By accident. By accident, I am an environmentalist. Growing up financially challenged (read: poor) makes me very conscious of conserving resources and re-using things. This was not because as a child I cared so much about the future of the planet, but because if you ran the water too long then the bill would be too high, if you left the lights on in unoccupied rooms then the electricity bill may not get paid, if you recycled those cans and bottles then that would be money to rent videos that week, and if you saved those plastic bags from the grocery store then we could save money on trash bags. There was also the if you take care of your clothes you could pass them on to a sibling, or if we run all of our errands at once, then we can save gas money.
These were all lessons that I feel a lot of struggling families and communities pass on to others without consciously affirming an environmentalist discourse. Through the hustle and bustle of the day, working 2-3 jobs, raising kids, etc. none of them, and especially my parents, had the time to sit down, think, research and say ‘by gosh! I am an environmentalist.’ For all they know, they were just trying to navigate poverty and make it through the day. Of course there are those who are consciously activists and organizers, but there is a certain beauty in the unconscious activist. Sure, the explicit intentions–or what we can myopically perceive of them aren’t to change the world, but by circumstance there is some organic initiative to at least ‘fix’ the situations that seem most accessible.
This is not to force the punitive conclusion that every struggling woman in the hood is an activist, but it is an attempt to force all of us to (re)conceptualize the way we understand activism, activists and organizers. I always refer Robin DG Kelley’s Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class. Kelley addresses the politics of everday—so-called “hidden transcripts of resistance” by placing things such as theft, feigning laziness, or the refusal to enter the formal work sector within the James C. Scott’s paradigm of “infrapolitics.” Infrapolitics as he explains is
the circumspect struggle waged daily by subordinate groups is, like infrared rays, beyond the visible end of the spectrum. That it should be invisible…is in large part by design—a tactical choice born of prudent awareness of the balance of power.
With all the conferences converging self-identified activists and organizers, can we get a conference to get the informal, unconscious activists together? Can we have a conference to garner respect for these people? Because Allah knows that I can site all the most wonderful organizers and revolutionaries of the world and none of them will come to close to my mother. Not because my mother has transformed a country or establish community centers; but because she never saw her life as a mother as different as the life of an activist. That artificial separation was never there–it was just an organic impulse to act because it is how we survive(d), how they survive(d).
Maybe the way mothers mother is a form of activism. Maybe there is a such thing as radical mothering, and maybe all the feminists who are so hasty (and nasty) to critique stay at home moms, have yet to realize that those mothers are the midwives for the revolution. They are the ones who give birth to and sacrifice to raise the me’s and the you’s.
Environmentalist
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