By Preeti Mangala Shekar and Tram Nguyen
Last year, the Oakland-based Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, with a miniscule staff and budget, worked relentlessly to pass the Green Jobs Act in Congress—a bill that if authorized will direct $125 million to green the nation’s workforce and train 35,000 people each year for “green-collar jobs.” That summer, Ella Baker Center and the Oakland Alliance also secured $250,000 from the city to build the Oakland Green Jobs Corp, a training program that promises to explicitly serve what is probably the most underutilized resource of Oakland: young working-class men and women of color.
In these efforts lay a hopeful vision—that the crises-ridden worlds of economics and environmentalism would converge to address the other huge crisis—racism in the United States. It is what some of its advocates call a potential paradigm shift that, necessitated by the earth’s climate crisis, can point the way out of “gray capitalism” and into a green, more equitable economy. The engine of this model is driven by the young and proactive leadership of people of color who intend to build a different solution for communities of color.
Van Jones, president of the newly formed Green for All campaign, talks about how earlier waves of economic flourishes didn’t much impact Black communities. “When the dotcom boom went bust, you didn’t see no Black man lose his shirt,” he points out, only half joking. “Black people were the least invested in it.”
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