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in solidarity with the movement for Black Lives.

 

The UCI Sustainability Resource Center stands unequivocally in solidarity with the movement for Black Lives. We emphatically condemn the continued killing and harassment of Black folks by police departments and a culture of white supremacy across the nation. We condemn the unjust and unsustainable systems of oppression, and anti-Black racism in particular, which have given rise to these conditions. We demand justice for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Ahmaud Arbery, Manuel Ellis, and countless others who have been victims of systemic violence. Black Lives Matter.

 

We apologize for our public silence in the past several weeks as we grieved, processed, and composed our thoughts before publicly affirming our solidarity with and our responsibility to Black students, staff, faculty, and the broader community. We recognize this privilege and work to do better to show up in this space and in this movement.

 

We acknowledge the legacy of exclusion and marginalization in higher education and sustainability movements. We will examine and commit to transforming ways in which our institutions and movements perpetuate the marginalization of Black students, staff, faculty, and the broader community. We will prioritize amplifying voices, stories, impacts, and actions in support of the movement for Black Lives both publicly and within our programs to dismantle this legacy while working towards collective liberation rooted in environmental balance, economic vitality, and social equity. 

 

To start, we take the Intersectional Environmentalist Pledge shared by activist and eco-communicator Leah Thompson. This Pledge is rooted in the concept of intersectionality, coined by Black feminist scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989. Intersectionality provides a frame to help us see how “many of our social justice problems like racism and sexism are often overlapping, creating multiple levels of social injustice” (Crenshaw, 2016). Intersectional environmentalism allows us to understand and address ways in which injustices happening to marginalized communities and the earth are interconnected. We owe a lot of this intersectional work to Black leaders. For example, the environmental justice movement was sparked in the 1980s by folks in Warren County, North Carolina. They led weeks of marches and protests in response to the state locating a hazardous waste landfill in the predominantly Black community. There are similar stories of environmental injustices from South Louisiana to Flint, Michigan to Oakland, California. We invite you to join us in this Pledge and in demanding justice for Black lives.

 

In Solidarity,

UCI Sustainability Resource Center

 

We have compiled a list of resources for learning and action, which you can find here. This is, of course, not an exhaustive list and we welcome your recommendations.

 

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Sustainability Resource Center
Student Center G464
University of California, Irvine
Irvine, CA 92697-3250