When it comes to how industry treats the environment, Black communities have been dumped on more than others for years, and scholars who deal with the Black experience in their classrooms haven’t done nearly enough as they should to stop it.
That is one of the main arguments that Dr. Rubin Patterson, a professor and chair of sociology and anthropology at Howard University, makes in his Greening Africana Studies: Linking Environmental Studies with Transforming Black Experiences (Temple University Press).
Brownfields and “LULUs” — or locally unwanted land uses — proliferate in the figurative backyards of Africana programs in cities throughout the country, Patterson shows in his book.
He posits that, if more scholars who deal with the Black experience also started to tackle these issues of the environment, it could potentially encourage more Black students to pursue jobs and careers in which they could work and to fight to make Black communities less hazardous, healthier and more habitable.
“Africana studies has gone from being arguably the most progressive field in the academy to one giving little attention to an area that not only has had a punishing impact on the black community but is on the cusp of a potentially great transformation: from destructoindustrialism to eco-industrialism,” Patterson writes.
“Even business schools have green MBA programs,” Patterson observes. “Africana studies should be developing progressive green curricula.”
Of the thousands of courses that students can take in Africana studies, only 28 undergraduate courses and six graduate courses deal with the environment, Patterson found.
