God and the Green Divide: Religious Environmentalism in Black and White by Amanda J. Baugh

Author:Amanda J. Baugh
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780520291164
Publisher: University of California Press

If we’re going to try to make this [environmental] movement more diverse, if we want to invite more people in, we need to think about things like this. Because if you had more black folks here to begin with, they wouldn’t be here by now. They would have left the conference and gone out to look for some meat.74

Even though Kyle had been vegetarian herself at several points throughout her life, she saw the absence of meat at this conference as a significant cultural barrier that would exclude other African Americans. While the conference’s vegetarian menu may have conveyed alignment with environmental values to most of the diners, to Kyle it represented something else: the exclusivity and cultural insensitivity embedded in a cuisine that catered to the preferences of the conference’s affluent white participants.

Kyle’s point seemed to be lost by the other people sitting at our table, but that moment exemplified her role at Faith in Place. Hired to conduct congregational outreach especially among African American communities, Kyle functioned as a cultural mediator, a black middlewoman working to bridge the divide between Faith in Place’s black and white audiences. At Faith in Place she pointed out cultural barriers, such as food choices, that she saw as obstacles preventing African Americans from developing a sense of full membership in the environmental movement. Through Kyle’s influence Faith in Place shifted its major fund-raising event, the Harvest Celebration, from a formal affair featuring gourmet food prepared by locally renowned chefs to “a fried-chicken and macaroni and cheese kind of night . . . with plenty of comfort food and cheer to go around.”75 Kyle also endeavored to cultivate an image of African Americans as respectable middle-class citizens, not as victims in desperate need of white people’s help. But even as she worked to challenge white stereotypes about her community, Kyle offered an essentialized blackness of her own, illustrated at the conference by her suggestion that black people would feel alienated without meat. She enforced a normative view of blackness to the Bible study women as well, silencing any possibility of a black vegetarianism and privileging an idealized agricultural past in which African Americans grew their own food and built community solidarity by harvesting, canning, and purchasing vegetables from the truck farmer. Even as she worked to defy white stereotypes about African Americans as poor and oppressed, she rallied members of the black middle class to advance environmental efforts in order to improve the situations of the black working poor. In her leadership role at Faith in Place, Kyle’s use of racial language was fluid as she approached different situations and different audiences. While embracing environmental activism as part of a display of middle-class respectability, she also emphasized the past errors of the environmental movement as evidenced by the persistence of an “eco-divide.”

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