Five - Race, class and green jobs in low-income communities in the US: challenges for community development

Summary

Introduction

On April 14, 2008, over a thousand activists gathered in Memphis, Tennessee to celebrate the life of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr on the fortieth observance of his assassination. Organised by Green For All, an organisation that advocates for green jobs initiatives, the ‘Dream Reborn’ conference brought together environmental, anti-poverty, criminal justice, labour and faith-based activists. Many conference attendees were attracted to the green jobs movement, sharing larger concerns about climate change after Hurricane Katrina struck the Mississippi Gulf Coast in the late summer of 2005.

For activists working in low-income Black communities, Hurricane Katrina had a similar impact on their political orientations as the Three Mile Island crisis had on America's perceptions of nuclear proliferation. That disaster in central Pennsylvania ignited a wave of protests against the nuclear industry in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The protests ushered in new measures regulating nuclear waste disposal, emergency planning and utility price controls (Joppke, 1992–93). Similarly, the Hurricane Katrina disaster helped to cultivate alliances between municipal officials, environmentalists and activists working on racial and economic justice initiatives. It focused attention on how municipalities could advance sustainable development measures that reduced carbon emissions while also addressing poverty and unemployment.

Green jobs programmes that targeted low-income residents, especially Blacks living in chronically distressed communities, are the focus of this chapter. The people affected by such programmes include individuals with histories in the criminal and juvenile justice systems and other marginalised populations such underemployed youth, people living in transitional housing, and low-skilled workers (Holzer et al, 2003; Holzer, 2007; Jones, 2008). These programmes are situated here within the broader arena of community development activism because they entail grassroots-led planning initiatives that prioritise the concerns of communities facing systemic patterns of racial and class marginalisation. The advocates involved in community development activism (and specifically green jobs advocates in this study) used a variety of strategies such as grassroots lobbying, protest and even forming partnerships with urban planners or municipal officials (Shaw, 2009). Some green jobs advocates were previously active in the environmental justice movement, which since the early 1980s has focused attention on the ecological practices of public agencies and pollution-emitting industries that disproportionately harm communities of colour and poor communities (Bullard, 1994; Shepard and Charles-Guzman, 2009; Zimmerman, 2010; Brown, 2011a).