Start here. Once you cross the threshold, you’re home. The door

is what brings you from out to in. The door:


the only unit of measurement, not how “poor,”

not four walls, not foundation or drywall or chimney or roof. A door


opens a place into home. Remember, on Gorée

Island, they walked us through that unknown mouth, the Door


made our own bodies a home, made doorways

out of our voices in the air, their undeniable treasure.

each other. How a nod can mean you’re home — home in feet planted, freely, on the floor.

My grandmothers made homes out of things that were not houses — the fervor

of their Blackmother spirits filling the Bessemer projects, the Greensboro trailer —

no fireplace but the warm TV set, no yard but the red clay. The splendor

of what lives beyond what you call welfare, inner city, blight. Don’t you know our

words are a way home? We even bend language into a liberating door.

I used to think my proper tongue meant I leaned toward

the thing that stole our culture. But we can’t outgrow our home. Or,

we have never left in the ways that matter — home in our flavors,

our dances, the languages we live. Home is in us, behind a locked door.

We bent the blue cries of this place into full-bodied song, bent frail walls into shelter.

We bent the cast-off portions into a meal, we bent two cents into a dollar.

We bent redlines and tenements into a sanctuary you can’t enter.

If you want to know how Black folks find our way back to heaven, start here. Open the door.

Courtesy of Carrie Mae Weems and Jack Shainman Gallery

Come In 

ow do we put back together a society that has broken apart? How do we build solidarity within a culture of individualism, punishment, and accumulation when we are constantly repairing ourselves in the face of various forms of daily heartbreak?

If we lend ourselves to the emergent struggles of our times — against Cop City; for Black history, abortion rights, trans liberation, widespread debt cancellation, climate justice, access to land, and alternative food systems; in solidarity with actors and writers on strike and so many others — drawing connections and showing up is where we should start and return to again and again. Now is a time for experimentation and discipline alike. We need to accept what an activist involved in the fight to Stop Cop City in Atlanta calls 

 rather than demand political, strategic, or tactical purism. We have to allow for different people to show up in various ways in terms of ideology and struggle; in our protests and movements, we need the widest participation possible to win.

The uprisings of 2020 showed serious cracks in the system’s legitimacy. By some estimates as much as 

 participated in the protests in some form, a figure without precedent in U.S. history. Around the world, people held protests in at least 

, embodying the globalized nature of our emerging struggles. Mass social upheavals unsettle the status quo; disruption proves to everyone that “normal” is a product of circumstance and not inevitability, that things might not have to stay the same after all. That revolt sent a flare into the sky: 

Don’t mistake the status quo for daily acquiescence. 

. We’re neither happy nor content with things as they are.

But we need more than protests and temporary uprisings. We must further develop our organizations into social institutions capable of creating new relations in every domain of our lives here and now. Previous generations of struggle led to the 

 to one of the worst epidemics in modern history. This fact is not lost on today’s ruling class, which is hard at work making sure today’s young students don’t know how or even whether these past victories happened — 

At work, let’s fight for strong workers’ movements — not only unions — that recognize and build upon the shared interests of a multiracial working class. At schools, let’s struggle against censorship like the opposition to 

 and Black history in the state of Florida while also fighting for 

 like Planting Justice’s in California, and for expanding access to and resources for public schools 

the way the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) of Brazil

 does. Let’s push for state accountability by planning and constructing the missing infrastructure of our neighborhoods like the socialist shack dwellers movement 

 in South Africa. Their struggle shows how the democratic input of everyday people shapes the built environment of their community, while also recalling the mutual-aid efforts of organizations like the Black Panthers and the Young Lords.

In Atlanta, several formations came together to build independent grassroots power to fight Cop City. They have targeted formal legal and political processes but also organized protests, occupied the forest where the city intends to build the police training facility, held a week of actions, and put on music festivals. In response, they have been targeted with sustained and virulent police violence and repression, tarred as terrorists by the state government.

These examples reveal the strategic importance of stable organizations pursuing long-term projects and programs. Uprisings are not enough — constructing an equal and democratic society requires the sustained participation of the people. They are the legitimate creators of the institutions and defenders of rights central to communal life. Beyond the 

 of direct democracy in protests, assemblies, and occupations, we need people power in practice and not just in slogans.

Illustration by Dakarai Akil. Photographs via Getty Images.

Uprisings Are Just the Beginning

This essay is adapted from a speech given at the 

ood evening. My name is Michelle Alexander. I am a former visiting professor and current student at Union Theological Seminary. I am so glad to be with all of you tonight. There is nowhere on earth that I would rather be at this moment in time. Thank you all for showing up. The fact that so many people are here tonight from all different religions, races, ethnicities, and genders is itself a testament of hope. I know that so many of us are carrying a great deal of grief, fear, anger, internal conflict, and despair into this room. I hope that we can breathe together now that we have arrived, exhale, open our hearts to one another, and listen deeply to each other. We are here. We are many. And we are not alone.

On behalf of Serene Jones, the president of Union Theological Seminary, I want to welcome you to this beautiful space — James Chapel. Serene could not join us tonight, because she has a commitment in Washington, D.C. But she wishes she could be here, and she extends a very warm welcome to all of you.

It is no secret that many people are closing their doors to these kinds of vital conversations right now, fearful of what others might do, say, or think. I am therefore enormously grateful that Serene said yes when I asked her if the Palestine Festival of Literature could come to Union to use this sacred space. She said yes, knowing that her decision might invite criticism or rebuke, but she also knew that James Chapel has been the site of many, many difficult, courageous conversations — dialogues that are essential to our collective liberation and the creation of beloved community.

In fact, it was in this very space that Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was originally scheduled to deliver his 1967 speech condemning the Vietnam War. The event was ultimately relocated to Riverside Church across the street, due to the overwhelming number of people who wanted to hear what he had to say and the space limitations here.

At Riverside, he stepped to the podium and said: “I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. … A time comes when silence is betrayal. And that time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.”

Dr. King acknowledged how difficult it often is for people to speak against their own government, especially in times of war, and that the temptations of conformity may lead us toward a paralyzed apathy. He did not deny that the issues present in Vietnam were complex with long histories, and he recognized that there were ambiguities and that North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front were not paragons of virtue. But he said that he was morally obligated to speak for the suffering, helpless, and outcast children of Vietnam. He said:

This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation’s self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls “enemy,” for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

He condemned the Vietnam War in unsparing terms. He decried the moral bankruptcy of a nation that does not hesitate to invest in bombs and warfare around the world but can never seem to find the dollars to eradicate poverty at home. He called for a radical revolution of values. He said:

We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

Dr. King was condemned by virtually every major media outlet in America for taking this stand. Even within the civil rights movement, many imagined that he was a traitor to the cause.

And yet, we now know — deep within us we know — that he was right. He is as right today as he was back then about the corrupting forces of capitalism, militarism, and racism and how they lead inexorably toward war.

And he was right that our conscience must leave us no other choice when the oppressed, the poor, and the weak are under attack. When their homes are stolen or demolished. When they are forced to migrate and to live in unspeakable conditions — in open-air prisons or concentration camps — perpetually as refugees under occupation, we must speak.

We must speak when Jewish children are brutally killed in the name of liberation. When antisemitism and Islamophobia slip in through the back door of supposedly progressive spaces. When Palestinian children in refugee camps are bombed and killed. When schools and hospitals and entire neighborhoods are laid waste. We must speak. When international law is treated like a naïve suggestion, we must speak.

Yes, it may be difficult. Yes, we will make mistakes. We are human. And yes, we may be afraid.

Countless lives and the liberation of all of us depend upon us breaking our silences.

What’s ultimately required, I think, in these times is not only activism or politics but also deeply personal spiritual work. As Grace Lee Boggs once said, “These are the times to grow our souls.”

All of us have a conscience that whispers to us, sometimes in the dark. The mandates of conscience that arise within each of us arise 

out of loyalty to abstract principles or doctrines but from a place of deep knowing — a deep knowing that we owe something to each other as human beings, that we belong to each other, and that our freedom and liberation depend on one another. If I do not stand and speak when the bombs are raining down on you, then who will speak up for me, for my loved ones, when the tables are turned? As James Baldwin wrote to Angela Davis more than 50 years ago when she sat in a jail cell, “For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.”

James Chapel has long been the site of courageous, necessary conversations such as the one we will have tonight. And this space has been a place of joy, art, creativity, and healing. All of that will be in this room with us tonight.

Michelle Alexander on Palestine

his summer, the earth raged. Fires in Maui and Canada, floods in Delhi and Beijing, heat everywhere — this is the beginning of the climate impacts scientists have long predicted, and the U.S. is unprepared in terms of everything from 

 to public health. And if I’m honest, I raged, too. Never in my life have I wished more to be a cyclone, blowing away everything in my path, or an earthquake, shaking everyone to their core until they take seriously the concerns of Black and Indigenous frontline communities.

August marked a year since the Inflation Reduction Act passed, arguably the most significant climate legislation in U.S. history. But the racist compromises and the marginalization of Black people and their demands that facilitated the bill’s passage have seeped into the climate movement, sowing division and narrowing discourse in ways that not only threaten to keep Black people at the bottom of a new green economy but also undermine efforts to address thornier issues, such as who owns energy resources or how to navigate conflicts about resource distribution and land use, questions that money alone cannot answer.

t’s true that the IRA has sparked the largest investments in clean energy and manufacturing that the U.S. has ever seen. In fact, along with investments from the CHIPS Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, two climate-adjacent bills passed around the same time, the federal government is funneling so much money into the development of clean and renewable energy — at least $515 billion in public investment from the IRA alone — that 

 is expected to come from renewable sources by 2024 (

up more than 10 percent from a decade ago

), and over half of all electricity could come from solar and wind by 2030. More than 170,000 green jobs have also been created in the wake of the IRA, a majority of them in red states, some of which, like Texas and Georgia, have the largest and 

 to be happy about that. By “derisking” clean technology through public subsidies and other forms of industrial policy, the IRA is succeeding, at least in its mission to spur private investment in clean energy and low-carbon goods. And after 40 years of exclusively neoliberal economic policy, that is something to celebrate. But the transition to clean energy, like every other economic transition, is inherently distributive and redistributive — especially in a capitalist society — and this time, we need Black people to significantly benefit. Yet, with the exception of a few targeted policies, the IRA and the debates that have emerged since its passage suggest that the U.S. is again (at this big age!) relying on white supremacy to decide how to allocate the power and resources that come from going green.

Since last August, commitments to climate and racial justice — legion in the wake of the 2020 uprisings — have disintegrated rapidly, leaving Black people at risk of being left behind and locked out of the clean energy economies spurred by the IRA. The shift arguably began with the deal Senate Democrats brokered among themselves to pass the law, which included several concessions that deeply and directly harm frontline communities. For instance, the IRA required the federal government to reopen public waters in the Gulf of Mexico to oil and gas lease sales, although the Biden administration had previously canceled the sales after court challenges from environmental and community groups. So far developers have bought only a fraction (3.3 million acres) of the reopened sites, but their successful development will almost certainly increase pollution in neighboring Black communities, which house the oil refineries and gas and petrochemical facilities that will process the oil and gas fossil fuels extracted from these sites. Worse still, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the federal agency responsible for carrying out offshore lease sales, 

, both in its analysis preceding the sale, arguing that “these low-income and minority communities are located onshore and distant from … oil- and gas-related activities” and thus did not merit consideration in the agency’s decisions about the sale.

The Senate deal also led to federal approval of the 

, which, like the lease sales in the Gulf, had been blocked after environmental groups presented evidence of the negative effects the pipeline’s construction and operation would have on water quality and local air pollution and argued that the project bypassed environmental protection regulations. Like most fossil fuel infrastructure, the pipeline and related facilities would run through poor Black, white, and Indigenous communities in West Virginia, Virginia, and North Carolina, some of which already have 

because of existing fossil fuel facilities. Furthermore, while the owners of the pipeline are 

 their property, those who live in poor communities 

 the pipeline and its stations will not be compensated for decreased property values or anticipated health risks that may result from the pipeline’s operation.

Many white climate experts and advocates argued that while these concessions were unfortunate — unjust, even — they were costs worth paying to pass the nation’s first major climate bill. Others argued that the compromises reflected nothing more than the outsize influence of Senator Joe Manchin and his fossil fuel allies, which would lessen once the IRA made clean energy industries bigger and more politically powerful. But even some of the IRA’s flagship policies seemed to be designed almost exclusively to serve the needs and interests of middle-class white people and also to pave the way for clean energy systems that continue to deeply marginalize Black people.

The IRA includes a slate of tax credits for individual consumers to install heat pumps, buy electric vehicles, switch from a gas stove to an electric stove — basically to electrify their homes and vehicles in order to reduce emissions. But the IRA’s tax credits are nonrefundable, making them nearly useless for the 

 that do not earn enough to have tax liability, many of which are Black. IRA tax credits also require users not only to have the money to cover upfront costs but also the ability to wait months for reimbursement, as with all previous energy tax credits — which have been overwhelmingly used by white people even compared with people of color at the same income levels.

The IRA tax credits also prioritize homeowners, a class that is 

, who are much more likely to be young, Black or Latino, or poor. The credits don’t attempt to address the split incentives that exist between renters and landlords: While renters are more likely to want to switch to renewable energy because they usually pay the utility bills, landlords bear the costs of electrification without benefiting from the savings that result, making them far less likely to invest in the relevant upgrades. Nor does the IRA address the fact that climate investment increases home values and thus property taxes for low-income homeowners, which risks unintentionally pricing them out of their homes, 

t is easy to understand why the IRA and the negotiations surrounding it were shot through with racism. White supremacy is incentivized at every level of our policy-making processes — from deciding whom a policy should target and shaping how it is designed to deciding how (and to whom) to market the policy. If I step back and squint (and try to forget that I’m Black), even I can understand how racism can seem — emphasis on 

 — reasonable in light of the conditions we face. But just because something is logical doesn’t mean it’s free — or smart.

For a policy to be effective in the long run, it must be about people. Imagine the impact of a clean energy development whose tax benefits went back into the community to help fund schools or build libraries, or a solar panel factory that’s required to provide child care and elder care for workers and their families. We need to give people concrete experiences of climate policy materially benefiting their lives: better-paying jobs, lower energy bills, new business opportunities, fewer utility shutdowns, and 

. Lower greenhouse gas emissions will mean fewer extreme weather events, fewer boiling summers, and less illness, but that will take time. And even then, most people will not experience the benefits of lower greenhouse gas emissions as viscerally as a transition that helps them to feed their families or take care of themselves. Blame it on capitalism or individualism or consumerism — it doesn’t really matter; we need those sorts of direct experiences for people to care about climate policy when 

. Most days, for most people (including me), life is just too hard to worry about what’s not feeding, fucking, or relying on you.

But for climate policy to be successful long-term, it has to serve Black people too, perhaps most of all. Especially in this fragile moment, right at the start of the domestic energy transition, the experience of having a 

 pipeline built through your community without consultation, or a 

 cratering sacred tribal land without consent, or new petrochemical facilities being allowed in 

 because they have carbon capture and storage with the emissions, or a 

 being rammed through a rural community that feels like it had no say, or a 

 to build a transmission line without any effort to find a different path, or a new incinerator being greenlit in an already polluted neighborhood without any consultation because it has solar panels — experiences of being silenced and dispossessed — could quickly halt the progress of a green transition, especially with the right wing hungry for followers and fossil fuels waiting in the wings.

These are real possibilities — in some cases, real stories. But they come with mounting, potentially unsurvivable costs, even if we rarely discuss them that way.

onsider the discussion that surrounds “permitting reform,” a 

 for efforts to streamline siting and permitting processes to help speed the development of renewable energy projects and modernize the electric grid. Permitting reform has emerged as a focus of Washington policy makers, many of whom worry that the U.S. lacks the regulatory regime and administrative capacity to support the rapid buildout of clean energy funded by the IRA. But the discussion has been dominated by the purported evils of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), one of the 

 Black communities can use to oppose toxic polluting infrastructure; almost all proposals to weaken it would remove or constrain the avenues the law provides for democratic participation in building infrastructure. Gutting NEPA has 

 for fossil fuel lobbyists, but since the passage of the IRA, it has also been 

 by “supply-side liberals” and members of the climate movement’s 

Thankfully, only the most toothless of the proposed NEPA reforms made it into the debt ceiling deal passed in June. But the fight over permitting reform reflects a trend of pushing aside what Black communities have said they want out of IRA implementation and the energy transition, often in favor of advancing clean energy technologies preferred by fossil fuel industries. Many frontline communities have expressed a fervent desire to prioritize renewable energy when it comes to clean energy development in their neighborhoods — especially community solar, microgrids, and distributed energy resources (like rooftop solar). But while several programs in the IRA do provide funding to support these types of projects, recent federal decisions have also begun to push projects into frontline communities that employ technologies such as 

 that could be used to prop up fossil fuels.

For example, the Biden administration has 

 to funding two hubs for direct air capture — a form of carbon removal — in or near frontline communities in Kleberg County, Tex., and Calcasieu Parish, La. This is in spite of vocal 

 from residents who worry that the technology could be used to justify the continued operation of at least 12 existing petrochemical facilities. Residents’ concerns are justified: The CEO of Occidental Petroleum, the company building the Texas hub, has already 

 that she sees direct air capture technology as a lifeline to “preserve our industry over time.” Nor would the technology remove any of the particulate matter or other pollutants that harm residents most.

The debates about climate policy since the passage of the IRA have been marked by dynamics that make these occurrences more likely — particularly an effort to once again define the climate crisis as a matter of energy policy, separate from concerns about the environment and unconnected to efforts to build a more just society. In fact, many of the loudest advocates for “cutting red tape,” who are almost exclusively white men, argue that demands for a just transition are incompatible with the demands of decarbonization or simply that they do not understand how to “

” address environmental justice concerns.

As a result, policy proposals that aim to balance efforts to decarbonize with the needs of Black communities are increasingly dismissed as ancillary, 

, or, worse, “unserious.” More dangerously, after it seemed like people started to understand how white supremacy, the fossil fuel industry, and the climate crisis are linked, environmental and racial justice are being sidelined as separate, secondary issues instead of principles that should guide decisions about how to structure the green transition. But there are simply not enough 

 in the world to prevent Black people from being left behind in an energy and economic transition that does not intentionally consider justice at every turn — not in this country, not with our history, and not with these systems.

I will never agree that white supremacy is a legitimate response to the demands of the climate crisis. Not just because I refuse to assent to my own oppression but because I do not believe that finding ways to legally 

 as many Black people as possible between us and a boiling planet is, or will ever be, a viable climate solution. But I understand the temptation. Truly.

he climate crisis is one of the biggest and most complex problems that the world has ever faced. If you slice open even one of the issues, 10 more problems fall out. Permitting reform alone touches issues with the transmission of electric power and, by extension, the design of our electric grids and energy markets; interconnection queues; cumulative impacts and fossil fuel development; environmental review; permitting and siting for energy projects at the local, state, and federal levels; labor; democratic participation; coalition building; disinformation and growing opposition to renewables among both elected officials and everyday people; utilities and their frequent opposition to clean energy development — and that’s just a start.

Addressing the climate crisis requires us to build out unprecedented levels of clean and renewable energy, much of it within the next decade; stop using fossil fuels, even though our societies and economies remain painfully dependent on them; broker new diplomatic relationships and operate with untold levels of global cooperation; and, at least in the U.S., do all of this while developing and defending a new regime of industrial policy — all while fending off climate disasters, a rabid GOP, rising white nationalism, and a democracy that seems to become more dysfunctional by the minute. It’s an absolute shitshow, through and through.

But as the U.S. begins to implement the country’s first real climate law, we are also creating the frameworks we will use to address the climate crisis for the foreseeable future. Baking white supremacy into these new frameworks, even if just to make designing and passing climate policy easier, will undermine the long-term success of the energy transition.

Why would a crisis this enormous require anything other than a broad set of people and perspectives? What makes us think that anything less is wise?

More concerning, as long as we treat Black people as dispensable, we help protect the social license of fossil fuels, making it harder for us to fully and hastily decarbonize. Few politicians on the right or on the left are eager to confront some of the most powerful corporations in the world, 

sever ties with some of their biggest donors

lose some of their most lucrative personal investments

or the green transition to be equitable, racial justice must thread through all the decisions about how it is structured and how public resources are distributed. One of the best ways to do this is to expand Justice40, a Biden administration initiative that aims to direct 40 percent of the benefits of federal clean energy and other climate investments to disadvantaged communities. The White House should update that order to include all of the programs in the IRA, and agencies should ensure that 40 percent of the funding (not nebulous “benefits”) are going to the communities identified by the White House’s new 

 to identify communities that have faced historical environmental and economic injustices. In programs where it is not possible to ensure that 40 percent of funding reaches frontline communities, as with individual tax credits, agencies need to create partnerships with community organizations and local governments to try to increase tax-credit participation among eligible Black households. The Biden administration should also 

 to make eligible for Justice40 funds projects with technologies that frontline communities have repeatedly opposed, like carbon removal and industrial carbon management.

Congress should also make tax credits refundable and add provisions that reconcile the split incentives for renters and landlords. The IRA programs do offer new possibilities for community control over energy resources, such as direct pay (which can help public and nonprofit entities build renewable energy) and the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (essentially a national green bank that will provide 

 for projects in low-income and disadvantaged communities). But these need to be supported with robust technical assistance and connected to organizations like the 

Deep South Center for Environmental Justice

, which help grassroots organizations design projects and apply for federal funding.

Investments alone are not enough. We must reform the administrative state to advance regulations that create fairer procedures. The 

 proposes many such regulations, including strengthening NEPA by requiring earlier and more robust community participation; 

 community impact reports that “assess whether the proposed action will exacerbate or contribute to adverse health outcomes for that community, including historical patterns of exposure and cumulative effects,” among frontline communities; requiring federal agencies to develop strategies that outline how they will address policies, programs, and practices that could have negative health or environmental impacts in disadvantaged communities; creating an interagency council to ensure such principles are incorporated into decisions across the executive branch; and requiring analysis of 

 would also amend Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 so that people could again sue in federal court for racial discrimination so long as the action created a disparate impact — a change that would make it much easier for people to protect themselves against environmental racism. Congress needs to pass the Environmental Justice for All Act so that these protections are in place before more IRA funding is released and the green transition matures.

Just as important, the U.S. must divest from fossil fuels, even if that requires nationalization or a federally funded wind-down of domestic fossil fuel operations. Fossil fuel industries have built their wealth on the exploitation and endangerment of Black, brown, and Indigenous people, and their continued operation not only undermines efforts to reduce emissions but also ensures that those communities will continue to be harmed even as clean energy deployment rises. There is no path for justice or full decarbonization without ending the production and use of fossil fuels.

ll these changes require our movements to view policy making as a tactic or space that should be organized. 

 policy making is a contested, contentious process that starts months and often years before legislation is written. At the federal level, while movements are often active at the start of the process (getting an issue flagged as a significant problem and spurring government intervention) and the end (shaping legislation once it’s in play or lobbying for its passage or dismissal), they are often absent from the murky middle stages where people struggle to decide 

to solve the problem in question or which solutions should be included in the next stage. The climate movement needs to develop infrastructure and tools to shape policy, beyond electing allies or engaging in legislative fights. Just as important, we must organize ourselves to push back on the idea that racism is a policy choice without costs to anyone but Black, brown, and Indigenous people.

There is hope. From 2018 to 2022, the climate movement became more powerful and unified than ever because we coalesced around a vision of green transition that included racial justice and broad social welfare policies. When I helped design the Green New Deal, I was trying to design policies that served Black people. And that proposal helped galvanize millions of people to care about climate change; they created 

 versions of Green New Deal policies, and eventually pushed climate to the 

. That, in turn, opened up the space to leverage the political opportunity created by the Green New Deal into meaningful federal action.

Strong climate policy requires a strong climate movement. But now that we have the policy, we are at risk of ripping away the foundation for the mass movement we need to see it through. When we trade away Black people, we trade away everything that makes a green transition compelling and urgent. No one gives a fuck about a heat pump when 

. No one cares about clean energy when they can’t eat or when polluters are allowed to dump poison over their heads to turn a profit. The climate crisis may be an existential threat, but millions of people are weathering 

. What’s a little more heat when you’re already going through hell?

Thanks to structural racism, the average Black person 

, and more likely to be unemployed than the average white person. When we design a green transition that serves the needs of Black people, we’ll have a green transition that serves all people, especially those who might not support climate action otherwise. That’s a transition that can sustain itself long-term. And the U.S. desperately needs that. In 2023 — on pace to be the hottest year on record — Americans still 

 climate change 17th (out of 21) when asked about national priorities. And despite the massive spending, in mid-July, 71 percent of Americans 

 said they had heard little or nothing about the Inflation Reduction Act.

How much more is possible if we mobilized around the green transition the IRA started just as we did the Green New Deal? What momentum, what progress could that unlock? We need a 

 mass movement along with mass organizations for climate. And the only way there is with — not over — Black people.

Illustration by Mark Harris. Photographs via Getty Images.

Our Green Transition May Leave Black People Behind

On Oct. 25, 2023, Waldemar Oliveira, Jen Parker, and Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò spoke with Mohammed Nabulsi, an organizer with the Palestinian Youth Movement, and Radhika Sainath, a senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal.

To start, it would be interesting to hear more about the work of your organizations and how they view the situation in Palestine and the protests in the U.S.

We are a legal defense for the movement for Palestinian rights in the United States. We’ve been around for 11 years. We provide free legal services to activist students, professors, anyone who’s been censored, punished, or falsely accused for speaking out for Palestinian rights. I’m based in the New York City office, and we’re a small team of people.

Palestinian Youth Movement is an independent grassroots movement of Palestinian Arab youth within North America and Britain. We are located across 15 cities. Our focus is on mobilizing Arab and Palestinian youth to take a leading role in the struggle for Palestinian liberation. That typically involves building power within our local context, where our primary base is the Palestinian Arab community. The biggest stakeholders in the liberation of Palestine are the communities in the diaspora, who have been severed, both geographically and politically, from our national movement. PYM’s role is to reconnect the Palestinian diaspora and its struggle, especially youth who have been largely disenfranchised both within local institutions and the national movement more broadly. We do that through a variety of means, of which one is mobilizations — especially in this moment, that’s what we’re seeing as our main role — but it’s also through political education, cultural programming, building institutions, whether it’s associations, unions, community centers.With a common vision and strategy across the diaspora, we can leverage power we build within our communities toward political and social change.

On October 18, the Center for Constitutional Rights 

 a legal analysis that alleged, “Israel is attempting to commit, if not actively committing, the crime of genocide in the occupied Palestinian territory, and specifically against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip.” Do you agree? Would you put it differently? How do you think about this?

 PYM’s position, which you can see in our messaging, is that this is a project of genocide. It’s a genocidal campaign being waged on the people of Gaza through a variety of means, including a 16-year-long siege of Gaza. We’ve seen an intensification of that siege in the last two weeks, the denial of fuel, water, electricity, and medical supplies, coupled with an unrelenting bombardment on a densely populated area with nearly half of its population being children — all while the U.S. works to send more bombs. The only way to see it is as genocide, coupled with the statements by the representatives of the Israeli state calling Palestinians “human animals,” talking about how they’re going to transform the Gaza Strip into a city of tents, and various other genocidal claims being made across the spectrum politically and on every level of the political establishment within the Israeli state, calling for a second Nakba. 

 have self-identified it as a genocidal campaign. We don’t need to read between the lines to understand; they’ve made it explicit.

Unfortunately, we agree with that, too. The Center for Constitutional Rights is a close partner of Palestine Legal’s. We should take the Israelis at their word. The Israeli minister of defense called Palestinians “human animals;” he said Israel’s military will “eliminate everything” in Gaza, and there have been calls to flatten whole neighborhoods. This is genocidal language, as 

 have pointed out, and the horrific military violence against Palestinian civilians should terrify everyone. Knowing the history of how this rhetoric has been used in other mass atrocities is very frightening. We’re very concerned about what Israel will do next. It’s important that the international community urgently stop attempts to commit genocide against Palestinians.

The Center for Constitutional Rights’s analysis and both of you pointed out a number of specific roles that the United States has in aiding and abetting Israel’s military response. There’s the role that the U.S. plays as a direct military ally and funder. There’s the role the U.S. plays in preventing action in the United Nations, its role in the Security Council. And then there’s the role that the U.S. plays as a hub of a powerful media apparatuses that can work on an international level to help manufacture a legitimacy story for this. From a strategic perspective, is there a particular one of these roles that you are focusing on or that people acting in solidarity with you should focus on?

At Palestine Legal, we are domestic focused. We’re here to make sure that activists like Mohammed, whom I represented when he was a student, can speak out for Palestinian freedom. We let activists do their organizing, and as movement lawyers we think it’s important to take a back seat, to be the defense, and not to dictate or direct the movement.

For us, it’s a struggle that must be waged on every front. Direct material aid has been the focus of the Palestine movement historically, the multibillion dollars provided by the U.S. government to Israel for military aid. There’s also now a call to increase military aid to Israel. The actual bombs being dropped on Palestinians in Gaza, the white phosphorus that’s being dropped on Palestinians in Gaza, are alleged to have links to the U.S. There needs to be a disruption of that.

As far as the U.S.’s involvement in the international arena, the call for a cease-fire, which is being echoed across the Palestinian rights movement in the U.S., is being amplified by a vast majority of governments across the world. Only a handful of states — many Western nations, including former colonial powers, and their de facto client states — are opposed to a cease-fire. We’ve seen an attempt at a resolution calling for a cease-fire brought by Russia, two separate resolutions, both of which the U.S. government vetoed. There’s also been messages internal to the U.S. government that there’s not to be a discussion of cease-fire. Our priority right now is to raise the political cost of the U.S. government’s policies.

Finally, to the question of media — that’s obviously a main front of ours, to counter the narrative. A project of manufacturing consent for genocide has occurred in the media; there’s been lies and fabrications, repeated and echoed by political and public officials. We’ve had to go on a full-frontal response to that. In the PYM, we’ve organized media trainings; our members across the U.S., Canada, and Britain have engaged media. I think we’ve done up to 100 interviews, both on a local and national level. We’ve also participated in alternative media, things like podcasts, YouTube channels, journals, including leftist journals. Right now, for the PYM specifically, it’s beyond the mobilizations in the streets. It’s about reducing this fervor that exists within the media around massacring Palestinians and raising the political costs, especially for the Democratic Party’s complicity.

Pro-Palestinian protesters during a demonstration in Brooklyn, N.Y., Oct. 28, 2023.

Both PYM and Palestine Legal are directly or indirectly supporting the current pro-Palestine protests. We would like to hear more about the impact of these protests and what you expect to achieve through them. What is the strategy of both your organizations at this point?

First, it’s to demonstrate that there isn’t a consensus in support of genocide, that there are millions of people, domestically and globally, who are against the genocide of Gaza, and that this campaign is not going to be waged without fierce opposition. It’s a declaration of our position on this issue and the position of the grassroots on the streets. Second, it’s to mobilize our communities and supporters of Palestinian rights into the streets to create actual pressure. The work doesn’t end or begin in the protests on the ground — those are part and parcel of a broader set of tactics, including direct actions, media campaigns, and targeting public officials. These are the types of things these protests are meant to do. It’s also about raising the political ceiling on what our community’s calling for, placing the call for a cease-fire within the context of 75 years of occupation and ethnic cleansing. It’s also about enlisting the people who come to street protests into actual organization. A lot of the time people’s involvement ends after going to a protest. These people need to be brought into actual organizations that can maintain that energy and direct it toward targeted goals.

Just to clarify, the demand right now is obviously cease-fire. We see it as the most tangible pressure point toward U.S. policy. Because it doesn’t end at cease-fire; there’s still a 16-year siege that we’ve been waging a struggle against. There’s a 75-year ethnic cleansing campaign and settler colonial project that exists on the ground. There’s expansion of settlements, settler pogroms; there’s the displacement of Palestinians from their neighborhoods and their homes; there’s an attack on prisoners.

Something that’s been missed are two prisoners who’ve recently been abducted from the West Bank and likely assassinated inside Israeli prisons. There’s over 1,000 people who’ve been imprisoned out of the West Bank; there are thousands of Gazan workers who at the time of October 7 were actually inside of 1948 Palestine, or what is called Israel, and were arrested as part of the response to the October 7 attack. 

[Note: they were eventually released back to Gaza without money, phones, or even identity documents.]

 There’s all of this stuff happening. There’s over 100 Palestinians who’ve been murdered in the West Bank since this all started.

For us as an organization, cease-fire is obviously the immediate demand to relieve the brutality of this campaign on the people of Gaza, to allow for them to receive basic goods and medicine. We’re talking about people who are dependent on medical supplies to sustain themselves, beyond the fact that they’re being murdered from the sky. The cease-fire is the immediate call, but it’s within the broader context of calls for justice, dignity, liberation for our people.

We have been getting a record surge of requests for legal help — a tsunami of incidents. In the past couple of weeks, over 300 people have come to us for legal help.

 [Note: as of Nov. 14, that number had increased to over 600.]

 That’s what we saw in all of 2022. And it’s nonstop. We’re seeing people being fired from their jobs for saying that they support Palestinian human rights or criticizing Israel’s policies. We’re seeing Students for Justice in Palestine and other Palestinian students being threatened with violence and anti-Palestinian and Islamophobic messages. They’re being smeared as terrorists, removed from their positions, or investigated by their schools for making statements similar to what 

 made, questioning Netanyahu and Israel’s role in all of this.

So many professors are contacting us, telling us that they have been questioned or that their classes have been canceled. They’ve been locked out of email; they’re afraid of losing their jobs. Even tenured professors are afraid of losing their jobs for communications supporting Palestinian rights, which is just McCarthyite, pure and simple. We’re seeing massive doxxing efforts, naming students who have signed statements in solidarity with Palestinians, things like a “college terror list,” severe harassment, death threats, threats to careers.

The list of things that we’re seeing goes on and on. Students are afraid of getting kicked out of school for, again, engaging in regular speech activities that students should be able to engage in on campus. The chancellor of the Florida state university system released a memorandum 

 all public universities in Florida to “deactivate chapters of national Students for Justice in Palestine” on their campuses. We’re seeing this massive effort from 

 groups, from big donors, from politicians trying to stop this growing movement for Palestinian rights. We are trying to push back on that, because we do see, as Mohammed mentioned, this overwhelming support from the streets, from the grassroots, and especially from the younger generations, artists, and writers who are speaking out against what’s happening, often at immense personal risk. We are trying to make sure that people have the space to speak out against what’s happening right now.

What is Palestine Legal’s legal strategy at this moment?

We have a movement lawyering strategy where basically we think of the law as one tool to be used in the struggle for justice. Sometimes it can be an effective tool; sometimes it’s not an effective tool. Sometimes organizing or speaking out or some of the things that Mohammed mentioned is much more powerful than using the law, because we know that the law wasn’t designed for activists, but sometimes it can be useful. Often when activists come to us, sometimes there isn’t a great legal solution, and we have to tell them that. But often if there is a way to use the law that’s helpful to the movement, we try to use it. In the case of Students for Justice in Palestine in Florida, this is just blatantly a First Amendment violation. It’s just a total do-over of a Supreme Court case called Healy v. James, involving Students for a Democratic Society, that was decided in 1972. It’s just unconstitutional, period. Where the laws are useful, we’ll use them to fight back.

We are a small office. We’re based in Illinois and New York City, and we have an attorney in California, but we field cases from all 50 states, so we’re not doing this alone. We work with a lot of partners and other movement lawyers. Right now, we’re in a desperate situation to expand our attorney network. Sometimes we file lawsuits. Sometimes we’re advising people on their rights so they know what to do, and particularly students so they can be their own advocates. Or we’re writing legal letters to universities, warning them against taking a discriminatory or unlawful action against students supporting Palestinian rights.

Pro-Palestinian protesters during a national student walkout day in support of a cease-fire in Gaza at Washington Square Park in Manhattan, N.Y., Oct. 25, 2023.

Where do you see this going? Because they’re not going to stop with silencing people on Palestine. How do you understand the relationship of the attacks on pro-Palestine students with broader trends and the broader significance for free speech? Why is the right to free speech important for the Palestinian struggle and struggles beyond it?

We’ve long said that Palestine is the canary in the coal mine for rights. After the American Studies Association passed its historic academic boycott resolution in December 2013, which was mirrored after anti-apartheid boycotts against South Africa, the association was met with a slew of legal threats. The ASA was eventually sued, and in the wake of that, pro-Israel lobby groups pushed states to pass laws targeting the boycott movement for Palestinian rights.

Looking at these anti-BDS laws, we later saw that 

 was behind a lot of this cookie-cutter legislation. And of course ALEC is behind a lot of other model legislation that supports corporate power and white supremacy. Palestine isn’t alone. We can see that, particularly in Florida with what DeSantis is doing; the same people who are trying to stop critical race theory and other social justice movements or ideas from being taught in our schools are also trying to stop students from advocating for Palestinian rights or discussion about Palestine in classrooms.

If it’s true that the right to free speech is used in a defensive manner, we were wondering if the right to free speech also has a more active role supporting the struggle. How could success in the courts against repression open another path for the Palestinian struggle in general?

I do see the courts as a last resort. Hopefully, we don’t need to use them. But it’s not just a free speech issue. We’re seeing a myriad of laws being violated as far as discrimination laws, as far as universities not supporting their Palestinian students and the hostile anti-Palestinian environment at college campuses, which violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.

A lot of different laws are in play here. The First Amendment and free speech laws are just one subset of laws that are being broken right now in this repression campaign. We’d like to see institutions, colleges, and universities treat their Palestinian students equally, the same as other students. If you’re reaching out to support your Black students after George Floyd’s murder, if you’re trying to support your Asian students after the anti-Asian spa killings in Atlanta, why not do the same for Palestinian students whose families have been killed or are being bombed in Gaza? That’s what Palestinians are asking: to be extended the same compassion and be treated the same as everyone else. Because their lives should be valued, too, and are no less valuable than anyone else’s. The same goes for Palestinians speaking up for their rights and their supporters as well. They shouldn’t be censored or punished for taking a principled stance on a human rights issue, on a freedom struggle issue.

Universities or people in power might not like that students are calling what’s happening ethnic cleansing or apartheid or genocide, but here in the United States that’s why we have the First Amendment — it’s so that the government doesn’t punish you for your views. That’s something we’re reminding people of now as well. And if we need to file lawsuits, we will.

How are your organizations laying the groundwork for struggles into next year and beyond? What is the midterm game and the long game?

Right now it does feel like we’re in this hamster wheel of reactiveness because we’re in a moment where so many people are losing their jobs and are quite terrified. But this is only, unfortunately, the beginning. We expect more threats to the student movement, and that’s because students have been on the cutting edge of social change throughout history. That’s where we see the greatest attacks — often in the university, against the student movement, against professors and teachers but also against writers and artists. That was true during the McCarthy era. It feels like this moment is a throwback to that.

But I don’t want this to be just a downer conversation, because the reason we’re seeing so much censorship, especially at Palestine Legal, is because so many people are speaking out. And that’s really exciting to see. We’re getting calls from doctors, lawyers, novelists, professors, teachers, models, professional poker players, you name it. There’s no area that hasn’t been touched, because working people across the country are speaking out against Israel’s attempted ethnic cleansing and genocide. That’s why we’re hearing so much about the repression. It’s inspiring to see that people are fighting back and are standing up. And that’s just going to be more true. This situation can’t stand forever.

It’s a very complicated conversation to have in the midterm. We’re dealing with an assault; we’re in the middle of a really intense campaign, the fronts that we’ve already discussed. We’re responding to what’s happening but also trying to go on the offensive in terms of campaigns around specific messaging, creating pressure to stop the genocidal assault — that’s the midterm goal.

Now, during this process, we’re identifying gaps that exist in terms of infrastructure, reach, networks, etc. That assessment is happening in real time, and it’s going to have to happen after the fact. We’re going to have to look back and see what we were prepared for, what we weren’t prepared for, and what we had to work out on the fly. That’s happening regularly, especially for the PYM. It’s a democratic organization with multiple chapters. We’ve shifted our messaging throughout this period; we’ve shifted some of our tactics and strategies, and we’re kind of testing what works and what doesn’t. There’s also feedback from our communities and partners; we’re learning what they want us to amplify or what they think is an effective approach. And we’re also shifting, arguing about, or rejecting some of the approaches our community is seeking.

In the long term, the fate of Palestine — and it was signaled by what Radhika said — is the fate of the left in this country. Where the left goes, we go; our ceiling is with the left. There’s only so much support for Palestine that can exist without a broader politics around a lot of different issues. I don’t need to give a spiel about why the struggles are interconnected, but our enemy — the largely right-wing institutions and strategies — are mobilized not just against the Palestine movement, as Radhika said, but against every struggle, including the climate struggle. One of the anti-BDS clauses in Texas was mirrored and now exists around the fossil fuel industry. Like Radhika said, ALEC is the main body creating these bills, which are then brought through state legislatures. The long-term strategy is to build the broader left movements in this country around the unifying platform. I say left and not progressive, because the progressive movement wavers. We’ve seen that both in terms of the elected officials who self-identify as progressive and the broader progressive institutions. So that’s how the PYM sees it.

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