Rooting for Black Land Ownership

Exploring the history of land theft in the U.S., Brea Baker argues that the Black reparations and Indigenous Landback movements are stronger together.

I do my best meditating when floating in water. Maybe it’s the way floating requires you to trust nature and your body to do what they do best. Surrendering to your own buoyancy with the water muting all sounds is a freeing reminder that we overcomplicate life to our own detriment. We are born with everything we need to float, and so the only thing left to do is be. Only when we doubt nature does our body begin to panic and sink.

I’ve begun to think that our relationship to the environment around us operates in the same way. Capitalists have tried everything under the sun to make farming—and everything associated with it—faster, cheaper, bigger, better. Call it the God complex in them. Time and time again we find out that these human interventions are disrupting an age-old process. Instead of deferring to Indigenous expertise, the pursuit of money will always lead greedy people to believe they know better than anyone else. Capitalists’ hubris is not-so-slowly killing us all, including this planet we call home.

Our family’s land is inland, but not too far from the coast. North Carolina’s barrier islands have historically protected the rest of the state from natural disasters and the Atlantic Ocean. Increasingly, as the utility of those wetlands and small islands has been ignored in favor of resorts and golf courses, floods swallow up streets, destroy dams, and make gainful farming even more precarious than it already was. After Hurricane Matthew ravaged most of the state, the dam on our family land cracked and the lake that once teemed with beavers and fish is now more mud than anything else. Water from nearby creeks and brooks flows through the area with nothing keeping the water in place. The flooding is insistent. Working-class Black people and other marginalized people across the country are forced to live in areas where no one else wants to live: places with infertile soil that flood easily; areas categorized as food deserts; crowded apartments with lead poison in the paint, toxins in the playground soil, and pollutants in the air.

This is not accidental or naturally occurring; often Black and Indigenous people are pushed onto depleted land and forced to bear the weight of problems created and exacerbated by wealthy white people, primarily because the powerful get to decide who pays their consequences. Land theft, then, is a centuries-long public health crisis. Sometimes, especially throughout the nineteenth century, environmental degradation was a purposeful act of warfare against an already disenfranchised people.

Unfortunately, the generals who ordered the destruction of land, animals, and natural resources were too shortsighted to see how those choices would ripple out and impact their own descendants as well. In his piece “A Rational Agriculture Is Incompatible With Capitalism,” Fred Magdoff argues that the strategies that “make eminent sense for the individual capitalist or company … end up being a problem not only for workers, but the capitalist system itself. … Many practices and side effects of the way the system functions degrade the ecosystem and its processes on which we depend and may also directly harm humans.”

Public educator and self-described eco-communicator Leah Thomas has heavily explored the relationship between social justice and environmentalism. In The Intersectional Environmentalist, a book named after both a term she coined and the platform she founded, Thomas introduces readers to Black environmental activists who have been sounding the alarm on the extractive practices of engaging with the planet for decades, as well as naming and amplifying the dire consequences for biodiversity, wildlife, and natural resources. Those outcomes in turn are deadly, and the people doing the most harm—those who hire private firefighters in the face of incessant wildfires, for instance—move around the globe freely, even search for new planets to hide on, while the rest of us shoulder the burden.

One of the advocates whom Thomas profiles in her book is Hazel M. Johnson, a Black woman from the South Side of Chicago who became a researcher and community activist after watching her husband and neighbors die from lung cancer at alarming rates. Johnson’s research revealed that Altgeld Gardens Homes, the housing project where she lived, was constructed on a plot of land known to have abnormally high asbestos levels, and that their neighborhood was surrounded by landfills and toxic waste sites. Having abruptly become a single mother of seven, Johnson began investigating the respiratory, carcinogenic, and skin conditions that her loved ones were facing after extended exposure to the fumes and water of the Altgeld Gardens area. Johnson later coined the term “toxic doughnut” to describe the phenomenon experienced nationwide but especially in urban centers, as well as throughout the South, where you are exposed to high concentrations of hazardous waste.

The ominously known “Cancer Alley,” which some residents feel is more apt to be called “Death Row,” is a less-than-100-acre stretch of land in southern Louisiana with the ninth-highest cancer death rate in the nation (as of 2020) and is responsible for more than a quarter of all petrochemical production. According to the 2021 Toxics Release Inventory Factsheet, which tracks the management of chemicals that threaten human health and the environment, Louisiana has the second-highest amount of toxic releases per square mile in the country. Along the Mississippi River, industrial headquarters and towering metal forts have been stationed as great return on investment to shareholders, but the greatest cost being paid is by the Black residents along the riverbanks and nearby parishes.

In one parish that falls within Cancer Alley, St. Gabriel residents are surrounded by more than two dozen chemical plants within 10 to 15 miles of their homes. Further south, in Wallace of St. John the Baptist Parish, where 90% of the population is Black and has spent the majority of their lives just miles from where their ancestors were enslaved, petrochemical plant emissions have created abnormally and astronomically high cancer rates. Clint Smith quoted civil rights leader Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, who said this of Cancer Alley: “The same land that held people captive through slavery is now holding people captive through this environmental injustice and devastation.”

The density of chemical plants in such a small area has compounded risks for many Louisianans who call the St. James Parish area home. Despite decades of protests, plans to build new chemical plants continue to be introduced and approved by local officials while more Black people die or lose the only land they’ve ever known. In 2018, the St. James Parish Council approved a private development initiative led by one of the largest plastics facilities in the world. The “Sunshine Project” would build 14 new facilities in Cancer Alley atop 2,400 acres, thanks to more than $1 billion in government subsidies and tax breaks. If successful, the project would allegedly bring in $9 billion and countless jobs in exchange for more than double the risk of being diagnosed with cancer for St. James Parish residents. Representatives of the United Nations have resisted the proposed expansion, claiming that the emissions of a single parish would exceed the emissions of 113 countries.

The hazy, smoke-filled air, full of mysterious chemicals that simultaneously flow into the river, affect the almost 1 million people who live in what has been dubbed a “sacrifice zone.” Just as it sounds, these zones have been deemed irreparably damaged for both people and land. The term first popped up to describe the ghost mine sites and the long-term effects of extracting so much from the land that there is little else to do with said land. That’s not to say that sacrifice zones are uninhabited, but that the damage will be felt by anyone deciding—or forced—to remain post-designation.

As Naomi Klein divulged in her book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, “Extractivism is also directly connected to the notion of sacrifice zones—places that, to their extractors, somehow don’t count and therefore can be poisoned, drained, or otherwise destroyed for the supposed greater good.” One Brooklyn high school teacher, Rosemarie Frascella, explored the concept with her 11th grade students, breaking down the idea that the sacrifice came without choice: “Someone else is sacrificing people and their community or land without their permission.”

The same violent methods used to push Black and Indigenous people off of land have had dire consequences for the planet, too. Public health and environmental health are inextricably linked; what hurts soil, water, animals, and air almost always hurts us as well. By separating ourselves from the natural world, we are dooming the planet to apocalyptic nightmares, and Black and Indigenous people to early graves. With each species of animal that goes extinct, every site of natural beauty that is desecrated, all of the trees that are torn down, and every body of water that turns sour from oil, trash, chemicals, or a combination of the three, we all suffer.

Only when we release the need to be subduers of all else will we return ourselves and this land to its rightful equilibrium. Indigenous people across the world have always centered reciprocity with all living things and the refusal to mind that wisdom has proven fatal. History has shown us repeatedly that Indigenous and Black people must lead the charge to remembering and restoring. We crave a return to the land, yes, but the land wants—needs—us back too. Reparation is a racial and economic justice policy as well as a climate necessity. The future of this planet depends on our collective willingness to deliver that justice.

Excerpted from Rooted: The American Legacy of Land Theft and the Modern Movement for Black Land Ownership, copyright © 2024 by Brea Baker. Used by permission of One World, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Brea Baker has been working on the frontlines for more than a decade. She believes deeply in nuanced storytelling and Black culture to drive change, and has commented on race, gender, and sexuality for Elle, Harper’s BAZAAR, Refinery29, them., and more. Her writing has been featured in the anthologies Our History Has Always Been Contraband and No Justice, No Peace. A Yale alumna, Brea has been recognized as a 2017 Glamour Woman of the Year, a 2019 i-D Up and Rising, and a 2023 Creative Capital awardee. She has spoken at the United Nations’ Girl Up Initiative, Yale Law School, the Youth 2 Youth Summit in Hong Kong, the Museum of City of New York, and more.