Things That Left Me Shook Week Four

       My emotions can be summed up with the delightful phrase fuck the government, and fuck big businesses. The fact that the big "Group of Ten" organizations is willfully and knowingly maintaining the oppression of people of color and indigenous folk is deplorable and is a testament to the white dominant discourse that runs deep in American society. The part that sickened me the most, which was very hard to chose because every action described in the letter was god awful, was that the NWF is using the swapping of land to erase debts (Gauna 2). The caucasity is real within NWF. On the topic of caucasity, the statistics introduced in "The State of Diversity in Environmental Organizations" by Dorceta Taylor was very troubling to read. The lack of representation by ethnic and racial minorities in Environmental institutions is absolutely astounding, especially given the fairly large sample size. 191 non-profits, 28 grant making foundations, and 74 governmental agencies were consulted for this report. That is a grand total of 293 different organizations polled, and even with all of them they still produced piss poor statistics for diversity within their organizations as a whole. Now diversity has increased but we still have a long way to go before we reach statistics that do not look like Tulane University's Business School admission rooster. Now on the topic of annoying males, #rollwave, the second article by Dorceta Taylor "American Environmentalism: The Role of Race, Class, and Gender in Shaping Activism 1820-1995" the way historians have captured the history of the environmental movement is problematic because it focuses solely on the contributions done by cis white middle class men. Which is problematic because as we discussed in my hit blog, Things That Left Me Shook, this means that environmental activism is seen through the eyes of white men so the way that gender, race, and class interact and how that evolved over time is forgotten/rarely reported. This has caused splits to form within the environmental justice movement since marginalized groups have to form their own groups in order to be included in the discussion. This is bad because then there are issues that are very important in one group that won't be as important in the other group and vice versa.
       Now I do have to say that learning about all the kick ass women involved with the Environmental Justice Movement was the highlight of the week. I love learning about women, especially females who get shit done. I focused on Thursday's readings for all my blogposts so that is why I haven't spoken more about them since they were readings for Tuesday. I just gotta shout the women out because those readings are probably the ones I have enjoyed most so far. It makes me happy to see women out there killing the game because it just makes me all warm and fuzzy inside. Also gives me flashbacks to listening to "Run The World (Girls)" which is a classic bop.

On that note: Here are my keywords for this week

1) Hysterical Housewives: A term used to dismiss female organizations, and female led groups so that their knowledge is no longer considered to be reliable,

2) Mississippi River Industrial Corridor: an 84 mile corridor that houses 140 toxic industrial facilities aka cancer alley

3) Group of Ten: The large environmental groups that claim to work for the people but actively work against them. Typically have representatives from the major polluters on their board of directors.

Bibliography:

"American Environmentalism: The Role of Race, Class, and Gender in Shaping Activism 1820-1995" Taylor, Dorcetta E. Race, Gender, & Class. 5(1). 16-62

"Southwest Organizing Project Letter" Guana, Jeanne et Moore, Richard. SWOP. 12

"The State of Diversity in Environmental Organizations" Taylor, Dorcetta E. 2014