Joy for Juneteenth
7 min readJun 19, 2021
What I want to say to all the celebrants: First, thank you. Thank you for being alive. Thank you for all my freedoms. My right to say no to anything. My right to enjoy. My right to vote. My right to speak. Without your ancestors' self awareness, their defiance, their organization, their continuity, their deep perception of time, I would not have any freedoms at all. Black people of the world, when you rise, you can't help yourselves, you free everybody! So thank you. Thank you for being alive.
I work to heal Earth, I work on climate change. I want true climate justice education for our children. And this is where it starts:
Climate crises, pural-in Los Angeles that's heat waves, no rain, fires-are caused by racist policies. By disrespect for and destruction of the people and the land they live in. Disrespect for people's living bodies, for their living minds, for their joy and understanding. Stealing their labor, their children, trying to steal their dignity. Of course racism destroys the land: if you are smacking or putting iron in the mouths of the people who work the land and exterminating those who know it, you will destroy it. The people who believe in white supremacist policies and the people who think they don't, but refuse to criticize them because they're "colorbind", people thinking like this in county, state and national agencies have built up traditions of racist policies that hurt the land (shrug) and pollute the people of color (so what) as if the Earth stays still and as if people of color will stay still physically or mentally for this treatment. Thanks to Ibram X. Kendi for teaching me to think in terms of people and their policies, not abstract systems of racism.
Climate change is due to racist policies and if we let it work through the systems in place today, it deepens racist results. We have the ultimate incarceration of us in the hot boxes of the city with no safe outdoors to go to. I refuse that. I refuse that for my babies. I refuse that for my grandbabies.
First of all, we're going to have to make the hot boxes a little cooler by having the city or the state erase utility debt. If you're in L.A., get out your cell phones, open the SCOPE.org website, and sign the petition to ERASE UTILITY DEBT. We cannot have people sweating and dying in their apartments because some man wants his money. Death for money. No. This is a climate justice issue. Because, look who's dying. Abuela didn't poison the skies with her Lear jet. Black dude who can't pay his utility bill didn't soak his wide green lawns with water stolen from the salmon a thousand miles away. My neighbor, she didn't engineer this careless, destructive, money-making system. But that's who's sweating in the boxes we call apartments. Because someone who is in a Lear jet wants their money.
Well I want my life. I want your life. Our city is supposed to be about life, with money as a SERVANT to the purposes of our people's lives. Not some people's lives. All of us. Black people's lives, Latinx, immigrant, Native, Asian, all the women, children. Money should be a servant to the children. Trees, pidgeons, the lives of all the little things that live in the soil. Because, in part, those little lives in the dirt make your food plants grow. Money should be a servant of the tiny lives of the dirt. Right? Money should not rule who lives and who dies. So, get behind SCOPE's petition to Erase Utility Debt. We will win back our water and our air conditioning.
Then we have to look over this city's systems (school systems, water and power systems, transportation systems, zoning laws, financial policies...)from top to bottom with a climate critical eye. We have to train our children to do this. Not only be installers of solar panels but be all those sustainability experts we need to analyze every workplace and neighborhood. That's part of what our schools should be doing. Black people already do this kind of critical thinking, certainly more than a whole lot of blithely comfortable white people who assume the corporations and the government will get together the technology to solve this without too much disruption.
Looking at that assumption: This city needs homes where people have money left over after rent to care for each other. The climate connection? Efficient homes with clean tech that are also cheaper to live in. Have decades of real estate business decisions made this happen? We gave the city billions for housing for the houseless people, and how many units got built? The climate connections of ending homelessness? Less waste, unity for transformation, design insights from the people who have lived in these streets. This city needs a lot more trees to draw down carbon and cool everyone, a lot more places where clean food is grown and made more delicious and sold. Climate connections? Transport emissions are saved, carbon goes into soil life not air, hospital emissions are saved, people find their connections to nature instead of to an IV tube. Is this happening? The stock market has been booming.This city needs streets where people of color can walk without fear of being beat down and yanked off to a prison boxes where they work as slaves. Climate connection of no prison slavery? Do I have to? Avoided waste, inefficiency, destruction of human creativity, destruction of unity and faith in transformation. Instead of police we need, at least for decades, maybe forever, treatment centers and trauma counselors in the streets. People who know us. As Black Lives Matter has proposed. The city promised in 2020 to remove $150M from the police budget to get started on this. Where's the results?This is not to discourage the workers who made these advances: it's just to say that since our government and businesses won't act on their own, we white people especially, and climate activists and others need to follow the lead of these workers and help watch our money. Every cent spent on command, control and punishment is less money for transformation. And keeps in place the brutally racist, negligent and repressive policies that set climate crises in motion.We need to imagine better ways. A green climate-friendly city has walkable neighborhoods with all we need groceries, schools, jobs within walkable distance. Streets where people can make music and dance, dream up and paint murals. Yes, even negotiate win-win business deals, IF they are about providing ways to make our stuff without destroying the living creatures that make us. Can you imagine business being responsible to the Earth? Can you imagine a city street where you can sit and lose yourself in thought, in a dream? Where your baby girl can do that?
Why not?
We need to make a city that honors, that lifts to the pinnacle of its policy-making paradigm, the life force. The same life force your Black ancestors found inside themselves, and loved when they saw it in others. The Black life force that studied the life around them, and studied the systems of men, that knew how to use poison against poison. That knew how to resist mental poison. That life force that knew how to engage the slightest spark of humanity in the poisoned people whose mouths dripped lies so that that spark of common humanity interrupted the lies, and the poisoned people stilled the lie-makers in their own minds. The Black life force that gathered people together to work for the freedom of their children's children's children, that worked then and now to loosen the bonds, to create faith, to sustain faith on down the generations.
The Work. Thank you for the work you have done to recivilize the so-called dominant people of this nation. We'll take it from here. Earth is telling us we have to for our survival.
By the way, there aren't very many of the truly dominant rule-makers, we know, the 0.01%. A few dozen, maybe a few thousand. All the knowledge and energy resides in us. COVID reminded us of that. We know and do everything. We know who's essential.
And until people acting out the lie of white supremacy and its twin lie of colorblindness, the refusal to see racist harm, until those people are removed from setting policy, from their positions of writing the rules, we will never solve climate crises. Climate crises are Earth's responses to being disregarded, disrespected, damaged, and disrupted. So climate crises will only be solved through respect. Bad climate policies will be dissolved as racist policies are dismantled. Racist people cannot see us, they can't see the land. They cannot see through the myopia of their economic traditions. They can't see past their "tribe." We have to do it, dismantle racism and its climate killing policies. It will not happen in any other way. We are the ones who see us. Thank you Black people for modeling this talent. We are the ones who don't need power over anyone. Thank you Black women especially for demonstrating how this works. We are the ones who can make make our lives in ways that help the Earth. Thank you Native people for maintaining understandings that show how it can be done. We can build a world that is fairer and eases the damage onto everyone's backs. We are Earth defending herself.
"We do this 'til we free us"--Mariame Kaba. Thank you. THANK YOU!
Thank you for being alive.