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4. Black Faces
- The University of North Carolina Press
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67 c h a p t e r f o u r Black Faces I think it is critical that people document . . . really begin to consciously think about all the holes that we have, again because so much of the history is an oral tradition and because we need proof. —ayoka chenzira, interviewed in Klotman and cutler (1999) I know we’ve come a long way baby, but it seems like we’ve hardly moved. —environmentalist audrey peterman (interview with author, January 2003) H urricane Katrina is considered one of the worst natural disasters in our country’s history. On August 29, 2005, the first Category 5 hurricane of the year slammed into Louisiana and Mississippi, leading to a breach in the 17th Street canal levee in New Orleans and flooding the entire Ninth Ward (Dyson 2006). Images of displaced water and people evoked a sense of helplessness, anger, despair, and shock across the nation and many parts of the world. While we were stunned by Nature’s destructiveness , something else, perhaps more insidious, was taking place.1 The images of black people “looting” and “shooting” during this desperate time were recorded and shown worldwide, providing an explicit image with an implicit meaning: “logics constructed in visual images that define blackness” (Rogers 1994, 160). These “logics,” the idea that there is an essential and fixed quality to blackness (in the case of Katrina, criminality and poverty), are represented as natural and normative behavior by simply and repeatedly showing these images. The power that images and words have in stigmatizing a people or community can have far-reaching psychological and material consequences. How one’s identity is constructed through representations calls into question whose social realities are maintained and sustained by such representations and who benefits from the perpetuation of these depictions.2 Equally disturbing is how one perspective of an experience, a person, or a place, in this case African Americans of the Ninth Ward, can become 68 black faces so embedded in our consciousness through representational acts that we cannot imagine, and therefore do not act on, other possibilities for those phenomena we seek to understand. In addition, for the individuals who are being “represented,” there is a danger of internalizing negative images to the extent that they cannot imagine different possibilities for themselves. Who we are and what we do is partially determined by our worldview; that perspective is informed by the stories we are told and the images we see. Many Americans “continued to be socialized via mass media and nonprogressive educational systems” that privilege a worldview that demeans and devalues alternate ways of experiencing the world (hooks 1992, 18). In the case of Katrina, the images not only “tested the nation’s collective sense of reality” but reminded us of our collective racial unconscious from which we take cues to determine our actions, including leaving “poor black folk defenseless before the fury of nature” (Dyson 2006, 19). These representations underscore how “hegemonic power actively produces and reproduces difference” in order to “maintain social and spatial divisions that are advantageous to its continued empowerment”(Soja and Hooper 1993, 184). In this case, it is the power of the dominant narratives that are fundamental to our environmental institutions and policies. Compared to Katrina, the absence of more inclusive interpretive exhibits or diversity policies within environmental organizations seem almost benign. But over the long term, the narrow representation of African Americans or their outright invisibility within an environmental context produces similar consequences to those of Katrina: lack of awareness among a community’s constituents , exclusivity and marginalization often interpreted as racism, and historical narratives lacking in complexity or unequal power relations resulting in unequal access to resources and exposure to highly vulnerable and/or hazardous environments with unequal resources to mitigate those hazards. Representation and racialization sustain the way many Americans think about the natural environment in the United States, which informs our environmental policies, institutions, and interactions. Both processes have the power to determine who participates in environment-related activities and who does not; what voices are heard in environmental debates and what voices are not. The process of representation “always involves power relations and is mediated through historically changing institutions, class structures, taken-for-granted historical accounts and scientific assumptions ” to shape today’s reality through the remembered or revised reality of the past (Duncan 1993, 53). The power of representation lies in its ability to shape today’s reality through that reality of the past (Moscovici...