January 13, 2025
Happy Monday, my friends! This week I’m taking an intensive course on creation and theology. As I’ve been reading the assigned texts over the last few weeks, a consistent theme has been the disconnection between social justice and environmental justice, where social justice was the realm of feminists, BIPOC communities, and the LGBTQIA+ community and environmental justice was the realm of primarily straight, white people. While I was reminded of what I heard my parents say in the 1990s about environmentalism being a “conservative” value while civil rights were a “liberal” value, I still was shocked that environmental justice would be considered separately from social justice. In the most basic sense, climate change impacts BIPOC and low-income communities disproportionately more than white, middle- and upper-class communities. Environmental justice is a key component of social justice.
Yet, the idea of one or more “types” of justice being outside of the overall header of justice is nothing new. Whether internal to specific communities—there are plenty of LGBQ people who don’t regard Transgender people as being part of “our “community—or external—third wave straight white feminists saying that lesbians had to choose between being a feminist or a lesbian. Wherever these calls originate, they are far too often a part of social justice work as we all deal with the lies we’ve been taught and the oppression we’ve experienced, sometimes at the hands of people from other marginalized communities.
Writing about environmental justice, Karen Baker-Fletcher says, “…few environmentalists realized the implications of the “Not in My Back Yard syndrome. The political climate of the times meant that the hazardous wastes, garbage dumps, and polluting industries would probably end up in someone else’s backyard.”[1] When we don’t attend to the forces of exclusion in our own communities they end up in another community’s backyard as exclusion of them by us. All too often marginalized communities have learned well from their oppressors.
Fannie Lou Hamer said that none of us are free until we’re all free. The work of justice must begin and end from the realization that our backyards are also someone else’s backyard. Environmentalism continues to demonstrate that pollution is vastly more common “in poor, powerless, black communities rather than affluent suburbs…even though the benefits derived from industrial waste production are directly related to affluence.”[2] We cannot continue perpetuating systems where the byproducts of prosperity further marginalize the oppressed.
How do your actions contribute to the oppression of others? How can you support their liberation?
Let us pray: Loving and liberating God, help us to see one another as you see us, not as competitors or enemies, but as siblings bound together in your love. Free us from the systems of oppression we unknowingly uphold. Guide us to work, not for our own gain at the expense of others, but for the flourishing of all creation. Empower us to resist the forces of hatred and fear, and to lift up those who are marginalized, to share the burdens of the oppressed, and to stand in solidarity with those whose voices have been silenced. May Your Spirit fill us with courage to challenge oppression in all its forms and to speak truth in love. Amen.
Blessings on your weeks, my friends! Please let me know if there is anything I can do for you.
Faithfully,
Ben
[1] Karen Baker-Fletcher, Sisters of Dust, Sisters of Spirit: Womanist Wordings on God and Creation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998), p. 61.
[2] Baker-Fletcher, p. 61
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