Jacqueline Patterson: Energy and Ferguson tragedy are interrelated
Jacqueline Patterson (second from left) with other panelists for a U.N. roundtable on ecosystems, natural resources and sustainability.
Despite being engulfed in community outreach efforts in Ferguson, Missouri following the tragic death of Michael Brown, Jacqueline Patterson of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) still found time to speak at the “Urgent! Sustainable Management of Natural Resources and Ecosystems” roundtable.
Patterson, the Director of the NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice Program, said both matters at hand are in fact urgent, and they’re far more connected than one might think.
Having just returned from one Ferguson event and on her way to another, Patterson made a point when interviewed to discuss how both ecosystems - sociopolitical and natural - are suffering from a devaluation of crucial resources.
In one instance: water, food and energy; in the other: young, capable minorities.
“The utter devaluation of black and brown bodies in particular but human rights in general is this pervasive thing that affects our entire ecosystem,” she said of Michael Brown case, in which the victim’s body was left in the street for four hours before finally being removed.
“It’s a situation where the perception of young black people is as a danger at worse and worthless at best just in terms of societal perception,” Patterson added.
She elaborated that this mirrors the depreciation of our natural resources, which are routinely subjected to polluting influences before intervening measures are taken.
To fix these issues, the NAACP Director calls for drastic overhauls, including fundamentally changing the way that law enforcement interacts with minorities and the way that money interacts with environmental policy.
“The fact that we don’t care about our natural resources and that we don’t care for our people is pervasive in nature and the ways that we deal with them have to be fairly comprehensive and have to really acknowledge and address the intersections,” she said.
The two in fact may actually have a hand in remedying one another.
Several panelists during Thursday’s roundtable discussed the importance of creating decent labor to allow the energy industry, for one, to grow while upholding common human rights conventions.
But according to Patterson, currently only 1.1 percent of the energy industry is occupied by African-Americans, and they earn less than one percent of the profits-unable to effectively ascend in the business. This, she says, in spite of the fact African-Americans spend around 40 billion dollars a year on energy consumption, a far larger sum.
This lack of return in investment perpetuates a cycle of exclusion in society.
“The lack of decent work means that people aren’t able to get involved with industrious activities because they don’t have these opportunities to be able to advance,” Patterson said.
But she contends that this pattern could be reversed, if more initiatives were targeted at including African-Americans in the industry, just as the pattern of hostility and violence between minorities and police in the United States could be quelled if addressed with a similar understanding of human valuation.
Patterson says with more of these types of efforts, we could bring the cycle of needless minority criminalization, desperation and altercation finally off the streets.
Hopefully this time we’ll realize: four hours is too long to wait.
