‘I can’t breathe’: Climate activist Leah Thomas on how the pandemic, systemic racism and environmental racism are affecting Black communities — Assembly

After coining the term “intersectional environmentalism,” Leah is building an inclusive climate movement.

In 2014, Leah Thomas was on summer break in her hometown of Florissant, Missouri when a police officer fatally shot Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager, in a nearby St. Louis suburb. Still reeling from the effects of the tragedy, Leah returned for her fall semester at Chapman University and began to consider how her identity as a Black young woman and her environmental science degree connected.

“I was thinking about how my identity and my Blackness were so enmeshed in my studies even though it wasn’t often discussed. I feel like in a lot of my classes we would learn that a lot of environmental injustices have more harmful effects on Black and Brown communities, but then they'd brush over it and go back to talking about saving the salmon,” Leah shares. “I was so traumatized from everything that had happened, so I began thinking that this can’t be a coincidence and that the same systems of oppression are at play in both environmental and racial justice spheres.”

Realising the connections between environmental and racial justice, Leah coined the term “intersectional environmentalism” to describe the ways in which they overlap. Leah based the term’s framework on legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw’s term “intersectional feminism,” which refers to how different social identities (such as race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, ability, physical appearance and class) overlap with gender, causing many forms of oppression to be active at the same time. In the same way, intersectional environmentalism identifies and amplifies the connection between the injustices marginalised communities and the Earth experience.

With the help of a few friends, Leah founded the platform Intersectional Environmentalist to work towards both climate and racial justice without erasing the contributions and perspectives of minority groups. Recently, the team launched the Intersectional Environmentalist Council, a group of environmental and sustainability activists from diverse backgrounds to help provide accurate and accountable information on issues of climate justice and how it affects people from different communities. The group works to amplify the often-overlooked contributions of people of colour in the environmentalist movement and hold organisations accountable to racial justice in the fight for climate justice.

Though Leah is looking forward to seeing what’s next for intersectional environmentalism, she says that she is most “excited about the council and what it can be.” It was an honour to speak with her and I look forward to reading more about the movement in the future.

Omolara Uthman (OU): In your article on The Good Trade, you mention that the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in your hometown prompted you to connect issues of racial justice to your studies as an environmental science major. You learned that communities of colour have had the most exposure to poor air quality and environmental conditions. Can you talk about the duality of the phrase, “I can’t breathe,” and how these systems of oppression connect?

Leah Thomas (LT): In regard to “I can’t breathe,” I think right now there’s kind of a triple meaning to the statement that’s disproportionately impacting Black and Brown communities. First, we’re in a pandemic that attacks the respiratory system making it hard to breathe, [and a virus] which disproportionately impacts Black and Brown people. Then when you think about climate change and how Black and Brown communities are also experiencing respiratory illnesses and asthma at higher rates because they’re placed in environments that have poor air quality which makes it hard to breathe. When you add on top of that systematic racism and the literal last phrases of so many Black men and women who are pleading with police or random people, like George Zimmerman was, to not take their lives and let them breathe, there’s three parts to the “I can’t breathe” statement. There are more things that are making it hard for Black people to just exist in the world and I find that really troubling.

OU: Why do you think that racial justice should be a fundamental part of the fight for climate justice?

LT: I feel that racial justice and climate justice are one and the same. I often say it would be very hard to make an argument that the environmentalism that we have right now is not inherently racist. If it were not racist, then why do BIPOC [an acronym that stands for “Black, Indigenous and people of colour”] experience all … environmental injustices the most: poor air quality, poor water quality, proximity to toxic waste sites, the list goes on and on and on. So if the environmentalism we have today [was] not racist, then Black and Brown people or BIPOC would not be always disproportionately impacted. In order to remedy that I think environmentalists should be anti-racist because the environmentalism that we have now that has been thought of as being “progressive” has only been progressive for one group of people and that’s not fair.

“... the environmentalism that we have now that has been thought of as being ‘progressive’ has only been progressive for one group of people.”

— Leah Thomas

OU: Can you tell us about the term you helped coin, “intersectional environmentalism?”

LT: In regard to “intersectional environmentalism,” I got the term from Kimberlé Crenshaw, and I try to credit her as much as possible because I want people to know that there could be no intersectional environmentalism if there were no intersectional feminism.

I realized that intersectionality and that framework that Kimberlé Crenshaw created could be applied to more than just feminism. When she created it in the '80s she was a law student at the time and was more specifically focused on being a Black woman and people not addressing the ways that class, wealth, race, culture and religion can impact the way one experiences prejudice. I just thought, you know, if my feminism is intersectional, then my environmentalism should be intersectional *bada bamb* [laughs].

I didn’t think that was a revolutionary thing to say. My Good Trade article actually came out over a year ago, but when the Environmentalists for Black Lives Matter graphic came out, I just decided to define intersectional environmentalism in that post because I wanted people to see the type of environmentalism that I practice and extend an olive branch towards the environmental community to join the environmentalism a lot of BIPOC are practicing. I didn’t expect it to be adopted into language, but as a communications professional and a writer that’s my biggest dream come true. To have a word that people are using.

OU: Aside from Kimberlé Crenshaw’s article, what other texts and lectures were most influential to you when you came up with the term?

LT: There’s a book that I really love, it’s a collection of poems called “Black Nature,” and there’s about 400 pages of poetry from African Americans for over the last 100 years basically talking about their relationship with nature — some of it very positive, other parts of it very negative, but it helped me to see that this is in my ancestry and this is my relationship to nature. I really love “Black Nature” and I think it’s really crucial and it helped me just figure out my place in the world around me.

Also, Teresa Baker, a part of the Intersectional Environmentalist Council, which we just launched today [this interview took place in July], deserves all the credit. She’s this incredible Black woman who started the Outdoor CEO Pledge to basically demand that outdoor companies get on board with diversity, justice and inclusion. She’s been really influential to me and to have her on the council is just so incredible. I think those are two of the most influential things when thinking about intersectionality and the environment.

OU: You’ve mentioned that oftentimes, you are the only Black person in your meetings for environmental justice. Tell me about what it’s like to be the only one doing this work and making sure Black voices are being heard.

LT: It can be frustrating. There's so much tone policing that’s going on and I feel like I have to do these mental olympics just to explain basic things about why Black people should be protected. Being the only one at times it feels like a long game for me, because I know that fragility is there, especially in progressive circles, so I just have to slowly plant the seed until people get it.

For example, I did a press trip with Patagonia and I invited my co-workers to get soul food in Harlem. I was with my two White male co-workers who came with us for brunch. You know I’m in California there’s not a lot of soul food so I’m really excited, but they came and one of them told me, “This is the only time where I’ve been in a space where I’m the minority essentially.” And at first they were kind of like looking around the restaurant, and it was kind of funny to me. But I hope they look back and see like, “Oh, I see what she was trying to do.”

But it can be really frustrating and most of the time it is a long game when it comes to progressive people; just slowly planting seeds. There’s a lot of frustration and a lot of need for community, which is why I created the Intersectional Environmentalist Council, because now more than ever I wanted people to see that they have community. Even if it’s not at their school or in their neighborhood or in their town, I want people to know that it doesn’t matter where they are, we have this virtual community that is here for them and that will advocate on their behalf and hold organizations accountable. Because that’s everything I wanted when I was working in those spaces. Hopefully if that community isn't there yet for a lot of people like me who are the only Black person or person of color in an organization that they can find community in the platform that I and so many BIPOC have created.

“You can’t have climate justice without racial justice, and if you’re ignoring it then you’re complicit.”

— Leah Thomas

OU: What do you think the environmental community can do in order to better support Black and Brown communities, the people who face the most environmental injustices?

LT: One thing is to avoid saviorism, I would say. I think well-intentioned progressive people when they do find out about racism, sometimes there’s the fragility and then the overcompensation and that goes into saviorism and where they are centering themselves. It’s like they will sometimes center themselves in the conversation about Black people … like going on a trip somewhere and posting pictures with Black and Brown children. An actionable step against [centering themselves in the conversation] is for people to amplify the voices of the people who are already doing the work because they are there. In every community, there are several communities that are like Flint, where the same thing is going on with water quality, and there are people advocating to get that message out, and I feel like oftentimes people are like, “Oh my gosh, they need a savior to advocate on their behalf.” But no, the best way to use privilege is to amplify their message and if people aren’t listening to those leaders, find a way to amplify their message and avoid saviorism. It should be everybody’s fight, but make sure to amplify the voices that exist already and avoid saviorism.

OU: What does it mean to be an “eco-communicator”?

LT: One of the coolest things about language, which we were talking about earlier on being a communications person is that I can just make stuff up! I can just make words up. I made that one up [laughs] but I was trying to describe what it is that I do because I have a background in environmental science and I’m a writer and a communicator, so an “eco-communicator” is just someone who communicates issues about the environment.

OU: Tell me about the creation of the Intersectional Environmentalist website. What do you want to achieve through this new platform?

LT: It’s actually a really funny story. The “Environmentalists for Black Lives Matter” post, which also contained the definition for intersectional environmentalism and the Intersectional Environmentalist Pledge, kind of went viral and had a little moment online. So my dad, who is super traditional was like, “Leah, I bought all these domain names for you, I don’t know if you’re going to need them, but they’re there if you need them.” And I was like “I’m never going to need them, Dad.” But then a week later I’m on a phone call with some eco-activist friends that happen to be in Texas gathering together to go to a Black Lives Matter protest, and they called me to talk and were like, “Oh my gosh, you’re going viral.” And we were talking about it and we eventually decided to build the website from the ground up in a week.

I was getting so many emails from people asking me for literature and books and documentaries and people to follow and support, so we want the website to just show people intersectionality through different lenses and different topic areas and communities. We want to expand on it a lot and have even more communities, but we’ve launched with either like five or six, and then we have topic leads from each of those backgrounds, and I’m really excited for what is to come.

We also have our Instagram community which was designed to have a lot of shareable content that’s unique to our platform and is about intersectionality. The colors are different or modern so that people will want to share it, and we really love our design committee.

OU: What changes do you want to see in the environmental justice space in regard to racial justice?

LT: It’s not an optional add-on. It’s climate justice. You can’t have climate justice without racial justice, and if you’re ignoring it then you’re complicit.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.