Social Justice and Environmental Justice Is an Easy Blend For Us: You Can’t Have One Without the Other—An Interview With CEEJ

Introduction

During the GC-HARMS (Gulf Coast Health Alliance: Health risks related to the Macondo Spill project), the Reverend James Black and Joi Black-Tate of CEEJ (Center for Environmental & Economic Justice) managed a cohort of community members for this community-based participatory research (CBPR) study’s Project 1 (Community Health Assessment). CEEJ also served as a risk communication hub that organized community risk forums and circulated risk information based on the results of the project’s analysis of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons concentrations in targeted seafood species and human biological samples.

John Sullivan worked within the GC-HARMS Community Outreach & Dissemination Core at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) at Galveston, Texas, and served as liaison to the community hubs and the fishermen’s Citizen Science network during the project. He and Wilma Subra directly assisted the hub coordinators in delivering the project risk message to their communities.

No Social-Economic Justice Without Environmental Justice

INTERVIEWER: OK, my first question is, could you talk about the impacts the Deepwater Horizon (DWH) well disaster had on your community and region?

REV. BLACK: Well, I think the total impact has not yet been determined, you know. But to-date, it had a tremendous impact in terms of health. Though I recognize the potential dangers from the oil spill to aquatic life, I cannot speak enough about how impactful it was on our community’s health, our awareness of health issues, and the health study that was done. We still have people talking about it; how they didn’t even know they had something like high blood pressure. The health study alerted us to personal health issues that we were not aware of. The process was illuminating, that’s a word I would use.

When the DWH spill first happened, we did not trust much of the information that was flowing. Over time, we got a sense of earnestness from the people at GC-HARMS, the UTMB folk we call them. We got a sense of sincerity from them, that they really cared about what was happening and it wasn’t just a fly-by. We had so many groups coming through here doing fly-by nights, but they came and stayed for five years, so to speak.

INTERVIEWER: So you’ve had prior experience with researchers coming in and working with your community in some way, or saying they wanted to, or starting something that was say short-term?

REV. BLACK: Yep. But no one came in with the broad scientific approach that this project did. Some solid scientific work was done, and not just in a lab at a university. They involved our community in it directly, and they used outside people to evaluate the findings. So this approach was new to us. It was big and broad, involved a long timeline, and we believed that, with so many universities involved, it gave the project a sense of validity, you know. Not just a fly-by. And we’ve seen other studies connected with Katrina. We’re a peninsula here, and we had water cover much of the land so we had lots of soil and water testing.

Another good aspect that comes to mind is, scientists that were involved after Katrina were also involved with this oil spill project, you know, so they knew the area some, prior. We felt that we could trust the researchers more, you know. So yes, we have had other involvement with research, but it was not always so good, you know. We were wary at first. At that first meeting I was listening real close to see was this just another scam trying to make some money off a project? But we were very happy with the results.

INTERVIEWER: Well it’s good to hear that you had a good experience with this because community-based participatory research is really the only way we knew to tailor research to the needs of the community. Because the community actually decides what to do with the scientists.

Ok, do you feel that, based on your experience with research prior to this, do you feel like you got a good concept of how the project would be structured, what your place would be within the structure, what you could expect the researchers to provide and what the thrust of their research was going toward? And what you would be expected to provide? Was all of this laid out for you well enough so that you understood what you would be asked to do, and what your goals and objectives would be in the process?

REV. BLACK: (To Joi Black-Tate) Could you answer that?

JOI BLACK TATE: Based on the initial meeting, I would say no. I didn’t have a very clear understanding of what was going to be expected from our organization. As time went on, with other meetings and the process, you know, it slowly became clearer.

REV. BLACK: I agree with Joi. I had an idea because of previous experience, you know, but I wasn’t totally clear about the depth of our involvement. And there was some question about the fish sampling, particularly, because that just didn’t make a whole lot of sense from our perspective—we aren’t a fishing community though we do eat fish, crabs and shrimp. But overall it was clear enough for us to say, yeah, we want to work on this. As we moved forward our role became clearer.

And the positive outcomes, you know, in terms of the separate meetings and all were good. We had some assurance that the project was going to be here. And the health study sold me more than anything else. Everyone else was talking all about fish life, the environment if you will, all of which we’re onboard with, but very few talked about the impacts on people, you know.

INTERVIEWER: Ok. Well that’s the whole idea with CPBR—it’s not a one-time thing. And once you’ve got the experience of doing a project of that type, it makes the next one easier to do. Now this is something you’ll have to think about, maybe, but what drew you personally into the environmental justice (EJ) movement, into working for EJ? What common ground do you feel you share you with other EJ activists and advocates within this network? And in your region generally?

REV. BLACK: To be honest with you, I’ve worked in the civil rights movement since age twelve and was not interested in incorporating anything else into what we were doing already. We were doing social justice issues, had been doing that for a while and we’re still doing it. But what drew us into the EJ movement was totally accidental. Someone from Xavier University in New Orleans started an environmental justice group. A member of that group came to us and wanted to use our network to communicate with people living in public housing. It was a public housing project and the outreach person who made that request was connected with The Deep South Center for Environmental Justice at Xavier University. That’s about it. That’s how we came into EJ—through our background in civil rights and social justice.

INTERVIEWER: What year was that?

REV. BLACK: That was early ’90s I think, you know, the early ’90s, or late ’80s. And we were brought in when the Deep South Center was at Xavier and so we chose to stand with Dr. Beverly Wright on these EJ issues, and eventually with Dr. Robert Bullard, too. That led up to President Clinton signing Executive Order 12898. ^a So we get involved with EJ from that perspective. We found that was a very striking resemblance to the social justice movement. As Dr. Bullard liked to explain, EJ was social justice. He defined the environment, broadly, as where we all work, play, and worship. So it wasn’t something different, it was something more, if you will, to add to our group’s agenda.

We looked around to see all of the other issues that we had not thought much about. The Louisiana Corridor, aka “Cancer Alley,” and realized how racism, social injustice, and lack of health care cause environmental injustice over there. We took on the dioxin problem at Gulf Port ^b and the toxic load at Keesler Air Force Base. ^c I also went to the Department of Defense (DoD) in Atlanta to know about Keesler and did different things to learn more. We all thought this is just an extension of what we’re doing already but now we’re dealing with health and survival, whether it be a nuclear plant in Fort Gibson or the dioxin here at the Naval base. So that’s how it all got started and it was an easy blend. Like a blended family. And I was really sold on the whole idea, you know, that we could not have social-economic justice without environmental justice. That was important. Environmental justice gave our work a broader and more comprehensive approach.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah, I know many people say the civil rights movement produced a lot of the EJ activists, lots of them.

REV. JAMES BLACK: Exactly. Most everybody I met cut their teeth, if you will, in the civil rights movement.

INTERVIEWER: Did Dr. King ever talk about EJ specifically?

REV. JAMES BLACK: Not to my knowledge. He skirted on it. But I don’t think the trend was familiar to him, in the sense that it is now. Certainly some of the speeches he made, some of the comments he made, touched the EJ effort.

INTERVIEWER: Joi, you’re from another generation and so, how do you relate to the EJ movement? Because it’s not an extension for you, it’s something you must have seen as brand new at some point.

JOI BLACK-TATE: Right. How do I relate? I guess for me, growing up with my father being in environmental justice, it’s different because I got to see it from a younger, less-experienced angle. As a kid growing up, we talked a lot about environmental issues in school so the concept wasn’t anything that was brand new. But it was introduced to us as a subject of study in different areas in school. I didn’t have the whole civil rights movement background to propel me.

INTERVIEWER: Did the kids you went to school with recognize things in their own environment that maybe weren’t the best things to have close by where they live?

JOI BLACK TATE: I think so. I think we were made more aware. And not just at school but from TV and other media. We had a lot more avenues to learn about environmental things.

INTERVIEWER: It’s interesting the two generations working on the same thing.

REV. BLACK: Yeah, we often see these things differently: sometimes more scientific, sometimes with a more artful approach. Like my daughter gave a beautiful testimony at church about butterflies, you know. It was almost a tearjerker because butterflies were just something we took for granted, don’t appreciate necessarily for what they really are. But when she talked about it, I began to see butterflies in another way: from scripture, spreading into a cocoon, the whole nine yards, I gave a sermon on that.

So that’s one thing the EJ movement did: it gave me a greater appreciation of “nature,” and our mandate to protect it. Something as simple as not stepping on a bug, you know. But you’ve got to appreciate all living things and the trees. One of the worst things for me now is seeing a forest fire, you know. I just hate it, you know. There goes all the hard work Mother Nature did.

INTERVIEWER: OK, one more question about EJ activism. What’s your big project right now at CEEJ? What do you have as a major focus project you’re working on?

REV. BLACK: Nothing as in-depth as we’ve done in the past. There’s small things that come up—educating the community and representing at conferences—but the biggest thing now is still health care access and awareness. From CEEJ perspective, we just try to make sure any issues, mostly health-related environmental issues, like asthma for instance, are addressed. Education, building more awareness, deepening our understanding on these issues, too. We still keep an ongoing watch on dioxin, and the other toxics at Keesler AFB. The military buried a lot of toxins after World War II at Keesler—which is less than 1/2 a mile from here. People were actually living on some of those buried toxins. Military people you know, it was base housing.

INTERVIEWER: You’ve worked directly with the Department of Defense on that?

REV. BLACK: Oh yeah, most definitely. Matter of fact CEEJ got an award from EPA for our work at Keesler and the Naval base, both. Now we make sure the clean-ups continue. For a long time, the naval base and the Agency for Toxic Substances & Disease Registry said there wasn’t any poison there. Our local Department of Environmental Quality said there were no toxics there. Then DoD said there wasn’t any dioxin poison outside of the base. And finally, after years and years, they finally admitted that there was. So there’s been a long clean-up. Katrina messed all of it up, you know. But that continues: our watchdog role–

INTERVIEWER: Did the water get all the way up to Keesler? From Katrina, the storm surge?

REV. BLACK: To the Air Force base? Oh yeah, oh yeah. See Keesler, you know, is on a peninsula. So you got the gulf here, you got the bay on the east side, on the north side you have the bay, you know. Those waters actually merged like this.

INTERVIEWER: Oh, you got two surges.

REV. BLACK: Mmhmmm. In particular, on the eastern part of the peninsula. A lot of base housing had to be rebuilt.

INTERVIEWER: The back bay water got Galveston Island, too, during Hurricane Ike. The storm surge and the front end of the storm didn’t have a huge impact. There’s a sea wall and that more or less worked. But there’s no sea wall in the back.

REV. BLACK: Water always finds that path of least resistance.

Communicating Risk on a Personal and Community Level

INTERVIEWER: OK, I’d like to ask you a question about communicating risk. When we were doing this project, I know back in the science shop they’re thinking the hardest part is going to be getting samples and analyzing them, doing the clinical pieces, having people give their samples, then analyzing them and doing statistical correlations. They didn’t think that communicating risk to the various partner communities would be, at least, equally difficult. And I’m mostly talking about how risk and seafood consumption were connected. The clinical team had to do more comprehensive risk communication in general: eating seafood and looking at your profile as an individual. Communicating risk on a personal and community level.

I remember making a presentation here when we got the first data from the sampling, and a number of people said you have to change your wording. Make it very specific to our life so that people can actually have something to apply it to.

REV. BLACK: Otherwise it’s just a load of abstractions we don’t really understand. And it doesn’t seem like it has any bearing on our life.

INTERVIEWER: We tried to incorporate all of those ideas. A lot of them came from right here!

REV. BLACK: I remember.

INTERVIEWER: And then we came back with Wilma Subra. Wilma’s pretty good at talking to people in terms everyone can understand, and she helped us an awful lot with that, but you all gave us a lot of good feedback. Did you all have trouble getting people to accept that risk message when it finally got put into a form that was understandable?

REV. BLACK: I think Wilma got her battle scars in Katrina, if you will, in terms of learning to communicate with grassroots people in a scientific way. She was the go-to person during that drawn-out crisis. Yes, I would rate risk communication the most problematic thing about GC-HARMS. It taught me how to ask good questions, regarding the scientific terminologies. It taught me to inform the scientists and agency people when they were using language that’s really not relevant to the people, their actual audience.

I didn’t like that part of the process at all. It’s like if you had never had any music training before, and I would tell you, OK John, play me a C chord, and you might hit your head like what the heck are you talking about. That’s the kind of reaction I have listening to someone else’s professional terminology, and all those acronyms. There should be another way to do it that’s simpler. What do you think, Joi, how did you find that part of it?

JOI BLACK TATE: I felt it was hard to understand the results and everything that went into the project. I also found it difficult to translate the material to everyday life. Whether we use layman’s terms or not, you still had to try to convert the results to each person’s individual life. I felt like that was probably the biggest challenge.

INTERVIEWER: I agree. The biggest challenge I had too.

REV. BLACK: To your credit, by the second time it had been “dumbed down” if you will.

INTERVIEWER: Well we don’t like to use that term, it’s like translation from one language to another, it truly is. You’re translating this terminology from a language that only scientists speak with each other, to a language that people use in their daily lives. But it’s not dumber or anything like that, it’s just different. But yeah, you’re right, we did change it after the first time.

REV. BLACK: Yeah, it changed. Then it made sense, talking about the aquatic life, you know, and which species was consumed the most. You put it in a form that was more comprehensible and it was, yeah, this will work here in our community. Even I understood it then, and I could communicate it to somebody else. Once Wilma explained everything, you know. That was very good.

INTERVIEWER: We were trying to get it down to one fact sheet. People don’t want to read a whole bunch of stuff. They got things to do.

REV. BLACK: So we were able to disseminate those and share the results. All that work, all the testing came down to: we can eat now, you know, from the Gulf. Now I’m still not comfortable with the shellfish, with the oysters you know. I went to a restaurant a while ago, with people that came for a lunch, and they were eating raw oysters. But I’m not going there yet, I don’t have much confidence in that.

Environmental Justice and Faith: All Aspects of Our Lives

INTERVIEWER: CEEJ seems to be at its core, a spiritual vision of people and their relationship to the planet. You also have a congregation and a Gospel-based outreach, and that’s different. We don’t work with any other groups like that. I was just wondering, how do you connect faith and spirituality with environmental justice work when you’re talking to your community? And health disparities, and health access justice, and housing justice, how do you put those together with faith?

REV. BLACK: Well, we have a holistic, that’s a w, wholistic approach to everything. Because we found that Christ dealt with all aspects of our lives, everything, you know. And so it wasn’t and isn’t a stretch for us. Particularly when I got involved in environmental justice, I began to bring some of that into our messages to some extent, you know. It turns out, we’re always also talking about health disparities, you know? That’s easier to make clear when you’ve got people of color and brown people who are living next to toxic dumps or over dumps. Like over in Louisiana we have that huge oil refinery right across the street, literally right across the street from neighborhoods . . . I think in Chalmette. And they finally bought all the houses and people out, you know, but many have diseases we can’t even pronounce.

So at the beginning, we talked about health and wealth, called the package a health and wealth seminar. So we already had those and it wasn’t a stretch to incorporate EJ, for me or the community. Because again, it’s about social justice and health equality, and that’s also part of the environmental side. So we start thinking about where the houses are being built, and proximity to railroad tracks, you know, and all of those things. Or proximity to interstates, where there’s high emissions rates, diesel emissions, we’re talking within a mile either side of the highway. We got involved in an asthma project, you know, with the state. We saw construction on Highway 49 over there and the residential neighborhoods along the highway were all black.

So those things are now part of what I mention when I talk to the community. As I understood it. Talking about social movements, now, we’re part of a statewide project on domestic violence. It’s another equality issue, you know, for women and children. We believe that social justice is part of our commitment. That’s how Martin King viewed the world—from a social justice perspective. Love and equality come from the same place, just like lack of love, and inequality. It all comes from inside ourselves; we need to change ourselves. So yeah. It’s an easy marriage—social-economic and environmental justice—for us here. A very easy marriage.

Every Time We Get Ready to Do Something New, There’s Unfinished Business

INTERVIEWER: You know climate change and climate justice are two big issues now, on a national level and very big in this region, because this region is subject to storms that may be stronger in the future. Have you been thinking as an organization about how the climate may be changing and how that might impact communities that already have a lot of vulnerabilities, you know, what they call a cumulative risk burden? People on the coast already carry a heavy load of risk but that burden may become greater as sea level rises, and warmer sea water may produce stronger storms? Do you find these issues may be a more central part of your mission in the future?

REV. BLACK: I’m a believer in climate change, though some call it more of an adjustment. But there are only so many things we can do effectively. So we’ve not become as focused on that area. We do talk about it, we believe in it, we’re praying about it. We have so many things going on that I’m not throwing us into that.

Now what has happened, what I’ve seen, because EJ funds are drying up, the program funding is flowing into the climate area now. That’s where Beverly [Wright], Robert [Bullard], and a lot of other groups are now. We support the issue, we’re with them, and we’re part of the organization: the Historically Black Colleges and Universities Climate Change Consortium Community Caucus.

INTERVIEWER: This is an organization devoted to climate change and climate justice issues?

REV. BLACK: Yes. We’re usually at the forefront of things like this but we’re not for this. We’ve not made it one of our stronger priorities yet. We’re so small.

INTERVIEWER: But you do see it happening right here where you live?

REV. BLACK: Oh yeah, no doubt about it. It’s very obvious, very obvious if you live down here. It almost makes you feel helpless, you know. It’s so big and it’s so massive.

INTERVIEWER: It certainly is.

REV. BLACK: We believe in it totally and every now and then we talk about it but it’s not something we’ve jumped into yet as a program. I keep saying, well, we’re still fighting this struggle here. Every time we get ready to do something new, there’s all this other unfinished business. If it’s not a school issue, we still got the whole segregation thing we’re dealing with.

INTERVIEWER: So Joi, I just want to ask for your take on climate change, climate justice, and the possible impacts it could have on the life you live here on the Gulf. Because you are from another generation. Would you say your generation is really attuned to that?

JOI BLACK-TATE: I think more so than older generations. Some of it was a little bit scary, to think of all the possible things that come from climate change but personally I find the issue fascinating, as well. I’ve heard a lot of people in politics aren’t taking it seriously, and that in itself is also a little scary. But I hope that with some of these projects going on now that we can actually make a difference. Just like with environmental issues, not everybody sees them as important. I think the same thing is true with the climate issues now. So hopefully we can make some true change, convince the right people that can make change happen, and support them.

INTERVIEWER: Ok, well thanks. I just wondered because it’s good to have more than one generation in an organization. Because it keeps the organization moving forward it seems. And climate change seems to be something that younger people are really concerned with. Because I know myself I probably won’t see the really bad effects of it because I won’t be here anymore. But they will, and they have kids too and those kids will see a lot more of it yet.

REV. BLACK: And Trump and friends want to remove themselves from some of the initiatives the U.S. already signed on to about world climate change.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah, the Paris Climate Accord.

REV. BLACK: I think, I call him t-rump sometimes, Trump, you know t-that’s rump. Um, I think t-rump is lying. It’s not that they don’t believe in it, I just don’t believe them when they say that. It’s too obvious, you know. But what they believe in more is the money that comes from doing the same thing that’s been going on all the time. Whether it’s coal-fired or whatever it might be. It’s the money. They see regulations only as restrictions on the money-flow, the love of money.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah, it certainly is, and I agree with you about greed. Well, thank you very much Reverend Black. Thank you, Joi. I really appreciate you giving me the time to do this.