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Black Earth: Resistance, Anti-Racism and the Environment
by Marcus Bernard
Creating Community, Space and Collective Joy
When I was recruited as Project Producer by tiata fahodzi, I was given a brief titled “tiata fahodzi and Watershed’s Climate Change and Racial Justice Project” with a timeline running from March to August 2022. It is now February 2023 and we’re just wrapping up this project because what we discovered was that there could be no rushing this process; what was needed was time and space and room for people to feel and connect.
The original project brief was to engage British African-heritage and Global Majority artists over five months to explore how the creative sector can better tackle the climate emergency and the ways in which it intersects with anti-racist practices. The brief acknowledged that when it came to the climate emergency, systemic racism had historically denied Black and Brown people a platform in the cultural sector. The idea behind the project was to be a first step to bridging the knowledge gap between environmental issues and anti-racism to ensure long-term artist-led change.
The then untitled project (which was eventually called Black Earth: Resistance, Anti-Racism and the Environment) was focused on how the creative sector could respond. It was industry focused rather than people focused, about companies rather than communities. As the project progressed, what became clear is that Black and Brown people had all the knowledge, experience and expertise to guide the sector down a more radical path.
But why should they?
We had already acknowledged that systemic racism had denied people of colour a platform; this denial, this silencing of our voices, became one of the most important guiding influences in how this project developed.
We had to ask ourselves, why should Black and Brown people save the sector when they’ve been denied a voice for so long?
Why should they share their knowledge and experience on the terms set by an industry project?
Why should the anti-racist discussions focus on the cultural sector when the pervasive and violent reaches of racism impact every aspect of our lives?
What we discovered upon creating our first open workshop session is that people of colour had a wealth of knowledge and experience and expertise to share but what was needed more than anything was to sit together and reflect, to find space to breathe, to mourn and laugh, to cry and scream, to find joy, to release rage, to connect.
And so, our project shifted focus. It became one about community, connecting with each other, creating a safe space to share our experiences and our knowledge.
It became a project about joy.
During one of our sessions, we looked to discuss themes of guilt. Guilt had been a recurring notion throughout the project. The idea that we should be doing more, that we’re contributing too much, that we should be putting ourselves into unsafe existing climate movements for the greater good. But as we looked to discuss guilt, we got way laid into a 30 minute conversation about hair. Hair is incredibly important to people of colour but especially to Black people. Our hair plays a part in how we are racialised. When we look at guilt within the climate movement, socialisation is a huge part of that and with socialisation, for Black and Brown people, comes racialisation. But our participants had never been given a safe space to talk about their hair and how that impacts the way they are treated. They possessed all the knowledge to talk about the climate justice movement but never had there been a space where they could relate to each other on the same struggle through the prism of hair texture.
This example made it abundantly clear to me that the most important part of this project could no longer be about what learnings the cultural sector could take. The project had to be about creating a safe space for people of colour to share their experiences.
We took this newfound approach into every aspect of the project. We ran nature walks to allow people of colour to be together in woodlands, connecting in moments of silence, to learn about nature through a decolonial and radically anti-racist lens. We discussed herbal remedies so people could learn about the physical and mental health benefits that can be sourced directly from the land, encouraging people to forge a relationship with nature in ways that may have been neglected in a British countryside that has footprints of centuries of imperialism. We commissioned artists to devise response pieces which tackled these themes, giving them the freedom to be experimental, to create something new, to take risks in a way that is so rarely afforded to young Black artists.
We brought all of these different strands of the project together to create a Green Care Package.
The tiata fahodzi Green Care Package is essentially a mini version of the entire Black Earth: Resistance, Anti-Racism and the Environment project. It contains explainers and backgrounds on climate justice, exercises that you can do with your friends and family to create your own understanding of what climate justice means specifically to you. It gives examples of creative resistance through growing and connecting with nature. There are herbal remedies to soothe your body and your mind, a dreaming pillow to allow your creativity and your joy to soar at night, and seeds to grow and start your own journey connecting with nature.
The ambitious idea behind this package is that we hope, with care and joy at the centre, to empower people to connect with climate justice movements in a way that feels right to them. But always, always, in a way that best takes care of their needs as people in a movement which often doesn’t look after its activists enough.
Ultimately, we hope that the Green Care Package can allow people to create their own community that serves their collective needs while arming them with the knowledge to continue an anti-racist fight for climate justice.
We hope, with care and joy at the centre, to empower people to connect with climate justice movements in a way that feels right to them. But always, always, in a way that best takes care of their needs as people in a movement which often doesn’t look after its activists enough.
Although this project evolved and changed throughout it’s journey, there are still invaluable lessons to be learned by the creative and cultural sectors. The most important learning is that they must create spaces for Black and Brown people to be bold and brave and safe. Space to learn and share and love. They must not continue to deny people their voice, to further marginalise those most impacted by the climate crisis in pursuit of surface level wins. They must redirect their resources, without strings, to communities that need them most and allow them to help shape the conversations, and the solutions, without dictating how they must think, act, and feel. If we are to win in this fight for climate justice, we must come together to challenge the systems that we all move in, to question who they benefit and be willing to tear them down to build something new.