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Environmental Racism
Mission Year, Atlanta, GA
A version of this article by Leroy Barber originally appeared in the Spring 2008 issue of Creation Care magazine.
Leroy Barber lives in an unjust American landscape. The people in his church live in one of Atlanta’s urban sacrifice zones. If you sat down to list the social ills that are unequally visited on his neighborhood, you might be able to name a few of the most prominent. But environmental injustices likely wouldn’t appear on your list.
On almost any environmental index, his area ranks in the worst ten percent of the United States. The city’s huge impoundment lot for towed vehicles occupies the land that would be our neighborhood hub. The collective leaking oil seeping into the unpaved earth beneath these cars pollutes their groundwater and runs into their streams. Asthma from air pollution affects large and increasing numbers of kids in his inner-city neighborhood. His neighborhood is also one of the worst in the U.S. for the presence of lead paint in houses.
The Bible says we’re meant to take a lesson from our environment about what God is like. Romans 1 exclaims that God’s eternal power and divine nature should be apparent from the creation.
If kids in his neighborhood were asked to look at metro Atlanta and describe what God is like, Leroy doesn’t think they’d get a vision of Jehovah-Jireh, the God who provides. If all they had to go on was general revelation, their picture of God would be horribly
skewed. They would see God’s creation as a place that is more threatening to black and Latino families than to whites. Confronted with environmental threats so obviously distributed along ethnic and class lines, they might begin to imagine a racist God.
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Leroy admits that until recently, caring for the environment in whatever form was not on his list of priorities as a Christian. In fact he claimed to be quite clueless to any environmental issues up until about seven years ago. It was then that he started to connect what he knew about structural injustice with these environmental issues.
As a black person he is part of a history in which pastors not only built the spiritual lives of their congregations by teaching, preaching, and living out Christian beliefs, but they also stood for justice against forces that threatened the well-being of their congregations and communities.
These environmental inequalities aren’t given to us from the hand of an unjust God. They are the results of human sin, a tolerance for injustice unwilling to see or act on the side effects of how we build our cities. Leroy feels he is obligated as a pastor and leader of color to look at this issue and take it as seriously as he does his preaching on Sunday mornings. As his congregation works together to build Dr. King’s beloved community, they think about the words of Jesus in the Lord’s prayer, “Thy kingdom come thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Leroy doesn’t believe heaven is a place where people of color have less, so he sees his job as working that justice throughout the earth.
Website: www.missionyear.org |