Thinking and being otherwise: Liberatory environmental justice and the 'Black Metropolis'

Abstract

When Chicago was founded in 1833, it was an abstract grid that operated as an instrument of procession and dispossession. Almost a century later, sociologists Robert E. Park and Eugene Burgess mapped another process of possession and dispossession as they studied the city’s social organisation. Their students St. Clare Drake and Howard Cayton adapted that map in their 1945 book, Black Metropolis. Both Park and Burgess, who were white, and Drake and Cayton, who were Black, marked the area of the city where Black people lived, situating it as an anomaly cutting through an otherwise well-determined model of urban growth. Park and Burgess labelled this territory the ‘Black Belt’ while Drake and Cayton named it the ‘Black Metropolis’, representing a radically different understanding of the city as a particular form of optimism. Using the notion of ‘Black optimism’ that emerges out of Fred Moten’s understanding of the Black Radical tradition as a framework, this paper argues that Blacks in Green, a Chicago community organisation, has advanced a form of radical sustainability that asks us to learn how to think and be ‘otherwise’. It pursues a form of environmental justice that depends on African American heritage, particularly abolition and reconstruction, to create new possibilities for Drake and Cayton’s ‘Black Metropolis’.