Environmental Justice: A key Battlefront in organizing a National Assembly for Black Liberation.

The alignment of the fragmentation of the Black Liberation Movement is a much needed course of action, especially now. While the urgency of now is upon us, the alignment of forces must take place in our various battlefronts. In the recent Black Activism Freedom Reports (November 6), we featured environmental justice reports on Detroit and North Carolina. It is clear that Detroit and North Carolina are only a few of the centers where Black working class communities are experiencing blatant forms of environmental racism.

In section five (5) in the draft Freedom Manifesto, “We fight on all fronts,” there is a plank on Environment: “The capitalist system is destroying the natural environment of the world. Profit seeking ravages ecosystems. It pollutes air and water. It creates mountains of nuclear waste. It fuels global warming. It axes biodiversity that has taken millions of years to develop. Environmental racism represents a disproportionate concentration of dangers in Black Communities.

The earth’s resources must be a commons for all humanity to share! End fossil use! Our future must be green!”

Whether it's Katrina, water crisis in Flint, ongoing devastation in Puerto Rico, we must study "Disaster Capitalism" neo-liberalism and new neo-fascism and work on unifying our fragmented Liberation Movement at the National Assembly for Black Liberation so that we can begin to take more and more offensive, strategic proactive steps to change this narrative of reaction and lamenting suffering.

We therefore encourage environmental justice activist who are engaged on this battlefront that impacts the Black working class, to address two points: 1) create a national working group that addresses the state of environmental racism impacting the Black communities, and 2) make suggestions that would augment the draft Freedom Manifesto’s call for environmental justice.

Freedom or liberation as Palo Friere pointed out, requires that we take “control” and “responsibility” of “adopting” our “image” and “guidelines” of what we want freedom to look like. The formulation of an environmental justice work group would represent one of many needed workgroups that would be an important part of developing a national assembly for Black liberation. The development of this and other working groups like this on battlefront issues that impacts the Black working class will move us closer to aligning our movement.