Hip Hop and Climate Justice

by ZORA UYEDA-HALE

Listening to the radio, you bob your head as Drake’s “God’s Plan” booms from your speakers. Then suddenly, a new track starts playing. Instead of rapping about “Mahbed and my momma,” they’re talking about fossil fuel infrastructures and planted seeds. This genre is eco hip-hop.

From its inception, hip-hop music has represented the variety of lived experiences of Black and Brown people. Artists have created tracks about the prison-industrial complex, capitalism, and poverty. Today, they rap about the climate crisis.

Hip-hop has evolved dramatically since its inception in the 1970s. The music has merged with different genres, become commercialized, and spread all over the world. However, hip-hop music maintains a few common threads: a rhythmic beat, vocals or rapping, and percussive breaks.

Eco hip-hop is no different. It incorporates these recognizable musical elements but speaks on topics of consumerism, climate change, and pollution. In particular, music connects communities of color together around these difficultsubjects, opening avenues to discuss radical change.

Although eco hip-hop is a fairly new genre, young people are already definig themselves within it.

From its inception in the Bronx neighborhood of New York City, young people have been at the forefront of hip-hop culture. In the 1970s, Black, Latinx, and Caribbean youth converged to create what would become one of the most popular music genres in the world. Hence, hip-hop has a big role in modern Black culture.

The Hip Hop Caucus, a nonprofitfocused on connecting the hip-hop community to the political process, honors Black resistance in their work. Whether it’s around voting rights or climate justice, Hip Hop Caucus empowers young people, who resonate with hip-hop culture, to take action. Russell Armstrong is the Policy Director for Climate and Environment at the Hip Hop Caucus.

Based on hip hop’s origin story, he commented on music’s strong influenceand function in Black history. “Music is already a part of [our] own identity,” Armstrong explains. “As Black Americans coming from the slavery days onwards, [music] was a way for people to come together, to organize, to socialize.”

Therefore, for Black youth in particular, hiphop creates belonging and familiarity. In the Bay Area, Youth vs Apocalypse (YVA) is a group of primarily young, Oakland-based climate activists. They use hiphop to organize, change the narrative, and push for policy. The Hip Hop and Climate Justice committee is led by Aniya Butler, an Oakland high schooler and longtime organizer with YVA.

Since the committee’s formation at the start of the pandemic, Butler has led many youth workshops on topics like rapid songwriting, creative writing, and spoken word. Reflecting onthe impact of these events, she notes, “Having a space like Hip-Hop and Climate Justice allows that sense of this is something I’m familiar [with],” Butler recalled, “This is something I can connect with [as a young person of color].”

Creating these spaces in the environmental movement is of the utmost importance. Many young Black and Brown activists face the brunt of pollution and climate change. This racial inequity is due to environmental racism.

Jim Crow,the Anti-Black system of segregation, discrimination, and violence, supposedly ended after the Civil Rights Movement. However, sixty years later, some activists are labeling environmental racism as the New Jim Crow.

Dr. Robert Bullard, known as the father of environmental justice, is recognized as one of the firstpeople to defineenvironmental racism. In his book, Dumping in Dixie, Bullard states that environmental racism is “any policy, practice or directive that differentially affects or disadvantages (where intended or unintended) individuals, groups or communities based on race.”

This inequity can be, and is often, intentionally structured. For example, the EPA has found that 71% of Black Americans live in counties that are in violation of federal air pollution standards, as compared to 58% of non-Hispanic whites. Consequently, Black Americans have a staggering 36% asthma rate.

In terms of natural disasters, only 50% of Black Americans own their homes, making them susceptible to permanent displacement. This urgent issue was a part of the reason why the Hip Hop Caucus began environmental political mobilization. Their “Think 100%” campaign was a direct product of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Fyütch, a Grammy-nominated hip-hop educator, reflectedon his awareness of environmental racism. “The older I’ve gotten, [I] start[ed] realizing things like cleanliness, food availability, green spaces, and neighborhood functions are hit hardest [in Black communities].”

“Now you realize everything is affecting [us] down to what we eat, how we eat, what’s being promoted to us, [and] how much things have changed since we were younger,” He continues.

Voices like Fyütch’s, who currently lives in the Bronx, New York, are usually overshadowed by larger, predominantly white, environmental organizations. These socially dominant institutions are only beginning to acknowledge these statistics and realities. Eco hip-hop puts the power of storytelling back into the control of those most impacted. The ability to tell your own story is liberating.

Butler affirmsthis sentiment. “Hip hop is an art form of resistance,” Butler said. “Resisting the systems that have been built to deprive us.” It’s more than music. It’s a form of protest and can create tangible change.

When Covid hit, big protests and marches were impossible. However, Youth vs Apocalypse recognized the continued urgency of the climate crisis. “This is not an issue that we’re forgetting about,” Butler said. “The climate crisis is here.”

So, they had to shift their tactics. Their firstmusic video, “No One is Disposable”, was created to bring awareness to the ways that corporations were still prioritizing profitsover people, even during a global pandemic. The video features people of all ages, but primarily young people, rapping, dancing, and holding signs of solidarity.

Three years later, YVA has released several music videos and an EP and led countless community events around hip-hop climate justice. “Youth are taking back our future,” Butler says. “[We] are advocating for a future where we have sustainability and these systems are dismantled.”

Hip-hop culture is often boiled down to music, but at its core, it’s social commentary. Fyütch explains, “Hip hop in its nature, always comments on society, it comments on neighborhoods, it comments on conditions.”

This commentary can be musical but also can be represented in visual art or other types of performance. The Hip Hop Caucus decided to channel this core element of hip-hop into a docuseries.

“Big Oil’s Last Lifeline” interviews frontline communities in Louisiana, Texas, and West Virginia, epicenters of the petrochemical industry. Armstrong explains, “I think that’s the whole purpose of [hip-hop] culture, being that it arises from many folks, many people engaging with it.” When more voices are elevated, the culture expands.

One last application of eco hip-hop is in the classroom. Fyütch has been a musician and spoken word artist for his whole life. After interning for a school arts program during college, he realized these passions were very similar. “Spoken Word is very related to that same energy of hip hop,” Fyütch recalled. “It was more of an untapped lane.”

From there he never looked back, using hip-hop to educate on Black history, empathy, and sustainability. “[Hip-hop] meets kids where they’re at,” Fyutch says, “I’m meeting them with the energy that they understand. So in that way, it’s a perfect bridge to talk about anything.”

On top of self-expression, the work of Youth vs Apocalypse, Hip Hop Caucus, and Fyütch, demonstrate avenues for tangible policy change. Getting an individual to watch a music video, attend a workshop, or watch a docuseries may not seem impactful. However, systemic change starts with individual action.

As Fyütch points out, “the future CEOs of these corporations are in the classrooms right now.”

In urban settings, the city is the environment. Young Black people face everyday environmental racism in the form of food apartheid, air pollution, and contaminated soil and drinking water. Eco hip-hop gives a platform, vocabulary, and community to express lived experiences and dreams for a better future.