How does race impact the way we all process these emotions?
According to the survey I conducted, the most disturbing emotions were reported by people of color, who, in a statistically significant way, were most likely to identify feelings of trauma caused by the effects of climate change. They also reported feeling fear to a greater extent than white respondents.
They also reported feeling overwhelmed. And this also came up often in interviews. What I didn’t expect – but it’s also significant – is that when it comes to parenting in the face of climate change, people of color in my study were most likely to report positive or action-oriented emotions, including feeling motivated, feeling determined, feeling cheerful or bullish. Because it was a quantitative survey, I wasn’t able to ask questions about where these positive emotions come from.
But I can only imagine it’s because people of color actually have a long history of facing existential threats. Black and Indigenous people in particular have had to develop tools that allow them to become resilient in community, family and social movements. So I can only imagine that these reactions of motivation, joy, determination and happiness come from the feeling: “We will survive, we will survive, and no matter what the future holds for us, we will find a way to thrive.”
So does your work really highlight the importance of African Americans and communities of color drawing strength from family in the face of these threats?
Not just family. We can trace the long history of Black people in the United States literally facing threats to our existence, starting from literally our earliest days in this country through slavery. And so one of the things that has always been a really crucial institution that protects us from the harm of the outside world is the family, and not just the family, but the extended family. And in our case it is often a chosen family.
We all have “funny cousins”, “funny aunts”, “funny uncles” – people who are not biological relatives. But the lack of biological relationship does not matter at all. They are family members. Building and maintaining these multigenerational bonds has always been crucial to strengthen us, not only in the face of major existential threats, but to strengthen us in a society where we often do not have the necessary resources and social support that we need.
We often lack a social safety net to provide us with the resources we need. Other institutions also provide this support. For example, church. Say what you will about the Black Church – there are challenges, there have always been challenges, but the Black Church has been a really crucial institution in the lives of African Americans, not just for religious reasons, but for social reasons. It was a very crucial institution throughout the Civil Rights Movement.
It provides a space of safety, comfort and community as a buffer against the many challenges of the outside world. How does this all boil down to climate anxiety and the question of having a baby? Well, unless research is done on African-Americans, for example, it tends to be assumed that we don’t have climate anxiety, or that if we do, it has no bearing on our children’s questions. And that’s not true.