African American sensitivities.

• Author: Marshall, Gene
• Position: Thinking Politically

On February 23, 2002, C-Span broadcast a six-hour panel discussion by some of the most perceptive African Americans. Their topic was the role of the African American community on this side of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The program was put together by the radio talk show host Tavis Smiley and the panels contained well-known people like Cornel West and Alan Sharpton as well as a wide array of men and women, elders and youth, Christians and Muslims, politicians, activists, and university professors.

African Americans who are embedded consciously and actively in their history and in the struggles with slavery and with civil rights, possess an important perspective on American society, the perspective of marginalized people who, because of the cruel gift of this marginalization, can see the whole society more objectively. Like the canary in the mine that is used to test the air for the miners, the African American community senses ahead of others the foulness of air and the need to change it.

Poverty and racial justice issues were so much in the forefront of this discussion that little or no attention was paid to the ecological context or with how racial issues and ecological issues might mesh together. I consider this lack of sensitivity on the part of African Americans a challenge to me and to the ecological movements I support. These panels of spirit-filled and truly giant African American men and women are in some measure blind to the extent of the ecological crisis and to the ways in which the ongoing devastation of the Earth presents all of us with a new master context for all our issues. This blindness may in some measure be the fault of the ecological movements.

Perhaps we who see the centrality of the ecological crisis have not done our job in relating our awareness to the awareness being emphasized by the most sensitive members of the African American community. Each set of movements has much to teach the others.

African Americans can perhaps teach the ecological movements something about confronting power with truth, with making the world listen to an emotionally and spiritually charged truth.

Ecologists can perhaps teach African Americans something about the bankruptcy of the entire mode of hierarchical civilization, that survival on this planet for all races and classes of humans depends on us working together in the building of a post-civilizational mode of society that is mutually enhancing with the natural...