How does race affect the way we all process those emotions?
What I found in the surveys I conducted was that the most painful feelings were reported by people of color. They were the most likely to identify as having been traumatized by the impacts of climate change in a statistically significant way. They also reported feeling more fearful than white respondents.
And they also reported feeling overwhelmed. And those words came up a lot in interviews. What I didn’t expect, but this is also important, is that people of color in my research on parenting amid climate change were the most likely to report positive or action-oriented emotions, including feeling motivated and decisive. no see. , feeling happy or optimistic. Because it was a quantitative survey, we couldn’t ask why people had such positive feelings.
But I can’t imagine it’s because people of color have a long history of facing existential threats. Black and Indigenous people in particular have had to develop tools for resilience within their communities, families, and social movements. So I can imagine that response of motivation, joy, determination, and happiness comes from a sense of, “We will survive, we will persevere, and we will find a way to succeed no matter what future lies ahead.”
So does your work really highlight the importance of African Americans and communities of color drawing strength from their families in the face of these threats?
It’s not just family. We can trace the long history of black Americans facing threats to our existence through slavery literally from the earliest days of settlement in the United States. So one of the really important institutions that has always protected us from the harm of the outside world is the family, and not just the family, but the multi-generational family. And we often include selected families.
We all have “playing cousins,” “playing aunts,” and “playing uncles” who are not biological relatives. But the lack of biological relationship doesn’t matter at all. They are members of the family. Building and maintaining these multi-generational bonds has always been important, not only to confront great existential threats, but also to strengthen us in a society where we often lack the resources and social support we need.
We often do not have a social safety net to support us in the way we need to. Other organizations also provide this support. Church for example. Say what you want about the black church. Although there have been difficulties, and there have always been difficulties, the black church was a really important institution in the lives of African Americans, not only for religious reasons but also for social reasons. It was a very important institution throughout the civil rights movement.
And it provides a space of safety, comfort, and community as a buffer against the many challenges of the outside world. How does this all come back to climate anxiety and children’s questions? For example, without studies including African Americans, we tend to assume that they do not experience climate anxiety, or that if they do, it has no effect on children’s questions. . And that’s not true.
