What role does race play in how we process those emotions?
In my research, I found that people of color reported the most distressing feelings and were statistically significantly more likely to feel traumatized by the effects of climate change. They also reported feeling more fearful than white respondents.
They also reported feeling overwhelmed. This came up a lot in the interviews. What I didn’t expect, but it’s important to note, is that when it comes to parenting in the midst of climate change, people of color were the most likely to report positive or action-oriented emotions in my research, like motivation, determination, happiness, and optimism. Because this was a quantitative study, I wasn’t able to ask why they had those positive emotions.
But I can only imagine that this is because there’s a long history of people of color facing existential threats. Black and Indigenous people in particular have had to develop the tools to be resilient within their communities, families, and social movements. So I can only imagine that the response — motivation, joy, determination, happiness — comes from a sense of, “We’re going to survive, we’re going to endure, and we’re going to find a way to thrive no matter what the future holds.”
So does your work really highlight the importance of African-Americans and communities of color finding strength from their families in the face of these threats?
It’s not just family. In America, we can trace a long history of black people literally facing existential threats, going back to the very beginning of coming to this country through slavery, so one of the institutions that has always been so important to protect us from harm from the outside world is family, and not just family, but multigenerational family. And for us, that often includes chosen families.
We all have “make cousins,” “make aunts,” and “make uncles” — people we’re not related to by blood. But that’s okay: they’re part of our family. Forging and maintaining these multigenerational bonds has always been important, not only to help us cope with greater existential threats, but also to make us stronger in a society where we often lack the resources and social support we need.
We often lack a social safety net that can provide the support we need. Other institutions provide that support. Churches, for example. Say what you want about the Black church. There are challenges, there have always been challenges, but the Black church has been a very important institution in African-American life, not just for religious reasons, but for social reasons. It was a very important institution throughout the civil rights movement.
And it provides a space of safety, solace, and community as a buffer against the many challenges of the outside world. How does all of this come back to climate anxiety and children’s issues? In the absence of studies that include African Americans, for example, we tend to assume that we don’t experience climate anxiety, or that if we do, it doesn’t have any impact on our children’s issues. But that’s not true.