability to combine the prophetic and the practical. We have plenty of great Americans who exemplified one or the other, but perhaps only Lincoln comes close to mixing them with the same alchemical power. King had many tools that lent him strength: He was able to listen, capable of keeping his ego in check, naturally empathetic, grounded from youth in the (not inconsiderable) politics of the church. He had the support of a strong family and a stronger wife; all of that allowed a kind of low-key and appropriate messianism that never overwhelmed him. He wasn’t a saint (the job description of prophets and saints are very different) but he was radiant.
But King also had the advantage of timing. He spoke to an America that could—in its middle—be moved by the two appeals that were his specialty: to the shared Christian faith of the great majority of Americans, and to a shared sense of America’s unique small-d democratic history. He was, obviously, no sucker: He knew as well as anyone the limits of both that faith and that history. But through those lenses America could glimpse his deeper truths.
This summer almost everyone has a) sucked smoke b) dodged floods c) endured preposterous heat. Many have hit the trifecta.
We’re not in that America any more, which perhaps helps explain why the many speakers at this weekend’s 60th anniversary of the March reached fewer souls. There’s little that’s universal left to appeal to in a deeply divided America. Which is why, as my last book argues, it was probably unwise of progressives to surrender the flag and the cross, but that Jordan has been crossed in reverse.
Still, there is at least one universal left, and that is the shared world we inhabit. No one invoked this more movingly on the weekend than Rev. Lennox Yearwood, one of King’s great heirs. The founder of the Hip Hop Caucus (and a board member with me at Third Act), Yearwood used his two minutes to get a lot across:
We stand here because climate change is a civil rights issue. We have a right to clean air and a right to clean water. And it’s critical for us to understand that this climate crisis that is happening from California to Arizona, where our mothers and fathers are literally cooking to death in their homes… And we understand right now that to be in this movement… that we must be intersectional environmentalists. And that means that we must connect the dots and break the silos. That means that racial justice is climate justice. And climate justice is racial justice. And we understand that we must connect a dot between voter suppression and healthcare and education. We understand that we must fight for those who are fighting for clean water in Jackson, Mississippi. And we must fight for those who are in Atlanta, Georgia, saying, stop cop city.
We applaud this administration for what they’ve done with the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure law. We applaud them, but that’s not enough because you can’t put up solar panels on Monday and build pipelines for liquified natural gas on Tuesday. You can’t put renewable energy on Wednesday and discuss an all-of-the-above strategy for fossil fuels on Thursday. And so what we are calling for right now are three main things that first, that we must stop the expansion of petrochemicals across this country right now. And secondly, we must ban vinyl chloride, that explosive chloride that exploded in East Palestine. And the last thing, if the administration is watching right now, we must declare a climate emergency!
To unpack a little, as the scholars say, it seems to me that Yearwood is making at least two key points. One is that there are specific parts of the climate crisis that are far worse for poor people of color, here and around the world, and that empowering them is a key task, both for practical reasons of power and moral reasons of justice. It’s a point made with great grace by Rhiana Gunn-Wright, the transcendently nerdy author of the Green New Deal, in an essay that came out this morning in Hammer & Hope, the new online magazine of Black politics and culture. As Gunn-Wright put it
More than 170,000 green jobs have been created in the wake of the IRA, a majority of them in red states, some of which, like Texas and Georgia, have the largest and fastest-growing Black populations in the country.
I should be happy about that. I want to be happy about that. By “derisking” clean technology through public subsidies and other forms of industrial policy, the IRA is succeeding, at least in its mission to spur private investment in clean energy and low-carbon goods. And after 40 years of exclusively neoliberal economic policy, that is something to celebrate. But the transition to clean energy, like every other economic transition, is inherently distributive and redistributive—especially in a capitalist society—and this time, we need Black people to significantly benefit. Yet, with the exception of a few targeted policies, the IRA and the debates that have emerged since its passage suggest that the U.S. is again (at this big age!) relying on white supremacy to decide how to allocate the power and resources that come from going green.
Her recommendations are tremendously useful (the whole essay is essential reading), and they include some clear specifics:
For the green transition to be equitable, racial justice must thread through all the decisions about how it is structured and how public resources are distributed. One of the best ways to do this is to expand Justice40, a Biden administration initiative that aims to direct 40% of the benefits of federal clean energy and other climate investments to disadvantaged communities. The White House should update that order to include all of the programs in the IRA, and agencies should ensure that 40% of the funding (not nebulous “benefits”) are going to the communities identified by the White House’s new screening tool to identify communities that have faced historical environmental and economic injustices. In programs where it is not possible to ensure that 40% of funding reaches frontline communities, as with individual tax credits, agencies need to create partnerships with community organizations and local governments to try to increase tax-credit participation among eligible Black households.
This seems inarguable to me. But to the degree that it requires a big movement to get it done, it requires an elevated sense of justice that I’m not sure we have at the moment. In King’s world, a concern for justice grew out of both religion and patriotism, and with those gutted it’s harder to reach the broad middle.
But it also—and this is the second part of Yearwood’s message—seems inarguable that we have a rare moment to establish that new universal. This summer almost everyone has a) sucked smoke b) dodged floods c) endured preposterous heat. Many have hit the trifecta. Yes, some people have had it worse than others, and since this is America those people are likely to be poor and Black. But we’re at the point where everyone can start to feel the threat. (Even asocial billionaires, though they tend to respond by buying up land they imagine will offer an escape). That collective fear/sadness/anger/maybe a little hope constitutes a shared self-interest—one that we can build on to make the kind of broad movement that might make justice real again.
I think it’s likely we’ll get to see this strategy play out in the months ahead at a place that Gunn-Wright mentions in her essay: Calcasieu Pass, Louisiana, site of yet another proposed giant LNG terminal. And I imagine that Yearwood, concentrating on his work with Beyond Petrochemicals, will be heavily involved. But that is a story to come.
For now, enough to end with this thought. Were MLK still alive (and it’s not impossible—his friend and colleague Harry Belafonte was born two years earlier and just died in May) it seems certain to me that the climate crisis would be at the top of his agenda, because he was drawn to any project that emphasized commonality. The Poor People’s Campaign, which he was building when he was murdered, was a multiracial effort to unite impoverished people for radical change; the climate movement is perhaps the first truly global campaign, designed to bring everyone who lives beneath our shared sky on board. As Dr. King put it, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” Climate change is the ultimate proof of that truth.
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The Language of 'Brown Finance' in Climate Finance is Racist
If you cannot hear the problem with the term "brown finance" yourself, please let me explain.
Jun 26, 2020
I first wrote this article in March, to be published in April for the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. I couldn't get it published. Outlets kept turning it down, even the most hard core environmental outlets. It was just one of countless indigities and frustrations that come with being a Black leader in the climate movement.
Here I am, a fairly prominent climate activist, trying to alert our movement to the fact that we shouldn't be using racist language, and the feedback from friendly, or so I thought, media outlets was more or less, "Eh, what's the big deal? We're going to pass."
Like the high profile missteps of brands and influencers in recent years evoking racist imagery or messages (see: Gucci releasing a sweater mimicking blackface or Pepsi and Kendall Jenner releasing a commercial trivializing the Black Lives Matter movement), the climate finance movement is evoking a racist framework in the language of 'brown.'
Finance leaders and climate campaigners are increasingly referring to carbon-intensive industries that are causing the climate crisis as 'brown finance'. It's all over the climate finance world, and now we sometimes hear fossil fuel divestment activists chanting 'down with the brown!'
I am a vocal, and I mean vocal, advocate for divesting from fossil fuels, and investing in climate solutions. Here I am at Chase Bank getting arrested right before the pandemic, because JP Morgan Chase is the largest investor in fossil fuels in the world.
Any investor, wealth manager, banker, or activist working to move money away from the industries that are killing us and our planet and into climate solutions, I support you. But, if you use the language of 'brown' to mean fossil fuels and carbon-intensive industries, you do not support me, or any other person of color.
If you cannot hear the problem with the term 'brown finance' yourself, let me explain. And if after my explanation, you still cannot hear the problem, then please just trust me and stop using the term.
"Brown is not just another color like green. It is a color associated with people, and in particular people of color. And it has meaning in the world and in the environmental movement."
While not a cornerstone of U.S.-based climate activism, using the color brown as a proxy for dirty, fossil fuel industries has picked up steam in financial circles in Europe, which has begun to influence other parts of the world. 'Brown' is juxtaposed to 'green': the first is bad, the latter is good. And herein lies the problem.
To avoid the worst impacts of the climate crisis, we have to act now to transition to a low carbon economy--often dubbed a 'green economy'. This 'greening' has been used to describe a suite of desirable attributes to meet the sustainable development goals and basic human needs such as clean air, water, and land.
The finance and investment community in particular uses the term 'green finance' to describe finance that is beneficial for the environment, including investing in climate solutions such as renewable energy and electric vehicles. The European Union recently issued green finance taxonomy to determine what economic activities can be considered environmentally friendly by banks and asset managers. The opposite of this green finance has unfortunately been branded as 'brown finance'--finance that is destructive to the environment.
But brown is not just another color like green. It is a color associated with people, and in particular people of color. And it has meaning in the world and in the environmental movement.
For people of color, it is hurtful and damaging to associate something that is detrimental to society with the word brown. 'Brown' has been linked to dirty and 'white' to clean, and this has significant racial undertones. Some good reading on this is Carl Zimring's book Clean and White. Language that frames 'brown' as bad is painful, exclusionary, and ultimately structurally damaging to people of color.
Why not just call dirty, dirty and clean, clean? If colors are absolutely necessary to describe an economy, why not just use colors disassociated with human skin, such as gray and green? This seems to be the approach taken by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, when he stated, "Place your bets on the green economy, not the grey economy, because the grey economy will have no future" at the launch of the UN Principles for Responsible Banking.
Last month, the Stop the Money Pipeline Coalition resolved to ensure the language of 'brown finance' is no where in their campaigning, and is committed to continue calling fossil fuel financing what it is--dirty finance. I commend this commitment, the movement is leading the way, and now we need those in financial institutions to commit as well. (Full disclosure, Hip Hop Caucus, for which I am President & Founder, is a member of Stop the Money Pipeline.)
In a recent article about diversity in environmental STEM, Rhodes Scholar Wanjiku "Wawa" Gatheru is quoted as saying, "Black and Brown people experience environmental hazards and crises first and worst but are not the ones in the environmental fields making the decisions that are going to mitigate these issues."
One reason the 'brown = bad' language choice can even emerge is because there is a lack of people of color in leadership in climate finance institutions and in climate NGOs and organizations. Green 2.0, an initiative that elevates and sustains public attention to the racial demographics of the leadership of the environmental field, recently published its 2019 NGO and Foundation report card that shows this lack of diversity at leadership levels. Green 2.0 concludes:
Young people are already building separate lanes of influence on climate change. Their leadership, messaging and organizing strategies are noticeably more inclusive and racially diverse than the institutions that comprise the wider movement. They are nimble and rapidly responsive, and they are in part because they are the communities they are trying to save. We trust that the longstanding, mainstream environmental movement can push itself to remain relevant by evolving similarly and rapidly.
I fully agree. If the climate finance movement and the institutions and NGOs therein want to find relevance among broader stakeholders and communities, using the word 'brown' with a negative connotation must stop. Frankly, using the word 'brown' in this context must stop simply because it is racist. 'Dirty Finance' or 'Grey Finance' it is.
The beautiful global uprisings for Black lives has centered for the world the truth that white supremacy, racism, and the greed of capitalism are at the root of our ills, including the climate crisis. Brown people are powerful, and we will not achieve climate solutions without Brown leadership. Brown = good.
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All We're Asking Is to Let Us Live: Stop the Money Pipeline Now
If you continue to fund projects that are literally putting our planet, our existence on the line, and defining the existence of our children, then you have left us no choice: that we must put our bodies against the gears of the machine and bring it to a grinding halt.
Jun 12, 2020
This January, Rev. Lennox Yearwood of the Hip Hop Caucus gave a speech at a civil disobedience protest at a Chase Bank branch in Washington, D.C. to help launch the Stop the Money Pipeline campaign. The YEARS Project and Hip Hop Caucus just released a new video of the speech that conveys the power and urgent message of his words.
"Chase Bank, you have become rogue in your business plan, the same way that slavery and other institutions that no longer have a social license. You are on that path. And that is why we are here."
Let me first say to the employees of this branch, we are here not as adversaries. That's very important. We stand here as humans together. We are brothers and sisters on this planet.
I'm here because I'm originally from Louisiana and 14 and a half years ago, almost 1,900 beautiful Americans, predominantly Black people, but Americans, drowned in the richest country in the world. And I would hope that post-Katrina, that we would be doing things better than what we did 15 years ago. That we would use that time to divest from fossil fuels and invest in clean energy.
I would hope that that would be the business plan. The problem though is that the business plan right now, for this bank, for Chase Bank, is that they are funding the fossil fuel industry. Over the past three years, they put $196 billion dollars into the fossil fuel industry.
Chase Bank, you have become rogue in your business plan, the same way that slavery and other institutions that no longer have a social license. You are on that path. And that is why we are here.
We're also here because the pipelines you are building are in the communities of Black and Brown people and, so, that can't be the situation. You're funding pipeline projects that are literally causing asthma or bronchitis or worse, cancer. We can't support that.
The folks who are impacted by this are people who look like me, who are Black and Brown people who are suffering. I just want to keep it 100% real: that the money that comes out of this bank literally kills poor people in the same community they're operating in. There's too many reasons to stop this madness. This is not about Republican or Democrat or rich or poor.
"You are funding projects that are killing our existence. This is not only about equality. It's about existence."
This is about humanity. Listen, there are other ways to make money. You can do better than this. You are funding projects that are killing our future. You are funding projects that are killing our existence. This is not only about equality. It's about existence.
So, we're here, to bring you a message. If you continue to fund projects that are literally putting our planet, our existence on the line, and defining the existence of our children, then you have left us no choice: that we must put our bodies against the gears of the machine and bring it to a grinding halt.
So again, to those who are working, I know on a Friday, I know this is probably the last thing you wanted to see. But get used to it. Because we're gonna be there. Everywhere you are. As long as you continue to fund destruction. All we're asking is to let us live. Let. Us. Live. Stop the money pipeline. Thank you.
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