Black/In/Climate: Three Definitions
Jonathan Jacob Moore
In this week’s contribution, Managing Editor Jonathan Jacob Moore offers three different definitions for Black in Climate, charting his relationships with self and community, the past and the present, and the struggle ahead.
When I started creating a series of pop-up “Black in Climate” gatherings at national convenings — beginning in 2023 at SF Climate Week — I was far from the first person to gather Black folks working in climate and sustainability. As an educator and writer, I’d spent years creating Black-only spaces for connection and creation.
I set out to create spontaneous moments for folks to connect with each other, network, and, selfishly as a big brother and extrovert-presenting introvert, build relationships with people I could learn from and support in the work.
Here’s what I’ve learned so far, and why I created Black in Climate.
Three Definitions
Black in Climate describes at least three relationships: a relationship with self and community, a relationship with the past and present, and an aspirational and absolutely necessary relationship to power, by all means necessary, for the planet and all its people.
Black in Climate: People who are Black and working on the climate
As in the sentence, We bouta get lit at the Black in Climate happy hour.
Movements for climate adaptation, environmental protection, and sustainability are rich with exceptionally talented, thoughtful, and creative Black folks: advocates, designers, educators, ecologists, engineers, fundraisers, statisticians, writers, and so much more.
Professional development is cool, but so often in my experience, professionalization has been a synonym for assimilation, disciplining, and pragmatism — none of which this planet or my Black ass needs more of.
I don’t want to professionalize if it means jettisoning critical thinking and empathy. I don’t want to specialize if it means reinventing the wheel with zero seconds on the clock.
I want to build with people who know they need to practice what they preach. I want to challenge people who challenge me. I want to center those least responsible for and most endangered by climate violence – nationally and globally — alongside people who are living proof of the possibility of adaptation against impossible odds. This is Black in Climate.
Black in Climate: People who are Black and weathering the climate
As in the sentence, To be Black in Climate means to disproportionately navigate the air pollution, extreme heat events, and severe flooding accelerated by climate change.
The word climate describes the prevailing weather conditions in a place over a long period of time. Scholar-writer Saidiya Hartman describes the afterlives of slavery as the “skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment” experienced by Blacks in the United States and globally in the wake of the Atlantic slave trade.1
As these afterlives persist, they sustain a climate of their own. As scholar-writer Christina Sharpe argues, “… the weather is the totality of our environments; the weather is the total climate; and that climate is antiblack… When the only certainty is the weather that produces a pervasive climate of anti-blackness, what must we know in order to move through these environments in which the push is always toward Black death?”2
In other words, the pervasive climate of anti-blackness is the meta-climate that Black folks will experience and are experiencing climate change inside of.
When guards abandon 600 inmates to Hurricane Katrina’s deadly floodwaters for days without food and water, this is Black in Climate.
When Detroit, one of the Blackest cities in the country, experiences record flooding immobilizing thousands and damaging homes, this is Black in Climate.
When Black residents of New York are twice as likely to die from heat stress as whites, this is Black in Climate.
Black in Climate: A set of behaviors and strategies inspired by Black social life and resistance that transform our relationship to the planet.
As in the sentence, Fracking? Naw. It’s time to get Black in Climate.
Black people are no stranger to the tools that climate struggle and survival require: communal imagination, local adaptation, intrapersonal resilience, organized refusal, and the excruciating work of wholesale revolution.
What would a climate movement look like exorcised of the antiblack, racist, neoliberal, and imperialist narratives that continue to envision “a sustainable plant for me, a dead planet for thee?”
What do non-Black climate organizers, artists, and movement builders have to learn from both Black folks weathering the climate and those Black people weathering the climate while working on it day in and day out?
And how can Black people working on climate learn from our home communities and genealogies and one another to make this dangerous and isolating work of changing the weather as collaborative and life-giving as we possibly can?
These are a few of the questions behind Black in Climate’s Census, launching in January. These are a few of my open invitations to all to keep this party at the end of the world going and going and going.
Jonathan Jacob Moore is a writer and the Founder of Black in Climate. To learn how you can support future events, please reach out.
See Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007)
See Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016)