Nazir Khan: Reclaiming Narratives Through the BIPOC Environmental and Climate Justice Table

Nazir Khan sat down with me on the 4th floor of the Minneapolis Institute of Art and chatted with me for almost an hour about everything from anarchism to the 40+ plants he has in his apartment. But our conversation centered around his inspiring environmental justice work. He has been organizing with People’s Climate Movement and Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), as well as in the labor movement, but his most pertinent project right now is starting a Black, Indigenous, Person of Color (BIPOC) Environmental & Climate Justice Table with others from the movement, including from Black Visions Collective, the Center for Earth, Energy and Democracy, and others. The other main organizer involved is Sophia Benrud, another amazing environmental justice activist. They are currently figuring out what this table is going to look like, but they are envisioning a space for people of color who are either already in the climate and environmental justice movements or want to get involved.

Nazir’s goal and the goal of the BIPOC table is to create space for BIPOC, especially those who are in the middle of environmental justice campaigns or who want to get involved. Nazir wants to accomplish this with a base-building orientation, he believes in organizing lots of people to create something more powerful than any individual could. Often when something happens in a neighborhood, people get up and start fighting without building that base, or getting connected with other organizations. Their efforts will be more successful if they organize and empower others to act collectively with them, and connect to the other fights around the state with similar goals. There is a recurring problem within the environmental justice movement where POC are often the single POC within their white organizations. They often end up getting ignored and left out of the conversation. In his organizing experience and as a POC himself, Nazir recognizes the need to organize, build power, and go in together to take up space.

“There needs to be organizing but at the end of the day you aren’t going to move people that are ideologically and politically opposed to you by asking them to be nice and to respect your historic or current injustices. You have to come in with power, so let’s build power together first and come to a shared analysis about things, because often people of color are pitted against each other.”

For Nazir, this is necessary in order for POC to be less isolated within the movement. Although the BIPOC table is his main focus right now, Nazir does a lot of activism and organizing with Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). DSA is a big tent organization that involves everyone from communists, anarchists, to social democrats. This creates a nice organizing environment because there is a lot of tolerance of other ideological understandings. According to Nazir, DSA is one of the most anti-racist and internationalist spaces in the U.S. leftist politics arena.

Next, we talked a bit about how he views the environmental justice movement. According to Nazir, environmental justice has historically been a space for frontline impacted communities. Big greens (large environmental organizations) and the climate movement at large have allowed these frontline environmental justice fights to have relative autonomy, but they have also taken most of the funding for themselves. This is frustrating for Nazir as he feels we are at a point in the movement where the most transformative legislation and campaigns are coming from those frontline movements. An example of this type of transformative campaign is a POC environmental justice campaign in Illinois called Lvejo (little village) that has been fighting emissions and pollutants coming from warehouses outside Chicago. They championed the Future Energy Jobs Act, a statewide comprehensive legislation that addresses job creation and climate change through allocating $750 million dollars to energy efficiency and renewable energy programs in low-income communities. The legislation includes a new Illinois Solar for All policy, a low-income solar energy program targeting environmental justice communities and including a job training program that will recruit from these same communities. This is a prime example of how a strong organized base can make lasting change, hold the larger organization accountable, and keep a movement grounded and grassroots-oriented. Lvejo has maintained momentum because they have a base that keeps them militant. Nazir added that many big greens don’t have the political skill to push for transformative legislation; their eagerness to compromise leads to them being eviscerated by big oil.

In contrast, communities directly impacted by environmental injustices have had to fight for their survival, learning compromise is not an option when people’s lives are on the line.
One of the questions I asked Nazir was “what does it mean to be an organizer?” I wanted to know what that title meant in more general terms, but also why it is significant for him personally. Nazir responded by bringing up how in our current society, the dominant approach to change is very individualistic and sees power as a one to one dynamic. “You’re not going to change things by asking someone in power nicely and individually, it’s going to take collective power.”This results in people asking for things from those in power and expecting the wisdom and persuasiveness of their arguments to convince them to change. Organizers like Nazir approach power as a collective process, people need to be organized into groups or collectives to pressure those in power because, fundamentally, the system is not just or equal. It is a system built on slavery, indigenous land theft, and genocide that continues to perpetuate inequality. Nazir asserts that “you’re not going to change things by asking someone in power nicely and individually, it’s going to take collective power.” This becomes especially true when you realize that on the other side are monied interests and capital. Industries don’t want change; they want to worsen the divide because they make money off of inequality. A good example of this is the mining of rare metals in the Congo, if conditions improve there and people are paid better wages the industry will lose profit, they are actively invested in keeping things the way they are. You might be able to get your councilperson to listen to you to get some space to park your car but besides that, you won’t get very far within a broken and unequal system. The concept of organizing attempts to combat this by building collective power and gathering people along a shared goal of transforming the world into a more just world.

Our conversation then took an interesting turn when I asked Nazir how he got involved with environmental justice work and where this whole journey started. Nazir graduated from Harvard in 2006 and started doing a lot of international public health work, specifically around the HIV/AIDS crisis in Sub-Saharan Africa. He became disenchanted with how that world operates, it is extremely neoliberal and often just a cover for a lot of foreign aid and U.S. diplomacy that does more harm than good. For example, according to Nazir, PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan For Aids Relief under President Bush) was essentially funding abstinence education as a solution to the HIV/AIDS crisis which sometimes took money away from people who actually had HIV and needed medication and treatment. He was also involved in international development and was disillusioned seeing how destructive much of that work is and the negative impacts development projects have on communities. People aren’t being asked what they actually want, but instead are being kicked off their land and further disenfranchised.

Seeing all of this playing out around him, Nazir quickly fell out of love with the work he was doing. But there were community organizing aspects of this work, which was the part he actually enjoyed. He decided to focus in on that and ended up quitting his job and moving to India. There, he got involved in a political campaign and worked at an urban institute that was using technology to solve social problems: Mapunity. In India, there are very strong leftist traditions, and he was more deeply exposed to those traditions during his time there. He eventually went back to the U.S. and got a job as a labor organizer, mainly organizing adjunct faculty at universities. He was organizing professors who were teaching hundreds of students, but barely making enough money to survive. Many of these professors were teaching 5 classes, spending all their time traveling around, and didn’t even have health insurance or time to grade papers. He was organizing them to bargain with their administrators, noting how the managerial class was extracting all the value of labor and not paying the workers what they deserved. In doing this work, he was made further aware of the power divides that exist in our society and really started to politicize.

Nazir eventually ended up doing labor organizing at the University of Minnesota, where David Pellow was supposed to be heavily involved before he left and moved back to California. Dr. Pellow is the author of the book Critical Environmental Justice which provided the framework used in our Environmental Justice class. Nazir works closely with one of Dr. Pellow’s graduate students. Pellow’s environmental justice framework aligns with both DSA and Nazir’s personal politics very nicely because of its overarching critique of the state and big money and the general anti-capitalist and socialist ideological framework. All these factors led him very organically to the environmental justice movement.

Coming into the environmental movement gave Nazir an even clearer analysis of where power sits. Big greens are often in a much more comfortable relationship with business, capital, and industry and therefore try to shift things by being nice, not realizing what it is going to take to get a large corporation to stop funding fossil fuels, for example. Things are not just given to you; you have to build the power necessary to take it and force the hand of your opposition. This analysis is something that the environmental justice movement seems to have, which is part of why Nazir saw his role in the movement so clearly. Frontline environmental justice activists are fighting for their lives everyday against entities that are profiting off their suffering. Those in power don’t care, that’s the way things are done so it takes actual power building to change it.

Next, I asked what Nazir thought the most important environmental justice issues facing Minnesota are. Line 3 is one of the most significant, and most of the work he does with DSA revolves around getting more movement, organization, and coalition surrounding line 3. If it gets built it will supply tar sands oil which is the most harmful, carbon intensive, and all-around dirtiest oil in the world. Line 3 goes through Minnesota, but if it gets built it is going to supply the globe. There is a lot on the line, but if this pipeline gets stopped it would further damage an already suffering industry. Stocks are going down and new infrastructure development is declining, stopping line 3 could potentially kill the tar sands industry which would be a major hit of fossil fuels as a whole. Furthermore, it would incentivize investors to shift towards renewables.

But for Nazir, this issue is pretty short term and although the two are interrelated, the most important long-term fight is inequality. Minnesota has some of the worst inequalities between people of color and white people that Nazir has ever seen. “That’s the power of environmental injustice: it’s so observable and smell-able, you can literally feel and see it.”Everything, from education, health, environmental injustice outcomes, and exposure to toxins shows extreme inequalities. This can be seen clearly in the Frogtown neighborhood. Frogtown is a lower income neighborhood in St. Paul with a majority POC population, the deeply embedded system of racism that exists in our society has resulted in this area being exposed to toxic soil, poor air quality, and dangerous infrastructure that has and will result in negative health impacts and a larger vulnerability to climate change. This is exactly what Nazir was referring to when he spoke about severe inequalities, he has lived all over the world and Minnesota is home to some of the worst inequalities he has ever seen. You can feel it, in ways that he hasn’t seen in other places, if you go to Frogtown, East Phillips, or North Minneapolis and then go to places where more white people live, the difference is astronomical. “That’s the power of environmental injustice: it’s so observable and smell-able, you can literally feel and see it.” Nazir believes this has to do fundamentally with how POC are not organized to fight back, despite all the non-profits that are serving them that talk about racial justice, they haven’t been able to create any lasting change because people aren’t empowered on their own to take charge of their wellbeing and betterment.

This connects back to the mission of the BIPOC table, power needs to be in the hands of those who are bearing these impacts. They need to be building their power and developing as political beings, not handing power to some representative who isn’t going to do anything. Nazir used the fight against the Amazon headquarters in New York City as an example of this. After intense pushback from the community, Amazon ended up canceling their plans to build a new headquarters in Queens. This was successful because of the huge base of mobilized people; it has taken generations to organize and build that base, but they are there, and they are instigating change. That’s the environmental justice fight, it’s not any campaign specifically, it is organizing the people who are impacted to have collective power.

We are witnessing a dramatic generational shift in how we understand what is happening in the world and Nazir and many college students such as myself are examples of that shift. The longstanding faith in post WWII wealth and shared prosperity came to an end in the 80s with Reagan and Clinton practicing neoliberalism. They wanted to free the market and globalize, thinking that everyone would benefit. But this is misguided, that’s not where the prosperity came from. The grand failure of this mentality was felt first by all of the developing countries that were subject to the World Bank, the IMF, and other structural adjustment programs that pushed for divesting from public health and education. These programs were riddled with corruption which resulted in destabilization. But that destabilization made it more profitable for capital, if those in power invest in education and health, incomes will rise, and global corporations will have to pay more for labor. Now we are looking at an ecological crisis as a result of this worldview, the analysis that we need high GDP growth to get human development just hasn’t worked. And many in our generation are realizing this system is broken.

Nazir spoke candidly about the many fights he has gotten into with friends who went to work for development banks or U.S. foreign aid bodies and thought they were helping people, when in fact this is a form of neocolonialism. His friendships with these people became an ideological battleground. But now there is a shift happening as people see the consequences of that worldview play out. This is part of the current influx to groups like DSA that provide an alternative. It’s not just Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez causing this shift and the growing interest in groups like DSA, what is behind it is a large scale failure of a worldview and the realization that we need a different way of doing things if we are going to address these huge problems that could result in literal genocide on parts of the planet. We need systemic, structural change.

When I asked Nazir about what keeps him going when there is so much cynicism and bad news all around us, he struggled. But after some thought, he said that seeing his role as straddling two worlds, as a “fugitive” with a mission here in the U.S., keeps him motivated. He was born in the U.S., but his parents immigrated to Brooklyn in 1980. He has done a lot of reflecting on his place in this country and as someone of Indian origin, exclaiming “what is my relationship to my home country and this country?” He has realized that he needs to maintain a real and meaningful connection to India that is not just about holding onto some traditions, but about acting together in struggle with those there who, for example, are on the frontlines of the worst impacts of climate change. The world is changing all around us, but he isn’t going to come here and just forget his family and people in India. He stands in solidarity and is fighting from the inside — especially as the response to climate change within the Global North is increasingly to shut down borders and push immigrants out. For Nazir, seeing his role and mission in this fight in a clear way and taking the time and care to build those connections is life giving and nourishing. So in conclusion, maintaining an internationalist solidarity and community keeps him going. And plants.

References

“Democratic Socialists of America.” Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), www.dsausa.org/about-us/.

Pellow, David N. What Is Critical Environmental Justice? Polity Press, 2018.

“Peoples Climate Movement.” Peoples Climate Movement, peoplesclimate.org/.

Wolf, Zachary B. “Ocasio-Cortez and Progressives Score a Victory in Amazon Fight.” CNN, Cable News Network, 14 Feb. 2019, www.cnn.com/2019/02/08/politics/amazon-backlash-alexandria-ocasio-cortez/index.html.