The Resilience of Race: A Cultural Sustainability Manifesto

Milford, New Hampshire, is well known to students of abolitionist history as the home of the Hutchinson Family Singers, often hailed as the country’s first protest singers. This celebratory history shows up the state’s whitewashing of its own engagement with slavery, because Mil-ford was also the hometown of Harriet Wilson, the first African American woman to publish a novel in the United States. Our Nig (1859) was the semi-autobiographical account of a young black woman’s abuse in indentured servitude. Controversial in its own time, it evidently continues to challenge a New England ideal that would prefer to ignore the racism in its own midst. Although the novel itself was recovered in the 1980s—to considerable academic fanfare—it wasn’t until 2006 that Mil-ford welcomed a modest memorial statue in honor of Wilson. As of this date, the Harriet Wilson Project is still struggling to find a permanent, local place to explore and maintain Harriet Wilson’s legacy.

Across the state, in Portsmouth, a 2003 city infrastructure project was halted by the discovery of the intact remains of eight women and men of African descent. According to a 1705 map, this cemetery was once swampland on the city’s outskirts; ground-penetrating radar indicates that it includes as many as two hundred burials. For the past eleven years, the African Burying Ground Committee has fought to reclaim this contested space, now a residential street close to the center of modern Portsmouth, containing a black history marginalized, then ignored, then lost. Their planned memorial still not been constructed.

These two projects encapsulate New England’s great irony: having seen centuries of steady population and development expansion, the region assiduously erases the indigenous removal and chattel slavery on which its expansion (like that of the rest of the country) was inexorably built. The Harriet Wilson and African Burying Ground projects thus also exemplify the need for a critical sustainability studies that can understand race and public memory as thoroughly implicated in environmental change.

Resolved: We affirm that resilience studies, as a discipline in formation, should take race as a central category of analysis. Race is the node around which environmental damage, community vulnerability, and economic imperatives collide.¹ It (over)determines what (and who) gets protected, preserved, and stewarded. Race is, in fact, a wicked problem. To borrow from the language of another emergent discipline—sustainability science—wicked problems are phenomena, such as climate change and poverty, that are transhistorical, transcultural, and seemingly intractable. They require transdisciplinary work and critical thinking; they require academics to come down from their towers and enlist members of the public not only in the coproduction of knowledge, but in the coproduction of our very research questions. In the United States, the wicked problem of race drives two of our most ecologically destructive and nationally formative processes: indigenous displacement and chattel slavery. And in the New England, where the word “wicked” is more often heard as an intensifier (“Wicked awesome!”), race continues to underwrite white privilege, as an entire region maintains the fiction that slavery and racism never affected us, due either to our own enlightenment or the alleged absence of people of color.

We call for all work on resilience and sustainability to give primary consideration to race and racism. If resilience works to restore systems, communities, and people after disasters, it must always focus questions of inequality, domination, colonialism, and neoliberalism. Critical sustainability, with the study of race at its center, must creatively reimagine human relationships with a variety of environments—natural, built, local, and global. We affirm sustainability science’s emphasis on partnering with the public in the coproduction of knowledge. In this model sustainability is not just something to be defined (à la the Brundtland Commission’s famous formulation) but is rather a method, an opportunity for institutional and societal transformation. It is an opportunity for academics to reconsider their traditional (some would say entrenched) positions as knowledge producers and disseminators.

Considering ourselves as stakeholders alongside members...