"The hurricane happened in between pay periods."

Episode 12 of Shack & Mu comes from the 11th annual HBCU Climate Change Conference in New Orleans with two guests who have decades in this work, Vernice Miller-Travis and Susana Almanza. They discuss in-depth what environmental injustice and climate do to families.

Vernice starts with a detail about Katrina that rarely makes the retellings. August 29 fell between pay periods. People had been paid the week before and would not be paid again for a week, so when the order came to leave, plenty of households had nothing to leave with. Not everyone had a car, and the Lower Ninth is not a walk from downtown, the only part of the city that stayed dry.

From there she makes the case for retiring the word resilience. Communities get knocked down, get back up, and get complimented on how well they take it, which leaves the knocking down unexamined. The recovery money bears her out. The Fifth Ward in Houston is still waiting years after Harvey while white neighborhoods got their FEMA money, eastern North Carolina got nothing a year on, Altadena's historic Black community is gone. What counts as resilience to her now is what people build for themselves. She also explains why the Lower Ninth flooded the way it did. The Army Corps channelized the Mississippi so tankers could reach the Gulf faster, and the wetlands that absorb storm surge went with it. Sankofa's wetland park is putting some back.

Susana Almanza grew up in East Austin in a family of ten. Tenth Street was the line between the Latino and Black neighborhoods, Austin's master plan put every community of color east of the highway, and school meant getting your mouth washed out with soap for speaking Spanish. PODER's fight now runs through land use. Development at 80 percent impervious cover, heat islands at 105 degrees, kids with asthma, landscapers with no guaranteed water break. Houses bought for two to eighteen thousand dollars are assessed at half a million now, and the property tax does the evicting. After PODER pushed six fuel storage operations out of East Austin, the towers went up on that land. The People's Plan of 2018 laid out a community land trust and cumulative impact rules. The ordinances are already written.

CHAPTERS

0:00 Family and the climate crisis

1:14 Vernice Miller-Travis joins

2:20 Katrina hit between pay periods

4:49 Retire the word resilience

6:45 FEMA money, Fifth Ward, Altadena

9:13 Sankofa and the 40 acre wetland park

10:47 Booker T. Washington and Sankofa

11:50 Stax, Al Green, and Isaac Hayes

14:22 Susana Almanza of PODER joins

17:26 Impervious cover and 105 degree heat

19:46 The People's Plan and a land trust

20:50 Economic racism and the property tax

22:00 The tank farm left, the towers arrived

23:29 Mercy Mercy Me and Gracias a la Vida

24:45 Closing

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Evacuation is a money question. Katrina made landfall between paychecks.

Resilience praises people for surviving what should not keep happening.

Recovery money does not reach everyone. Harvey, eastern North Carolina, and Altadena show it.

Displacement runs through land use and property tax, not only rent.

ABOUT OUR GUESTS

Vernice Miller-Travis is a longtime environmental justice leader, co-founder of WE ACT for Environmental Justice in Harlem, and a board member of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition.

Susana Almanza co-founded PODER, People Organized in Defense of Earth and Her Resources, in 1991 and directs it. She was born and raised in East Austin.

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"I think the answer is pretty simple. Being comfortable with the uncomfortable."

Episode 11 of Shack & Mu hands the mics to two HBCU students at the HBCU Climate Change Conference. Dr. Mustafa Santiago Ali opens on June Jordan's line that we are the ones we have been waiting for, then he and Dr. Sacoby Wilson hear from Joseph Carter, a junior political science major at Texas Southern University, and Sincere Harrison, a senior at Clark Atlanta University who came up through the Bullard Center's Environmental Justice Climate Corps.

The gap they describe first is awareness. Students are living with exposures nobody has told them about. Mold came up as the example, in homes and in campus facilities, and neither of them knew much about it until the research put it in front of them. Both want to make the subject interesting enough that other students actually engage.

Then the question of where power comes from when the world makes you feel small. Joseph is the youngest person at his law firm and the youngest in the Texas Legislative Internship Program, which usually takes law students. He works housing defense across 72 counties in Texas, fighting unlawful evictions and the conditions landlords leave behind. Sincere walked into the Bullard Center internship with no idea what environmental justice was, spent a month in the field looking at what was fouling the air in Black communities, and has since recruited four students into the summer program.

What they carry back to campus comes down to exposure. Joseph noticed a Harvard summer program had two Texas Southern students in it while other HBCUs sent far more, and he runs a nonprofit pushing opportunities to students on his campus and high schoolers around Houston. Sincere does the same at Clark Atlanta for the students behind him, because nobody told him those doors existed either.

CHAPTERS

0:00 June Jordan and the next generation

0:29 Fighting for climate justice while in college

0:56 Mold, and what students are not being told

2:06 The Bullard Center internship

2:59 Why Clark Atlanta matters to this movement

3:12 You have power unless you give it away

3:43 Comfortable with the uncomfortable

4:47 Being the good you want to see

6:12 What they take back to campus

6:39 Only two Texas Southern students at Harvard

7:43 The arts question

8:06 J. Cole, Drake, and telling a story

8:38 Nas, If I Ruled the World

9:18 Closing

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Awareness comes first. Mold and air quality are already in dorms and neighborhoods, and nobody tells students.

Discomfort is the cost of the room. Both describe being the youngest or the newest in the building and walking in anyway.

One internship can redirect a career. Sincere knew nothing about environmental justice until a month in the field.

Exposure compounds. Every opportunity passed down to a sophomore puts somebody else on the path.

ABOUT OUR GUESTS

Joseph Carter is a junior political science major at Texas Southern University. He interns with the Texas Legislative Internship Program at a firm doing housing defense work across Texas, and runs a nonprofit that gets opportunity information into students' hands.

Sincere Harrison is a senior at Clark Atlanta University on a pre-law track, studying criminal justice with a sociology minor. He came through the Bullard Center's HBCU Environmental Justice Climate Corps and now recruits students into it.

Find the environmental justice center closest to your campus and ask what they need. Then tell the students behind you.

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"Either I'm going to complain, I'm going to leave, or I'm going to do something about it."

Episode 10 of Shack & Mu is in New Orleans, where culture is not decoration. It is the strategy. Dr. Mustafa Santiago Ali and Dr. Sacoby Wilson open on Amiri Baraka's line that an artist's role is to raise the consciousness of the people, then sit down with Rashida Ferdinand, founder of Sankofa Community Development Corporation in the Lower Ninth Ward.

Food comes first, because in this city food is history you can eat. On Sankofa's land that history is growing: field peas and purple hull peas, okra, hibiscus for tea, thyme and basil, tomatoes, chickens laying fresh eggs, beehives making honey. The point is not just access to groceries. It is owning the ground your food comes from. The organization takes its name from the Ghanaian concept of going back to your past to build your future, adopted after Katrina when the resources promised to the Lower Ninth never arrived.

Then the land itself. Four generations of her family have lived in that neighborhood, and her grandfather's house stood three blocks from the wetland park Sankofa restored. Go back a hundred years and this was marsh and swamp, so the restoration was less about building something new than pulling away what had been laid on top of what was already there. The people who know it best live on the block. Elders who grew up playing in that water were naturalists long before anyone handed them the word, and some are park rangers now, guiding tours from memory.

Art runs through all of it. She is a sculptor and a potter, and the clay she works with comes out of the ground at the park. Everybody is an artist, and the creative act here was sculpting the land itself. The episode closes on how the model travels: education programs, school partnerships, and a way of working other neighborhoods can pick up.

In this episode

• (0:00) Amiri Baraka and the role of the artist
• (0:19) Red beans, gumbo, and the history in the food
• (0:57) Katrina, petrochemicals, and other hazards
• (1:22) Meet Rashida Ferdinand of Sankofa
• (2:59) Why the name Sankofa
• (4:02) Field peas, okra, hibiscus, chickens, bees
• (4:53) Nature's supermarket and owning your food
• (5:11) Looking across the Lower Ninth after Katrina
• (5:28) Complain, leave, or do something about it
• (6:02) The vision has to come from the community
• (6:15) Four generations, three blocks from the wetland
• (6:45) What a wetland does for a neighborhood
• (7:10) The elders who were naturalists first
• (7:47) Getting kids back into nature based spaces
• (8:42) The soil has memory: art and the work
• (9:19) A sculptor whose clay comes from the park
• (10:30) Scaling the model past the Lower Ninth
• (11:13) Honoring what the land used to be
• (12:11) Partners doing the work alongside them
• (14:08) Power to the people

Key takeaways

• Sankofa means going back to your past to build your future. The name is not a slogan, it is the method.
• Ownership beats access. Growing field peas, okra, hibiscus, herbs, eggs, and honey puts the food supply in community hands.
• The wetland was always there. Restoring it meant removing what covered it, not inventing something new.
• The experts live on the block. Elders who grew up in that marsh guide the tours now, teaching from memory.
• Everybody is an artist. She digs the clay for her pottery out of the park she helped bring back.

About our guestRashida Ferdinand is the founder and executive director of Sankofa Community Development Corporation in New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward, and a ceramic artist. Sankofa runs food access programs, gardens, and the Sankofa Wetland Park and Nature Trail. More at sankofanola.org.

Go back to get it. Learn what your land used to be, find the neighbors who remember, and start with what you can grow.

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