When I First Understood Environmental Racism

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Have does my lived experience starting as a little girl inform my professional expertise today?

My parents divorced when I was about 11 and my mother sold the house we'd lived in since I was in pre-school. She'd gone from a stay-at-home mother to a working one a few years earlier when she separated from my father. 

This was the 70s, and she felt the need to take care of herself and her four children on her own with as little help from my father as possible. So, she wanted to get an apartment she could afford on her much lower income from my professor father's she earned as a keypunch operator. 

To her credit, she also was saving to buy another home in a better neighborhood that had only her name on the deed. She achieved that goal, made easier by my father's regular child support payments. But it didn't happen before I and my three siblings saw firsthand what it was like when others around us lived in intractable poverty.

The home we left was in a neighborhood that had experienced White flight, so it was deteriorating as poorer Blacks than we were moved into the area. I remember it going from predominantly White to nearly all Black within a year after we moved there. 

We lived in an old Victorian, which was one of the largest on our street, with rooms to match. But, my father had bought the house for us, so my mother sold it within a year after they legally separated. I remember being mournful—and fearful—as we rode away from the house for the last time. 

My mother first moved us to subsidized housing for a year, then to a second-floor walkup for another year while she saved for a house. This was in a dilapidating three-story building with a vacant lot behind it where people I knew were from outside the Black community came to dump their waste. That included raw garbage and dead animals. 

We weren't allowed to go into the lot, where something was always smoldering. But we could see it from our back porch and, worse, smell it from anywhere in the apartment, which my mother kept immaculate.

There were multiple vacant lots in the neighborhood, where I suspected once sat old homes that fell into disrepair, got condemned and demolished. Many still had the decaying remains of the structures on them. I was stunned by what I saw, and wondered how in a country as wealthy as I knew by then America was that humans were forced to live that way.

I felt rage every time I walked through my neighborhood, especially to get on the bus to go to school in a White community in a suburban town about an hour from my home. It was a place of pristine homes and manicure lawns. This felt unfair. I wasn't much different in class than many of the kids I went to school with, yet the entire experience left me feeling like I was an alien—the "other". 

My best friend in school was a White girl named Cheryl who lived in a similar apartment building to ours, but in a much cleaner and nicer neighborhood. I understood that what I was experiencing at home wasn't "normal" and it wasn't right.

Her father was a laborer, yet she lived relatively well in a safe, clean suburban neighborhood where I knew we weren't allowed to move. As if to reinforce the message I was getting, our school bus full of Black inner-city kids got stoned sometimes as it drove through the community. The perpetrators, White teens speeding by in pickup trucks, shouted the n-word and demanded we go home. This was in a Northern city.

Conversely, my father was a professor and my mother had a "good" pink-collar job. Yet, we lived in a trash-strewn, rodent-infested neighborhood close to one of the worst in the city. It was also unsafe, full of prostitution, drugs, and violence my parents worked to separate us from.

I already understood that when couples divorce, if they have children, and the mother gets custody, their standard of living often declines rapidly. That forced mothers to move with their children to communities unfamiliar to and uncomfortable for the children. That certainly was where we were. But, my mother ensured me it was temporary, which helped me endure our time there. 

But, I still didn't truly understand why so many poor Black people lived permanently surrounded by filth. Many lived in neighborhoods where buses and trucks spewing heavy smoke passed through constantly and White people, including from commercial concerns, brought their garbage and dead animals to rot.

One day, while he visited, I asked my father what I was seeing—and experiencing. 

Back then, he was an Africana studies professor, social justice artist, and Black civil rights activist who'd already gained renown. He never talked to us like we were small children who couldn't understand the world the way adults did. Black children were adultified then as they are now, anyway. So, he was as straight with us as he was with his students.

He said, "What you're seeing is environmental racism, and White people dump in our communities to send us a message about their perceived superiority." As I grew alarmed, he continued. 

"They want you to feel you're like the garbage they dump here; like you're unworthy of anything good in life," he said. "They have places they can take their trash or they can have it picked up just like we do. But they come to our communities to show us they can invade them at any time and we can do nothing." 

Then he got quiet to let me process what I'd just heard.

When he felt he'd waited long enough, he said, "You've already been taught to never let White people make you feel inferior. Instead, when you get older, fight back, but do it the right way." By that, he meant with my mind, not my fists, like I saw others around me do.

While I had experienced racism regularly already—a little White girl in my Catholic school second grade class called me the n-word and it continued from there—this felt insidious. 

Rather than wallow in hopelessness and self-pity or self-destruct the way racists expected I would, I determined then I would do something about this kind of racism in all its forms. (Already, the concept of "race" made no sense to me, so racialized injustice certainly didn't.)

Because the adults around us taught us the history of race in America, dots started connecting in my child's mind. As he knew I would, I figured out shortly after my conversation with my father that racism in all its expressions were tied together and it was deliberate. It was part of the global White supremacist's DNA.

I had developed a keen interest in banking and finance very young. I saw that because they had more income, there was a difference between how my father and his often wealthy friends lived, in relative privilege and comfort, and how far too many other poor and low-wealth Black people did. 

It was clear what segregation and weaponized racism did to Black communities, and environmental racism was part of that. I started learning all I could about how racism got weaponized in America and after college, became a professional journalist so I could expose what was happening in Black communities. 

I also wrote about those who excelled and what went well in our community, too, because I didn't want to perpetuate Black poverty p_rn.

Since my first experience with environmental racism—or any racism, my lived experience helped me understand how racialized people must navigate the world. 

From early adulthood to recent years, I've lived in or near communities where environmental racism is prevalent and unapologetic. I wasn't "allowed" to live in better communities, because I was priced out or made to understand how unwelcome I was. I had asthma for years because of where I was forced to live and ended up in the emergency room more than once because I couldn't breathe.

That experience helped me, as a professional, act as a cultural translator who can explain why someone in a marginalized community may react to certain concepts the way they do. That's often true with the idea of climate justice. 

It can seem a lofty idea when you're pushed into neighborhoods where breathing pollution is the norm and you expect to deal with health issues related to that pollution. Do you choose LED lightbulbs or asthma medication for yourself or your child? My lived experience ensures I feel that question.

So, clean energy seems like a grand notion to people who aren't from low-wealth communities. But, the choice may make little sense to someone who's trying to keep the lights on or pay other bills, even if their energy source is costing them—and the environment—more. 

It's important some of your key professionals have cultural competence from lived experience that gives them nuanced perspectives. It's equally important they get heard so your organization can serve its core constituents effectively and your organization doesn't make grievous errors dealing with people in low-wealth or racialized communities. I hope my story conveys that clearly.

Dahna M. Chandler is a doctoral researcher at the University of Southern California, studying the history of racialized discrimination in the U.S. finance industry, and an award-winning finance journalist. She holds a master's in corporate communications from Georgetown University. She works with opportunity finance sector organizations and related mission-driven nonprofits as a social impact communications consultant, drawing from her own lived experiences that align with those organizations' core constituents. Contact her for potential collaborations.

(c) 2024. Dahna M. Chandler for UpThink Strategic Communications, a division of Thrive Media Collaborative, Inc. All rights reserved. This case story may not be reproduced or reposted in whole or in part without express written permission of the author.