Shale Maulana, Center for Environmental Citizenship

Shale Maulana is Northwest summit coordinator for the Center for Environmental Citizenship and a student and activist at Seattle Central Community College.

A large part of putting together our summit, "Powered By Justice: Skills to Build Energy Alternatives," probably the largest part, is recruitment. One of our primary goals in recruiting students for this summit is diversity. We want our summit to speak to a broad base of students, because no movement will be effective in this country if it does not look critically at racism and work to change the course of things.

There is a lot of mistrust between environmental organizations and communities of color. A lot of this comes from the white-dominated nature of most environmental groups. If you are a person of color, being at a meeting that's all white people besides yourself can be really intimidating and awkward, even if the group is not overtly racist. The strange looks, the way your comments and questions are received, the feeling of "What am I doing here?"

Many of the actions environmental groups take are not very accessible to communities of color. For example, actions involving arrest. Not that these actions are not a legitimate tool -- they are in appropriate situations. However, being arrested means something totally different when the criminal justice system specifically targets people like you; it's not going to mean just a slap on the wrist and a few hours in jail. A similar dynamic happens in rallies that have a high police presence. Often, organizers do not plan enough to keep people safe and out of jail, because it's not such a concern for white activists. This is a very unsafe situation for most people, especially people of color.

The environmental movement often does not consider economic issues around environmental protection and how they will affect low-income communities, as well as communities of color. For example, Seattle is planning to build an extensive light-rail system. The light rail is potentially great for reducing air pollution. The problem is that it will run down the middle of a main street in Rainier Valley, the most diverse part of the city, with potentially devastating effects on the community. It will be underground north of Rainier Valley, in the wealthier part of the city. For these reasons, among others, engaging students of color in the environmental movement is challenging because of legitimate issues around trust.

So, where do we go from here? EnviroCitizen staff collectively participate in Dismantling Racism trainings and caucuses, which help us be critical of and understand race and power. It's our foundation for achieving diversity, in a sense. We also spend a lot of time on messaging, to make sure the way we approach people is not alienating. We work hard to be genuine in our anti-racism. At our summit, one of our workshops is designed to look at the history of the environmental movement; institutionalized, cultural, and personal racism; and current intersections of environmental destruction and racism. In this way, we work to educate environmental activists and shape the future of the environmental movement to be more inclusive.

Some of our recruitment is broader, like class presentations. For these, we make arrangements with college teachers to give a short presentation at the beginning of classes. They are usually about five minutes. I start with a question like, "Who here has asthma? Who knows anyone who has asthma?" Then I talk about air pollution in Washington, and how Washington has the highest asthma rates in the nation. The highest asthma rates are concentrated in southeast and central Seattle, in the more diverse and poorer neighborhoods. I mention how clean energy alternatives can reduce the pollution and increase the health of our region. Then I announce our summit and hand out a flyer. It's pretty simple, but effective. This is how we found most of our volunteers.

We try to be very intentional about our recruiting. We have meetings with student organizations and multicultural clubs. We do presentations at tribal colleges. We are very open about our goal of diversity, and are open to criticism about our approach as well. We know that we are not the ultimate in challenging racism; we are human just like anyone. So, we are always open to critique.

Recruiting for this event has been about building honest relationships and having truthful conversations around environmental racism, and finding appropriate ways to change this in the future.