Chelsea Mikael Frazier: Learning environmentalism through the lens of black feminism (ep351)
“One of the most powerful untapped resources is spirituality. Spirituality—particularly spirituality from Black and Indigenous communities all over the world—has been so denigrated and so viciously attacked that many people are unaware of its transformative potential.”
In this episode, we revisit our past conversation with Chelsea Mikael Frazier, Ph.D., a Faculty Fellow in the Cornell University Department of English. She is a Black Feminist eco-critic who writes, researches and teaches at the intersection of Black feminist theory and environmental thought. As the Founder and Chief Creative Officer at Ask An Amazon, she designs educational tools, curates community gatherings, gives lectures, and offers consulting services that serve Black Feminist Fuel for Sustainable Futures.
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Transcript:
Note: *Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Chelsea Frazier: I grew up in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I don't know if you've heard the term “Minnesota nice,” but Minneapolis is a place that is very liberal in its political orientation, and that even can show up in the way that people relate to each other interpersonally. But as a young Black girl, for me, a lot of the time, “Minnesota nice” was pretty much just passive-aggressiveness. I had to get really good, really young at figuring out what wasn't being said because it was like talking to people and feeling a certain amount of hostility, but it's coming through a smile, so that can be really confusing when you're younger.
I didn't really have the language to explain my emotions and thoughts and reactions to this political and cultural climate that I grew up in until I started my undergraduate degree at Barnard College in New York. It was then that I began to delve into Black feminist studies. As I began to understand, [I saw] some larger societal and cultural patterns that point to the ways that Black women and Black girls are often treated. I was like, ”Oh, okay, now I can make a little bit more sense of what has been going on.”
I don't think that I realized that my interest in Black women in my studies was going to end up being so personal. It was like, “Oh, this happens to be a field that seems most relevant to my life.” Then upon further reflection, I was like, “Oh, this is a field [which] has helped me make sense of how my life relates to this larger world that I grew up in and I'm currently participating in.” So that's how I got started.
On an even more pragmatic level, Women's Studies was the first class at Barnard that I got an A-minus, which was the highest grade I got at the time. [I was] a sophomore and the most interesting book that I had read was Angela Davis’ autobiography. I was like, “Okay, I seem to be the most interested in performing the best in this class. I'm going to go with this.”
Kamea Chayne: The field of environmentalism is largely dominated historically and still today by white men or at least those who aren't low-income. My question is whether this is the result of our institutionalized injustice, just having sidelined and marginalized more Black, Indigenous and people of color as well as low-income folks; or if it's a matter of how people with different identities and backgrounds may have discussed and viewed environmental issues through different lenses—racism, sexism, classism, or public health.
Chelsea Frazier: Well, it’s both. And it depends on how you want to look at that question.
For example, if you're talking about environmental studies in a purely academic way, a lot of it has to do with the latter more so than the former, but it still is both. The reason I say that is because Black feminist literature or Black women's literature has always privileged, understood and articulated the relationship between subjectivity in the environment and how race, gender, and class mediate that relationship between subjectivity and the environment.
Now, even though Black feminist literature and Black women's literature did that, it didn't always announce itself as environmentalism or ecologically centered. But it doesn't mean that it wasn't there. When it comes to the way that information is organized in the academy and in general, most of the time, canon building or even field building and discourse creating is a matter of phrasing. Phrasing can also be intensely political and contentious.
I do think that there have been implicit and explicit ways that Black people have been excluded from larger participation in the environmental movement or in ecology as a political orientation. However, it doesn't mean that Black people, Black women, and even Black feminists haven’t been authoring their own understanding of ways of being in the world and ways of articulating relationships between different entities.
Kamea Chayne: So today, you identify as a Black feminist eco-critic, and I feel like many of our listeners may not be familiar with the field of eco-criticism. Can you share what this is all about and how it helps us to make sense of ourselves and our evolving relationships with the environment?
Chelsea Frazier: Landing on thinking about myself as a Black feminist eco-critic was a years-long process. I knew that Black feminism was, again, where I found my intellectual home. I shared a lot of the same concerns as many of my fellow colleagues, who are eco-critics but didn't see myself or my work or my other intellectual commitments reflected there. So I was basically trying to figure out how I landed on being a Black woman as an eco-critic and Black feminist, with me carving out an alternative way to conceptualize many of the concerns that I saw in the broader fields of eco-criticism.
It wasn't necessarily an attempt just to be clear, to diversify eco-criticism or to diversify the environmental humanities or to include myself in that conversation necessarily (although those have been many of the byproducts of that). What it was an attempt to do was really think about what it meant to acknowledge, again, to go back to your previous question, the logic and understanding of ways of being in the world and ways of being a relationship with the environment that were rooted specifically in Black feminism.
Because I didn't see too many other people around or really anyone around me who articulated the concerns in that way, I needed some language to make sense of myself so I didn't feel like I was constantly jumping back and forth between all of these different identities and lines of thought. I needed to figure out where my place was. A lot of people mistakenly refer to me as a Black ecofeminist. Ecofeminism is related to the work that I do.
Ecofeminism is not rooted in Black feminism.
In fact, unfortunately, ecofeminism has suffered from a lot of the same things that eco-criticism and the broader environmental movement have suffered from, which is a lot of homogeny. There was only one type of person represented in those conversations.
So Black feminist ecology is a set of principles, a reading practice, a framework that is rooted in Black feminism specifically. That's part of the reason why Black feminist eco-critic fit so well once I finally landed there.
Kamea Chayne: Right. In applying your Black feminist perspective to ecocriticism, I know you actively write against what's called colonial earth ethics. How is this at odds with environmental justice? And how has it been reflected in the various environmental solutions promoted and implemented today?
Chelsea Frazier: Pretty much in every way. Colonial earth ethics are slippery, right? They show up again in our most celebrated forms of resistance to ecological violence. So by that, I mean that if we're overly focused on reform, it keeps us from being able to see that (as my articulations of colonial earth ethics point to) a lot of these issues that we're suffering from can't be reformed—they need to be abolished, reworked, repurposed. They can't simply be reformed.
Colonial earth ethics describes a set of practices that perpetuate ecological harm, and it's functionally rooted in an exploitative relationship with the environment.
Thefts, whether legal or illegal, are a key component of colonial earth ethics. Physical and cultural dispossession of particular peoples is a feature of colonial earth ethics. It's functionally an understanding of the world that perpetuates that idea of disconnection from the environment. That disconnection then absolves the practitioner, knowingly or unknowingly, from [a sense of] responsibility to the environment.
Kamea Chayne: I was just talking to the director of Terralingua, which is a nonprofit focused on protecting and enriching biocultural diversity, which includes biodiversity, cultural diversity, and linguistic diversity. I had a major “aha” moment when she talked about how the major political frameworks that we understand today, from socialism to capitalism, communism to fascism, all of these political frameworks across the spectrum share their view of nature being resources for human use. So none of these really go back to the roots of addressing our view of separation from the environment.
Chelsea Frazier: Yeah, and that separation from the environment is the condition that sets the stage for colonial earth ethics to happen.
To be even more specific, when I say colonial earth ethics, what I'm describing is a set of practices, values, systems, and ways of being that justify or facilitate taking action while being completely ignorant about local ecosystems. Part of that is by ignoring or not being aware of the connection between the people in that environment, the animals in that environment, anything that comprises that environment, and misunderstanding that relationship. And a willingness to enact violence.
When you understand yourself to be a part of an environment or you understand your connection to things and you understand that anything that you put out is going to come back to you, you're a lot slower to just outright violate the people and things around you. Because ultimately, you're violating yourself, you want to avoid that. It's not really even so much about morality. It's just a pragmatic thing.
Kamea Chayne: I also wonder if we're stuck where we are today because we exist in a system locked into a human construct. So, for example, things like nation-states and these border lines that we drew, and the maps created through colonialism as well…
Chelsea Frazier: The way that we organize the world right now and everything that we're complicit in is really about benefiting and funneling resources to one group of people, or at the very least, to uphold a set of practices, that privilege is one way of being in the world.
One of the things that I always think about is the fact that our current ecological situation can often be boiled down to the fact that we have a very limited notion of the human subject. A lot of societal problems that we have come back to the fact that we have a very limited notion of what a human subject is.
I take my cues from Sylvia Winter, who really points out that there are so many problems that we're struggling with, including the unequal distribution of resources that come down to the fact that functionally, if you're not a white man interested in perpetuating capitalism, your very being is at risk and that everything on the earth is right now funneled towards supporting that way of being and privileging that way of being.
Kamea Chayne: My guess would be no to this question, but do you think it's possible to achieve environmental justice by working inside of this colonialism-rooted system itself, or how much do we need to dismantle and undo in order to get there?
Because things that we exist in today and accepted truths like nation-state borders, private land ownership, placing a monetary value on everything to make them fit for the marketplace but that have led to so many otherwise meaningful and valuable and enriching things becoming transactional or undervalued. These are things that happened, limiting what environmentalists can do to regenerate true abundance for people and our planet.
Chelsea Frazier: The simple answer is no, but...
When it comes to really sitting with the exercise of world-building, you have to consider what your alternatives are, and you have to think about untapped resources.
One of the most powerful untapped resources is spirituality. Particularly spirituality from Black and Indigenous communities all over the world has been so denigrated and so viciously attacked that many people have been or are unaware of its transformative potential.
When I'm thinking about alternatives, I'm interested in moving away from a colonial earth ethic. Thinking about the ways that Black feminist ecology—and spirituality is a key component of Black feminist ecology—can really open doors for something new, right?
Another [way] that I would say Black feminist ecology [departs] from traditional environmentalism [relates to its] rhetoric around "saving” the environment. Even that is rooted in a particular religious-philosophical doctrine, that thinks that saving is the earth is possible and necessary in our relationship with the environment. But really we need to understand how to be a community with our environment.
Spirituality offers a metric for doing so that is not so hierarchical, or at the very least, that understands the hierarchy of humans not being on the top, because we're not sure yet.
Kamea Chayne: With all this said, a lot of colonial earth ethics have become deeply embedded in our culture and even in the field of conservation. I'm wondering what you had to personally unlearn about your own identity or about what the dominant culture has indoctrinated you with in order to fine-tune the questions and solutions you really wanted to explore.
Chelsea Frazier: Yeah, I had to unlearn the shame that comes with being a “budding environmentalist,” and by that, I mean that I think a lot of environmentalists use scare and shaming tactics in order to alert people to the urgency of our ecological situation.
That is another way that race and gender policing happens within environmental discourse and in environmentalist communities.
There was this knee-jerk reaction [when I said things] like, “Oh, my God, I did recycle this thing,” or, “Oh my goodness, did I use the reusable straw?” or “I'm not using the right reusable bag at the grocery store.” I had to sit down and think about, “Okay, if I'm not doing this thing, does it signal that I care less about my environment?” Then I had to move into “Okay, let me really explore all of these things that I have been taught. Make me a ‘good environmentalist.’” To really just do my own personal research and think about how effective they were at helping us to “save the environment.”
Then I started to really see things such as [how] a lot of recycling facilities are in low-income communities of color. [The question became] if I'm recycling, what am I actually saving? Because it seems like the communities that most look like me and that many of the communities that I grew up in are actually being harmed by this practice that is supposed to be the most celebrated of our environmental practices.
As I started to nuance my perspective through my research about the literal day-to-day, life-or-death implications of some of these practices, it really changed what I valued, in terms of what I thought was going to help me transform into a person that was in a deeper relationship with my environment, but also as an educator and as a writer, what was going to help other people to transform their relationships with their environment, too.
Kamea Chayne: I guess this also points to the importance of going beyond seeing “sustainability” as an individualistic pursuit to seeing it more so as a collective goal that requires systemic, spiritual, institutional shifts.
Chelsea Frazier: Exactly. And don't get me wrong, those choices that we can make within our daily lives [do] affect a larger supply and demand. However, to your point, a lot of these values and ethics are community-driven and are policy-driven.
If I made every single "right" decision on my own, it still wouldn't be enough to disrupt these interrelated systems that are rooted in resource extraction.
I also want to point out that I hear a lot of environmentalists and people who are working on discourse that we need to care for the environment because these are resources that are finite. They use the word finite. There's this idea that our resources are scarce. I want to be very clear that we are creatures of the earth. Everyone and everything that is here is from here, which means that when we are in a harmonious relationship, our resources are actually boundless and abundant.
But because everything on a policy and cultural level is geared toward this understanding that we only have so much, it then creates a relationship where extraction is the norm—extraction becomes justified. That is something so much larger. You can’t mitigate that in your kitchen, worrying about whether or not your choice to recycle or not was the right one.
I had a dear mentor reach out to me recently and say, “Hey, Chelsea, I'm trying to really do better about my relationship with the environment. What should I do? Should I start recycling? Should I start there? What do I do?” I'm like, “Let's not think about recycling so much. I want you to go outside and sit next to a tree. Really sit down and think about how you can connect with that.” It doesn’t have to be a tree. It can be any element of nature that you that brings you joy. Everyone has that. I was just telling her, if you're able to this week, just go sit down next to a tree and listen. Just listen.
That is part of how you can actually begin to cultivate a relationship with the environment that is not based on work and saving your hood, [not based on] “what can I do?” [as] another task I need to add to my to-do list…
…in order to save something outside of myself, as opposed to sitting down and meditating on your relationship with our environment, your very home, which ultimately is about a relationship with yourself.
Kamea Chayne: The reality is often a manifestation of our worldviews and our perspectives and our inner beings and how we see this world. So even though it might sound too simple to be true, I do feel like a lot of this goes to our inner relationships and our independent relationships to the environment.
I also had been thinking a lot about how scarcity is a human construct, because a lot of times if we supported degraded lands to restore their own regenerative capacities to heal, they are able to recreate abundance. But I also wonder how much of this scarcity narrative has perpetuated a lot of division and competition among humankind and justified control, justified hierarchies, because if there is a scarcity of resources, then we need somebody to control and manage how we distribute and use these resources.
Chelsea Frazier:
Scarcity is one hundred percent a human construct, and it's a very unevolved way of being in the world.
We think as humans that we're at the top of the food chain and that we operate with the highest intelligence on the planet. But the fact of the matter is other species do not interact with their environment as if there will be nothing, especially when there's an abundance of a particular thing.
Your question also gets at another set of concerns that I can think about, which is what do alternative economies look like? Because alternative economies or future economies that are not dependent on resource extraction, I think, are really our only way to move into a different way of being with the world, or at least [they are] a huge part of moving into a different way of being in the world.
My hope is that we can start really thinking about alternative economies that do not take scarcity as a given in hopes of avoiding that policing around resources that we have right now that many people think is justified. Part of the reason we have banks, part of the reason why currency moves the way that it does, and even part of the reason why we have literally the actual police force… is to protect property.
Kamea Chayne: We are so locked into this current system right now, [so much so that even as] we're in this coronavirus pandemic where it's become quite clear that the system is failing us, people are [still] stuck on saving the system; governments are pumping trillions of dollars into the economy. What's being said is people have to keep consuming things that they don't need in order to uphold this current system.
It's becoming clear that this current system isn't working. Yet we're so stuck on trying to do everything that we can to save it. How do we move past this? This deep desire to want to save this thing that isn't working? How do we move beyond this, psychologically, to be able to rebuild something that is totally different, but that really works out better for our humanity and for the earth?
Chelsea Frazier: For me, it's about thinking about the people who were never invested in the system and who were able to move in ways that allowed them to survive these systems, but who always did things either a little or a lot against the grain.
When you think about all of the ways that they did those things together, a map starts to form.
[I look to] Black women and Black feminist thinkers and writers and a lot of people that this particular world considers “disenfranchised”. And I’m by no means romanticizing some of the challenges that come from being a Black woman in society or being a person of color in society, or being a Black trans woman in society, for example, or a sex worker in society. But a lot of the ways that people who are meant to be harmed by the prison systems (in order to keep it running) have lived in abundant ways that point to alternatives.
I really turn to them to think about how to outline something that will come after this deeply unsustainable system. It doesn't matter how many arbitrary dollars and numbers are moved around to save the economy, as we make sense of it right now. All the cracks and fissures will continue to become more and more apparent to more and more people. We have been experiencing cracks in this system that people are so interested in saving for many, many years, if not centuries. It's bound to fail.
It's bound to fail, and many of the people who made abundant life despite living in its failure are the people that I turn to in order to think about how to live after this and to leave breadcrumbs for my descendants who will be the ones who will be building that world in an even more immediate way than I am.
Kamea Chayne: Transitions are never easy. There's always going to be suffering along with that process. But I do feel like the earlier we do it, we might be able to buffer or lighten some of those harms compared to continuing to artificially inflate the system that is not working and have it completely collapse one day.
Chelsea Frazier: We'll see. Time will tell. I think a lot of people are worried about the apocalypse, then you have people panic buying and hoarding and doing all these things, getting ready for the "end."
But Octavia Butler was a genius and a prophet. One of the things that she told us is that the collapse of society was going to be a slow burn. It was not going to be cataclysmic. Then what she did in the parable of the series is give us a very detailed picture of what that decline was going to look like and how and how it was going to move. She gave us a picture of what it was going to look like at the end of it, but also made it very clear that...
This was not an apocalyptic event that led us here. This was not a grand collapse.
This was public programs being defunded. This was the police being exposed for the government-funded militia that they are. This was our water supply being increasingly destroyed, so much so that water becomes this highly contentious resource that flows freely from our forces right now. It's going to happen. The likely thing is that the collapse of our current systems is going to continue happening slowly through situations like this pandemic and then the federal response to it after this is over.
There have been breaches in our economic and political system prior to this moment. The 2008 stock market crash was something that people are still recovering from, and some families won't ever recover from, whatever “recovery” means under this particular system. More and more cracks will continue to happen.
It's our responsibility, as people who are interested in moving intentionally into another world (as opposed to a new world happening to you) to pay attention to what these cracks are leaving open to create. This is really a time [of] creation. This is not a time [of] coping and hoping things get back together. This is a time of resting abundantly. Once you're rested, getting to work, creating something new, new systems, new ways of being.
Kamea Chayne: As we look to our future, if our dominant culture centered Black and Indigenous voices and perspectives and solutions in the field of sustainability (and also just for this new economy that we need, or this alternative that we need), how do you think that may change our current approach to addressing our ecological breakdown, and how we're going about saving the economy?
Chelsea Frazier: It would change absolutely everything. If Black and Indigenous voices were centered in those conversations and weighed in, and they were not censored as a result of their being complicit in a larger, white liberal vision. If they actually were centered, everything that we know would be unrecognizable. I mean, because everything right now, including our “solutions” to these problems, are geared toward perpetuating a particular colonial earth ethic that supports one way of being in the world.
So if you centered other voices and you didn't do it in a performative way, the world that we currently live in would be unrecognizable. It would be a new world. It would be the next evolutionary step. I don't think that you're saying this at all, but just to be even clearer, it doesn't mean “just find a Black person and give them a voice.“ It means that there are ways of being historically rooted in Black and Indigenous cultural practices that can give us better insights into being harmonious with the environment in ways that a colonial earth ethic and liberal white environmentalism could never do.
To put it simply, it would just be a completely unrecognizable world.
Kamea Chayne: As we're wrapping up our discussion, I'd love for you to share whatever else you feel is important to get across to our listeners that I didn't get to ask you about, as well as your general calls to action for them and how they can support your work.
Chelsea Frazier: I'm an English teacher at heart and a writer, and so one of the most transformative things that people can do is to continue reading and continue really understanding alternative ways of being in the world.
Even if there's no green in the title, no environment and no ecological in the title or anything like that, even if it's not considered an “environmental” text, just expanding yourself is one of the ways to really deepen into your relationship with the world because you'll have an expanded understanding of your place in the world. I just always encourage people to keep reading and keep writing.
However, when it comes to people who are aware that our current system is not working, that our current practices are not working, a lot of people are even the beneficiaries of the ways that the system works and they can even see this isn't working, this is not sustainable.
Reading is only going to take us so far. It has to be accompanied by some action.
When it comes to people who are interested in wealth redistribution, find the Black and Indigenous-led organizations in your corner of the world and fund them. You don't need to go in and tell them anything. If you have the resources and you're trying to be a part of something different, something new, and being a part of the next evolutionary step of our world that does not rely on the exploitation of Black and brown people, go and fund the institutions, practices, and movements that have been doing that work. Because none of this is a new world-building alternative, none of that is new. I want people to know that the only way to really ensure that that's going to happen—you can read all the books in the world, but if you're sitting on the resources—think about what ways you can redistribute those resources.
Finally, as we've been talking about, the people who will lead us out of this ecological mess are going to be the Black and Indigenous collectives and communities that have been doing the work and then spearheading this conversation and they are often at risk of some type of violence, whether it's slower violence or more immediate violence. So one of the best things that you can do is figure out ways to literally physically protect a lot of our future and present leaders.
That, again, can go back to resource distribution. Sometimes, as we can see in a lot of the protests that have been happening all over the world, it literally means people of privilege, which is often white people, standing in harm's way, standing in front of Black and Indigenous people who are putting their lives on the line in order to ensure and raise awareness around this new world. That absolutely needs to happen.
Keep reading, keep writing, figure out how to distribute resources to the people who need them who will lead us, and figure out how to protect at all costs the people who will continue to lead us. One of the ways that I have been in my own work opening up pathways for that is to allow people to fund particular sessions that I do within my organization Ask an Amazon.
I'm so happy that we get sponsors who are like, “Okay, you provide mentorship to people who might be experiencing financial hardship, and I know your platform is geared specifically toward helping disenfranchised folks that come from a particular socio-economic background or particular race and ethnic background or gender background” or whatever. That's one of the ways that I've seen my own community show up in terms of resource redistribution and protecting students, our future leaders, from the harm that can and most often does come their way at some point on that journey.
Kamea Chayne: Dr. Frazier, thank you so much for joining me on this podcast today. It's been incredible. We covered so much and there's so much for us to reflect on after this conversation. We're so grateful. What final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?
Chelsea Frazier: I really appreciate the work that you're doing and the title of your podcast. As soon as I received the notification that we might be having a conversation together, it made me think of the Zora Neale Hurston quote, “The dream is the truth.”
I just want to encourage all of your listeners to keep that in mind, that there's nothing arbitrary about dreaming. Just continue to trust that the things that we dream when we're awake and or sleeping can really lead us to a better world.
