08 September 21
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While noting that a national NoToRahm campaign is underway with constituents calling for senators to reject the nomination, the Chicago Tribune column by Rex Huppke quoted the campaign’s coalition: “Emanuel has a long record of being extremely undiplomatic, abrasive and contemptuous of humane values. His record as mayor of Chicago, where his administration oversaw the coverup of the horrific police shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, is especially troubling.”
Earlier this summer, victims and relatives of victims of police brutality in Chicago while Rahm Emanuel was mayor released a joint statement that said: “During his eight years in office, Emanuel displayed contempt for communities of color. He showed callous disregard for terrible losses suffered by the families of those who were killed or brutalized by officers of the Chicago Police Department.” They added: “Rahm Emanuel became a symbol of lethal disrespect for Black lives. Making him a U.S. ambassador would make the U.S. government a similar symbol.”
A longtime Chicago journalist and political consultant, Delmarie Cobb, told Huppke that “Rahm Emanuel was a disaster for the Black community in Chicago. The remnants of his administration are still very much evident and we’re still living through them. So the idea that someone like him, who was a complete failure as a mayor, would be rewarded with a high-profile ambassadorship or anything in the presidential administration is just unbelievable.”
And Cobb said: “It was Black voters who took Biden over the top. He would not be president if it weren’t for Black voters. So this is an insult to Black voters everywhere, not just in Chicago, to put someone in such a high-profile position whose actions with Laquan McDonald alone should be disqualifying to ever hold a position in anyone’s administration.”
Meanwhile, a Sept. 1 Chicago Tribune news story reported that 28 relatives of Chicago victims of police violence “voiced opposition to an Emanuel appointment to ambassador. Arewa Karen Winters, who said her nephew was shot and killed by a Chicago police officer in 2014, noted Biden’s support for George Floyd’s family and police reform. ‘Rahm Emanuel does not deserve to be the ambassador of anything,’ Winters said in a video voicing opposition. ‘As families who have been traumatized by police violence and terror, we are very hurt and we feel betrayed at even the thought of President Biden wanting to appoint Rahm to such a prestigious position.’”
Cobb wrote in an article that Emanuel “closed 50 public schools in predominantly Black and brown neighborhoods. He closed six of 12 mental health clinics in these communities. Now, who needs access to mental health care more than Chicago’s Black and brown residents who are underserved, underemployed and under constant threat of violence?”
Los Angeles police officers survey a protest in downtown Los Angeles on 14 August. (photo: Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times/Rex/Shutterstock)
An internal police chief memo shows employees were directed to use ‘field interview cards’ which would then be reviewed
Copies of the “field interview cards” that police complete when they question civilians reveal that LAPD officers are instructed to record a civilian’s Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social media accounts, alongside basic biographical information. An internal memo further shows that the police chief, Michel Moore, told employees that it was critical to collect the data for use in “investigations, arrests, and prosecutions”, and warned that supervisors would review cards to ensure they were complete.
The documents, which were obtained by the not-for-profit organization the Brennan Center for Justice, have raised concerns about civil liberties and the potential for mass surveillance of civilians without justification.
“There are real dangers about police having all of this social media identifying information at their fingertips,” said Rachel Levinson-Waldman, a deputy director at the Brennan Center, noting that the information was probably stored in a database that could be used for a wide range of purposes.
The Brennan Center conducted a review of 40 other police agencies in the US and was unable to find another department that required social media collection on interview cards (though many have not publicly disclosed copies of the cards). The organization also obtained records about the LAPD’s social media surveillance technologies, which have raised questions about the monitoring of activist groups including Black Lives Matter.
Surveillance concerns
In 2015, the department added “social media accounts” as a line on the physical field interview cards, according to a newly unearthed memo from the previous LAPD chief, Charlie Beck. “Similar to a nickname or an alias, a person’s online persona or identity used for social media … can be highly beneficial to investigations,” he wrote.
While the social media collection has gone largely unnoticed, the LAPD’s use of field interview cards has prompted controversy. Last October, prosecutors filed criminal charges against three officers in the LAPD’s metro division, accusing them of using the cards to falsely label civilians as gang members after stopping them. That unit also has a history of stopping Black drivers at disproportionately high rates, and according to the LA Times, has more frequently filled out cards for Black and Latino residents they stopped.
Meanwhile, more than half of the civilians stopped by metro officers and documented in the cards were not arrested or cited, the Times reported. The fact that a department under scrutiny for racial profiling was also engaged in broad scale social media account collection is troubling, said Levinson-Waldman.
Furthermore, when police obtain social media usernames it opens the door for officers to monitor an individual’s connections and “friends” online, creating additional privacy concerns. “It allows for a huge expansion of network surveillance,” said Levinson-Waldman, noting how police and prosecutors have previously used Facebook photos and “likes” to make dubious or false allegations of criminal gang activity.
Hamid Khan of the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition noted that the LAPD also shares data with federal law enforcement agencies through “fusion centers”, and has previously used “predictive policing” technologies that rely on data collected by officers in the field and which can criminalize communities of color.
“This is like stop and frisk,” he said, of the use of field interview cards. “And this is happening with the clear goal of surveillance.” The LAPD, he noted, has allowed officers to pose undercover to investigate groups, meaning officers can create fake social media accounts to infiltrate groups.
Dr Melina Abdullah, co-founder of Black Lives Matter LA, said she had long suspected the LAPD conducted “targeted tracking” of specific groups or individual accounts, but was surprised to learn of the default collection of this information in everyday encounters. She fears this could be part of “a massive surveillance operation”.
The copies of the cards obtained by the Brennan Center also revealed that police are instructed to ask civilians for their social security numbers and are advised to tell interviewees that “it must be provided” under federal law. Kathleen Kim, a Loyola law professor and immigrants’ rights expert, who previously served on the LA police commission, said she was not aware of any law requiring individuals to disclose social security numbers to local police.
And she said she was shocked to learn about the social security section on the cards, noting that it was “so antithetical to the department’s own policies” and clearly violated the spirit of sanctuary laws, which are supposed to prevent officers from asking civilians their immigration status. The LAPD had previously taken steps to ensure it was not requesting place of birth information to improve trust with undocumented communities, she said.
The LAPD told the Guardian on Tuesday that the field interview card policy was “being updated”, but declined to provide further details.
Monitoring Black Lives Matter LA
The revelations of broad social media data collection also raised concerns about how police monitor activists.
The Brennan Center obtained LAPD documents related to Geofeedia, a private social media monitoring firm that partners with law enforcement and has previously marketed itself as a tool to monitor BLM protests.
One internal document, which is undated but appeared to be several years old, listed the “keywords” and hashtags that the LAPD appeared to be monitoring through Geofeedia – and they were almost exclusively related to Black Lives Matter and similar leftist protests. It included #BLMLA, #SayHerName, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, #fuckdonaldtrump and the names of people killed by LA police that prompted major protests.
The list did not include any hashtags for rightwing demonstrations and far-right movements, which have grown increasingly violent in recent years in the region.
The context in which these search terms were used is unclear from the records provided, and the LAPD did not respond to questions. The city attorney’s office said the LAPD stopped using Geofeedia around 2017 and that the agency did not have a current list of keywords for social media monitoring.
Abdullah, who helped organize around many of the hashtags the LAPD was monitoring, noted that BLM’s actions were non-violent: “They’re following Black protesters who are organizing to stop violence and saying, ‘Stop killing us’ … And are they turning a blind eye to those who are actually violent: the white supremacist organizations that are growing in number?”
In a 2016 memo to LAPD included in the records, another social media tracking company, Dataminr, listed under “success stories” its tracking of a BLMLA protest outside a jail, saying the firm “uncovered the first images of people at the protest”, as well as its tracking of a protest featuring “a giant blowup statue of Trump”. The local news site, LA Taco, reported last week that LAPD had used Dataminr to monitor last year’s BLM protests for George Floyd.
Jacinta González, an organizer with advocacy group, Mijente, said the LAPD records appeared to fit a pattern of how police in America respond to protest organizations: “There is a long history of law enforcement using surveillance, whether in-person or through digital technologies to attack Black and Latino movements fighting for racial justice.”
LAPD’s new tech: ‘address threats before they occur’
The Brennan Center’s records further revealed the LAPD is now seeking to use technology from a new company, Media Sonar, which also tracks social media for police. In the 2021 budget, the LAPD allotted $73,000 to purchase Media Sonar software to help the department “address a potential threat or incident before its occurrence”.
The extent of the LAPD’s Media Sonar use is unclear, but the company’s communications with the LAPD have raised questions. In one message, the firm said its services can be used to “stay on-top of drug/gang/weapon slang keywords and hashtags”. Levinson-Waldman said she feared the company or police would misinterpret “slang” or lack proper context on local groups and language, and she noted research showing that online threats made by gang-affiliated youth largely don’t escalate to violence.
Media Sonar also told the LAPD it offers “pre-built keyword groups” to “help jumpstart implementation” of threat models, and helps police “cast a wide net”. The firm also said it could provide a “full digital snapshot of an individual’s online presence including all related personas and connections”.
The messages from Media Sonar suggested that the department needed significant safeguards to ensure that keywords didn’t disparately target marginalized communities and checks to ensure the data was accurate, Levinson-Waldman said.
Records show that the LAPD has requested federal funding for Media Sonar for “terrorism prevention”, but some advocates are concerned it would be used for protests. In March, a city council report analyzing the LAPD’s response to BLM protests recommended the department purchase software to analyze social media content.
Media Sonar did not respond to inquiries about its relationship with the LAPD. The LAPD did not respond to requests for comment about Media Sonar.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. (photo: David Williams/New York Magazine)
"He speaks from such a place of deep ignorance ... and it's not just ignorance, it's ignorance that's hurting people across this country," the New York Democrat told CNN's Anderson Cooper on "AC360."
Her comments came in response to Abbott's pointed defense of the controversial Texas law that bars abortions as early as six weeks into pregnancy, which is one of the strictest in the nation and prohibits abortion before many people know they are pregnant. Under the Texas law, abortion is prohibited when a fetal heartbeat is detected, and there is no exception for rape or incest -- although there is an exemption for "medical emergencies."
Asked about the law's lack of exception for rape or incest earlier Tuesday, Abbott defended the six-week period wherein abortions are still permitted and vowed to work to "eliminate all rapists from the streets of Texas."
Ocasio-Cortez called the governor's comments a "disgusting" defense of a law centered on "controlling people who are not cisgender men."
"I'm sorry we have to break down Biology 101 on national television, but in case no one has informed him before in his life, six weeks pregnant means two weeks late for your period. And two weeks late on your period for any person -- any person with a menstrual cycle -- can happen if you're stressed, if your diet changes or for really no reason at all. So you don't have six weeks," she said.
Addressing the governor's goal to "eliminate rape," the New York congresswoman argued that "these aren't just predators that are walking around the streets at night."
"They are people's uncles, they are teachers, they are family friends, and when something like that happens, it takes a very long time, first of all, for any victim to come forward. And second of all, when a victim comes forward, they don't necessarily want to bring their case into the carceral system. They don't want to re-traumatize themselves by going to court. They don't necessarily all want to report a family friend to a police precinct, let alone in the immediate aftermath of the trauma of a sexual assault," she told Cooper.
Since the law went into effect, supporters of abortion rights in Texas have proceeded with a three-pronged approach, starting with an attempt to get women the medical attention they need or the financial resources to travel across state lines.
In addition, clinics are turning to state courts to block as many civil lawsuits as possible that they hope could ultimately land at the Texas Supreme Court. Finally, they've asked the Biden administration to think broadly about ways to use the muscle of the federal government to protect a woman's constitutional right to abortion.
US marines and Afghan commandos stand together in 2017 at Shorab Military Camp in Helmand province. American ground troops are out of Afghanistan, but war from the air may go on. (photo: Wakil Kohsar/AFP/Getty Images)
In the summer of 2019, Biden delivered a speech laying out the blueprint for his foreign policy agenda. He argued that it was "past time to end the forever wars, which have cost us untold blood and treasure."
It's a position he took again and again — in the pages of Foreign Affairs magazine, in his first official address to Congress, and even in his remarks last week on the withdrawal of U.S. ground troops, marking the official end of the 20-year mission in Afghanistan.
But critics — and even some Biden allies — question whether the "forever wars" are truly over. The president may have shrunk the wars, they say, but he has not ended them, nor are they confident he can without the backing of Congress and the public.
"The use of military force, the support of autocratic regimes, the maintenance of a facility at [Guantanamo Bay] — these are all still aspects of the forever war that are a backdrop of what America is in the world," said Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser under former President Barack Obama. "And until we dismantle at least aspects of that infrastructure, we can't say that we brought a forever war to a close."
Biden wants to refocus U.S. foreign policy
When Biden came into office, he was trying to reorient U.S. foreign policy — scaling down the focus on global terrorism and expanding the focus on China, Russia and cybersecurity threats.
In addition to pulling ground troops out of Afghanistan, U.S. drone strikes were at an all-time low for the first six months of Biden's administration, as Foreign Policy magazine reported in July. Biden's National Security Council has been working on an interagency review of counterterrorism policy, which includes the use of drones.
A senior administration official said the president established "interim guidance" on the use of military force to ensure he had full visibility into any potential action while the review was underway, but no final decisions have been made about new counterterrorism policies. The New York Times has reported that the Biden playbook could be a hybrid of drone policies administered under Obama and former President Donald Trump.
Experts say despite Biden's original foreign policy aims, the resurrection of the Taliban, the chaos in Afghanistan and the possibility of a failed state that could become a breeding ground for terrorists could complicate his ambitions to truly end the wars.
The United States carried out strikes this summer in Iraq, Syria and Somalia. Late last month, it also struck targets connected to an alleged ISIS affiliate in Afghanistan as the U.S. was withdrawing from the country.
The U.S. air war stretches over the horizon
"We will maintain the fight against terrorism in Afghanistan and other countries," the president said last week. "We just don't need to fight a ground war to do it. We have what's called 'over the horizon' capabilities."
He was referring to drone and missile strikes. Even as vice president, Biden insisted that counterterrorism efforts from the air were more effective than protracted ground warfare.
But experts say that means the war in Afghanistan is morphing — not actually ending.
"Under no definition of warfare would the end of ground troops be called the end of war," said Seth Jones, who previously advised U.S. special operations in Afghanistan and now works with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "If the U.S. is prosecuting a lethal campaign against terrorists [who are] on the ground, that's an act of war."
Biden's allies scoff at criticism, suggesting it's a matter of semantics, and insist he's taken a decisive step his predecessors wouldn't.
Vali Nasr, a senior adviser to former U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke between 2009 and 2011, said Biden's words are a sign that he's recalibrating the U.S. mission.
"I think the significance of what President Biden said is not so much that he literally is going to withdraw from every single theater of military operation all at once and will not go back in again," said Nasr. "It just means that the United States will not be thinking about a military presence as a first option in every single international situation."
And, he said, Biden understands that the era of U.S. nation building is over.
"In the end, we destroyed al-Qaida not because we tried to build Kabul or Iraq into a shining city on the hill," Nasr said. "We destroyed al-Qaida by hounding them individually with drones and special forces and eliminating them."
The widespread use of drones and the human cost on the ground from airstrikes have been contentious issues.
The British-based watchdog group Airwars estimates that at least 22,000 civilians have been killed in U.S. strikes over the past 20 years.
The U.S. government has no comparable publicly available total from the past two decades. In the past few years, the Pentagon began issuing annual reports about civilians, and those annual death toll numbers are significantly less than NGO estimates. The U.S. government says the discrepancy is because it has access to confidential information. Skeptics say there's no clear information because some of these strikes are covertly carried out by the CIA, and so the government won't publicly admit they exist.
Earlier this summer, the ACLU joined with more than 100 other groups to call on the Biden administration to end "the unlawful program of lethal strikes outside any recognized battlefield."
"Airstrikes, including through the use of drones, that take place outside of recognized armed conflict — that is a centerpiece, a hallmark of the forever wars," said Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU's National Security Project.
Congress and the public have a say
Critics of the so-called forever wars say the only way to end them is not by focusing solely on specific policies, but also the legal framework, principally the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force that, they say, has allowed for open-ended warfare.
For the past two decades, the basis for Republican and Democratic presidents alike to carry out military operations has been the war authorization passed by Congress in the frenzied days after the 9/11 attacks.
"This was a 60-word authorization that was a blank check," said Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., who at the time was the only member of Congress to vote against the 2001 war authorization. "It just said the president is authorized to use force in perpetuity, forever, against any nation, organization, individual, he or she deemed connected to 9/11."
Lee is working to repeal the 2001 AUMF, as well as the one passed in 2002 to authorize the U.S. invasion of Iraq the following year. The White House has said it supports narrowing war authorizations but hasn't been explicit about the 2001 authorization and how it should be rewritten.
Obama's deputy national security adviser Rhodes says dealing with outdated war powers is an important first step, but he thinks it will be much harder to completely end the wars.
"The reality is this is going to be a long process of essentially unwinding a series of wars and authorities, and I would argue excesses, that date all the way back to those early months after 9/11 that have shaped American foreign policy," he said. "I don't even think a president alone could end the forever war. It would take Congress. It would take a shift in prioritization from the American public."
Perhaps that opening is coming.
An NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll released last week found that a slight majority of Americans now believe domestic terrorism is a greater threat to the United States than global terrorism, a marked shift from the fears in the country immediately after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy's name was included in a broad request the select panel sent to social media platforms and telecommunications companies. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
The letters were notable for a couple reasons. One was that the signatories included a murderer’s row of fringe figures in the House GOP — Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.), Louie Gohmert (Tex.), Paul A. Gosar (Ariz.), Mo Brooks (Ala.), etc. — with almost nobody from the mainstream of the party joining in, save for Republican Study Committee Chairman Jim Banks (Ind.). The second was that the letter to Yahoo was incorrectly addressed to a former CEO who left the company in 2017, Marissa Mayer.
The letters were, in many ways, emblematic of the GOP’s increasingly pitched and slapdash efforts to prevent the committee from gaining information about the historic attack on the U.S. Capitol.
While the letters didn’t include the signatures of more-established Republicans, they did follow similar comments from the most senior House Republican, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.). McCarthy last week threatened tech companies that complied with the subpoenas with retribution if Republican retake the House.
“If these companies comply with the [Democratic] order to turn over private information, they are in violation of federal law and subject to losing their ability to operate in the United States,” McCarthy said. “If companies still choose to violate federal law, a Republican majority will not forget and will stand with Americans to hold them fully accountable under the law.”
Except it’s not at all clear what McCarthy is even talking about when it comes to what law would be violated, nor has his office specified. PolitiFact cited experts who said there is “no such law barring companies from turning over information sought through a proper subpoena or warrant.”
If one really wanted to send a “do not comply” threat, it would seem helpful to detail exactly what leverage you have. Otherwise it risks looking like a political — rather than legal — threat born of desperation. And while McCarthy didn’t sign the letter, it’s pretty clear these members were following his lead.
Beyond subpoenas, there is the matter of people who know important information simply being forthright about it. And on this count, McCarthy and others have also been far less than helpful.
McCarthy is one of several prominent Republicans who have key knowledge of Jan. 6 and what President Donald Trump said and did — and when. He would also seem to have been concerned about Trump’s response, given that he pleaded with Trump to call off the dogs in the middle of the riot.
But despite initially blaming Trump for not doing so quickly enough and even floating a historic censure resolution against Trump, McCarthy later backed off and actually suggested Trump had heeded his calls. McCarthy also, despite the stakes of the matter, declined to further detail his talks with Trump — despite Trump being someone who, again, he said bore blame for that day.
The story has been similar with another prominent Republican wrapped up in the matter who spoke with Trump that day. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) has offered some uncharacteristically awkward responses when questioned about those conversations.
At one point a month ago, he said he couldn’t recall whether he spoke with Trump before, during or after the riot. As I noted at the time, the content of the call would probably help Jordan place it. And sure enough, Politico reported a week ago that Jordan and Gaetz, like McCarthy, pleaded with Trump during the riot to get his supporters to back off. People forget stuff, and Jordan has said he talks with Trump often, but it would seem pretty difficult to forget the time you asked the president to rein in allies who were overrunning the U.S. Capitol.
A final key element of the effort to hamstring the committee involves other punitive measures — these ones against Republicans who are serving on the committee. Greene and Gaetz have re-upped an effort on behalf of many of those who signed the Mayer letter to get Reps. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) kicked out of the House GOP conference. The supposed reason: They are acting effectively as “spies for the Democrats” in conference meetings.
The question is what are they supposedly spying upon? High-profile Republicans including McCarthy and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) have blamed Trump for both his actions before and his response to the riots.
There is certainly a strategic reasons to not want Cheney and Kinzinger around, especially if you view the investigation as a partisan witch hunt, as GOP leaders contend it is.
But these are also people who have stood by the party for years before now, and whose views of the situation lined up with many higher-ups in the party, at least before it reverted to a batten-down-the-hatches, defend-the-party mentality. It also suggests that there is indeed something interesting and relevant to be “spied” upon.
It’s possible that Republicans genuinely don’t see this investigation as fair, and are responding accordingly. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) rejected both Banks and Jordan as McCarthy’s selections for the committee. This prompted McCarthy to pull all of his appointees and leave Cheney and Kinzinger as the only Republicans on the committee.
But since then, we’ve seen both Banks and Jordan engage in the kind of conduct that would again seem to invite suspicions that they were picked more to brawl than to find the truth. Jordan’s status as a key witness, in particular, suggests he wouldn’t have been the most ideal committee member.
And even before that, we saw Republicans reinforce over and over again that their true objection to the efforts to investigate Jan. 6 was more that they were worried about how it would hurt them politically than anything else.
What we’re seeing today — including weird legal threats against subpoenas and a lack of disclosure of foundational events — certainly reinforces that.
Activists supporting the decriminalization of abortion in Mexico march in Guadalajara, Mexico, on September 28, 2019. Mexico's Supreme Court has ruled that it is unconstitutional to punish abortion. (photo: Ulises Ruiz/AFP/Getty Images)
A child draws with chalk in the Bronx borough of New York City in August 2021. (photo: David Dee Delgado/Getty Images)
In the face of environmental racism, sustainability isn’t about what you buy.
As I grew older and learned that the issues were more complicated than that, I felt ashamed. There were more “rules” than I thought, and it seemed like everything I had been doing was wasteful. I grew up with a large box of straws in the back of my kitchen cupboard, which I later learned could harm sea turtles.
The juice pouches I was fond of during lunch were actually not recyclable, nor were the plastic bags we received at the grocery store. (Those have to be dropped off back at the store and can’t be put in your curbside bin.) And all the times we had a special pizza night? Turns out the pizza boxes soaked in grease can’t be recycled, either. There was just so much more I didn’t know: the caps on water bottles, plastic utensils, bubble wrap, packing peanuts — all things that could not be recycled or had very specific rules on how to do so.
Fast-forward to adulthood: Now a trip to the store makes me anxious, as I continue to search for products in my budget that have less waste and contain natural ingredients. I pick up one item to be met with a laundry list of unintelligible words on the back, and another to learn that the company tests on animals (which leads me to realize, upon further research, that cruelty-free and vegan are not synonymous).
After finally finding one that meets my criteria, I see the packaging is made of thick plastic, something I can’t imagine is recyclable. I pick up another product to find it meets all the standards but is extremely overpriced, and I know there’s no way a moisturizer should cost that much. I start to sweat as I notice that I’ve been in the skin care aisle for more than 20 minutes, with my husband jokingly texting me from the car asking me if I’m still alive.
In reality, my empathy began to feel stressful. But the problem wasn’t me. Having a conversation about sustainability is so nuanced for these exact reasons: How are we expected to do the best for both ourselves and the environment when we are facing unforeseen factors that don’t allow us to?
In the current conversation about sustainability, the focus has fallen on our personal responsibility to help the environment. This could look like anything from buying the right products to recycling, reusing, and reducing. But for neighborhoods where recycling centers aren’t accessible and “sustainable” products are uncommon, the overarching idea of the sustainability movement changes drastically. As I delved into what sustainability looked like in neighborhoods similar to my hometown, I found that a different and urgent story began to unfold.
Let’s talk a little about recycling: How do different communities across America handle this? It’s been shown that different communities have different recycling habits. For example, suburban communities reportedly recycle at much higher rates than urban communities. On the other hand, rural communities are more likely to say they don’t recycle at all. The biggest hurdle appears to be access to recycling centers in general. A 2018 survey from the Recycling Partnership found that more than half of Americans — specifically young and low-income people — say it’s not that they don’t want to recycle, but that they feel they do not have proper access to recycling programs.
There’s a barrier to entry to buying the “right” products, too, especially due to greenwashing. This term, coined in 1986 by environmentalist Jay Westerveld, describes when a company spends more time and money to market itself as eco-friendly than it does actually working to create a lasting impact to help the environment. This means everything from oil companies launching “awareness” campaigns to recycling programs that charge consumers an arm and a leg for questionably effective waste disposal. So buying sustainable products means one not only has to sift through all that greenwashing but also pay a higher price for recyclable items.
Despite the lack of institutional support and corporate confusion and expense, local groups all over the country are working to protect the environment. In low-income and underserved communities, activists say it’s crucial that we not only work to preserve the land but also educate the people who live there on how they can work to be sustainable in an accessible way. In these communities, though, the urgency is less to do with personal consumption than with the structural factors that cause daily harm to the people who live there — a problem known as environmental racism.
This key term was coined in 1982 by African American civil rights leader Benjamin Chavis. It’s described as the way communities, primarily inhabited by people of color and groups with lower socioeconomic status, are faced with various factors that affect their quality of life, such as proximity to toxic waste facilities and garbage dumps, environmental pollution, etc. Chavis also described environmental racism as discrimination within environmental policymaking, as well as the exclusion of people of color in the ecology movements.
The Bronx, with its residents affected by this vicious cycle, is both one of the most racially diverse areas in New York City and one of the poorest congressional districts in the United States. With some of the worst pollution levels in the US, the South Bronx has been nicknamed “Asthma Alley.” In fact, Bronx residents require hospitalization for asthma at five times the national average and at rates 21 times higher than other New York City neighborhoods.
I spoke with Sustainable South Bronx, also known as SSBx, an organization that promotes environmental justice in an area that carries an environmental burden for the rest of the city. SSBx was founded in 2001 by Majora Carter, who wanted to campaign for parks and green development in the South Bronx and provide New Yorkers facing significant barriers to employment with job training for green-collar careers.
Eliana Greenwald, development and communications coordinator at the HOPE Program (which has partnered with SSBx since 2015), said, “Our clients, many of whom were born and raised in the South Bronx, have had firsthand experiences with environmental injustices, including a lack of access to green space, living in food deserts, high rates of asthma and related diseases resulting from pollution, noise pollution from trucking, transportation and zoning inequities, and so much more.”
Greenwald said that every weekday, 15,000 trucks pass through the Hunts Point neighborhood of the Bronx, producing toxic air pollution on their way to and from the Hunts Point Market, one of the world’s largest food distribution centers. These diesel emissions directly affect the residents of the community. In addition, Greenwald said, facilities in the South Bronx also handle 100 percent of the waste produced in the Bronx and at least 23 percent of the city’s commercial waste.
Another community group focusing on making these changes is the North Bronx Collective, which is composed of Black and brown women and nonbinary people who work to protect and tend to the land within the Bronx community. I spoke with Alicia Grullon, an organizer with the collective and a lifelong resident of New York City.
Grullon stressed that issues like hunger and mental health concerns as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic are not new to Black and brown communities: “Our communities have lived through redlining, chronic unemployment, and the trauma of being displaced due to rising rents and gentrification,” Grullon said. “Our work feeding people was urgent, and so was the need to provide long-term mental health relief. We wanted to provide hope to combat decades, if not centuries, of persistent systemic racism and violence impacting the mental health of residents in a largely working-class area overshadowed by the more affluent Riverdale.”
Within the conversation of environmental justice, it’s important to make space for Black and Indigenous voices and those of people of color, as much of the policymaking affects their communities. It’s easy for folks who aren’t affected by these problems to turn a blind eye and make decisions motivated by their own economic benefit rather than community care.
In comparison, Sustainable South Bronx helps to bring options to locals so they can take control of what’s happening in their communities. Greenwald mentioned that SSBx currently runs a program called NYC CoolRoofs, which pays participants to coat rooftops in a reflective material that decreases buildings’ energy consumption and alleviates the “urban heat island” effect. In 2021, SSBx received a grant from the Environmental Protection Agency to expand the programs’ services to industrial buildings in its home neighborhood of Hunts Point, one that faces overwhelming environmental burdens. Through its programming, SSBx is not only working to inform the people of the community but as Greenwald explains, also offering a “long-term environmental justice solution.”
At the North Bronx Collective, the team works within the food justice movement as well as on land rehabilitation. During Covid-19, they focused on providing mutual aid to the community in the form of handing out gift cards to local supermarkets and offering free meals and masks to anyone who needed them. Although this might not be something that people would typically associate with environmental justice, food access, in reality, is foundational to any kind of justice.
More recently, the collective has been focused on rehabilitating Tibbett’s Tail, a city park located near Bailey Playground in the Bronx. During the pandemic, the area became a dumping ground for trash and litter, and got overgrown with weeds, so members of the collective took the initiative, got their own tools, and went right to work. Grullon said that as the area was cleared out, she noticed that people were using it for respite and enjoying this once-forgotten space.
The North Bronx Collective’s work focuses not only on serving the current residents of the community but also on taking long-term actions that will benefit them in the future, such as educational programming on topics like healthy eating, composting, and growing medicinal plants. Grullon understands the sacredness of green space and how it can be extremely healing for people. “Green space is life,” she says, “and working BIPOC people on the front lines of the climate change crisis in the city have been living with pollution and [the] ramifications of this on their bodies for too long.”
Environmental racism is an epidemic in the United States, and does not begin or end with the obstacles faced by those in the Bronx. From state to state, underserved and low-income communities are suffering the consequences of both poor policymaking and a lack of care for the land and the residents who reside on it. According to Insider, an estimated 70 percent of contaminated waste sites are located in low-income communities, and more than 2 million Americans live within a mile of sites that are susceptible to flooding — the majority of which are found in Black and brown communities.
The environmental justice movement was actually pioneered by Black, Indigenous, and people of color. The beginnings of this movement can be traced to Warren County, North Carolina, a primarily poor, Black area where, in 1982, the state government decided to dump 6,000 trucks of soil laced with toxic chemicals into a newly built hazardous waste landfill.
The people of Warren County immediately began to protest but unfortunately lost the battle; however, they drew so much attention to the cause that it encouraged others to fight for their land as well. One of the most prevalent examples of environmental racism is the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. In 2014, the city of Flint changed its water source to the Flint River in an attempt to save money, but the new water supply was incorrectly treated and led to poisoned water being pumped through the city’s pipes. As of 2017, it was reported that between 6,000 and 12,000 children were exposed to lead-contaminated drinking water, at least 12 people died, and more than 80 were made sick with Legionnaires’ disease.
In Louisiana lies an 85-mile-long stretch nicknamed “Cancer Alley” due to its proximity to oil refineries and petrochemical plants. The residents of this area are 50 times more likely to develop cancer than the average American, and the population is predominantly Black. In Pahokee, Florida, sugar cane farmers set fire to the fields, leaving just the cane, in order to reduce transportation costs as they ship the cane without any surrounding vegetation. This results in large clouds of black smoke, also known as “black snow,” that pollute the air.
In 2018, it was discovered that a creek in Cheraw, South Carolina, was used as a dumping ground for cancer-causing PCBs up until the 1970s. The Harrisburg/Manchester neighborhood of Houston, Texas, although known as an energy capital, is surrounded by refineries, chemical plants, sewage treatment facilities, and hazardous waste sites. In Detroit, Michigan, which has the biggest population of Black people in the US, the sky is so polluted that it has an orange hue, and the air is filled with so many toxic chemicals it can cause acid rain.
The instances of environmental injustice across the country are plentiful, and one can see it’s not as easy as “reduce, reuse, recycle.” Often it’s external factors, and those in power, making the decisions that affect our land. But just because we are met with these hardships doesn’t mean we don’t have a voice.
As a person of color, it’s inspiring to see not only people from my hometown but folks who look like me, who are striving to make a difference. For those who don’t have the resources, who may not have the knowledge or read the trendy think pieces — that is who we are trying to help. It’s never too late to make a change or help others. As Alicia Grullon told me, “We’re part of the earth, and there’s power in knowing that. When we take care of the earth, we take care of each other.”
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