“We’re actually Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory in Michigan. How you just going to sit here using these people as guinea pigs?”
Often, these communities are portrayed as hapless, or helpless. But OneZero spoke with four environmental justice activists in Detroit who have taken their own futures — and the future of their communities — into their own hands.
“Eventually a lightbulb goes off and you see that your community is a sacrifice,” says Martin. “We’re actually Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory in Michigan. How you just going to sit here using these people as guinea pigs?”
Rhiana Gunn-Wright, an architect of the Green New Deal who worked at the Detroit Health Department during the Snyder administration, saw firsthand that white residents living near the Marathon oil refinery in Oakwood Heights were bought out of their property, while Black residents in Boynton were not.
“I think as climate change worsens, you’re going to see more and more Detroits, where the wealthier part of the tax base leaves, the people who are left are the poorest, yet there’s all of this infrastructure to maintain,” she says.
Environmental justice activists have been fighting for a healthier Motor City for nearly 40 years.
Donelle Wilkins, a pioneer in the environmental justice movement in Detroit, is one of them. In the 1980s, Wilkins was an occupational safety worker who became part of a conversation to erect a new solid waste incinerator in the middle of the city. The people involved in building the incinerator, mostly white men, saw it as an opportunity for a new construction job, she says. Government officials and many citizens were excited about it as well: An incinerator, then thought of as a safe, cost-effective waste disposal method, could attract new industries. But the city workers who would eventually have to work in the incinerator facility, many of whom were Black, opposed its construction. Wilkins was there to lobby for them.
