ecoAmerica in Paris Day 5: Can Hip-Hop & Faith Build Climate Support In Paris’ Low Income Areas?
Outside of the Paris “beltway,” (Boulevard Périphérique), far from the climate talks and the palaces and villas where side meetings and donor discussions are taking place, are suburbs that are home to many of Paris’s immigrants, including Muslim families from Africa (France has the largest Muslim population in Western Europe, an estimated 5-10% of is 66.7 million people). The French word for these suburbs, 'Banlieues,' has become pejoarative—slums inundated by immigrants.
Much of the Banlieues contain massive concrete housing projects built after WWII to provide “utopian” housing to French factory workers, but they have instead become concentrations of poverty and isolation, as described by George Packer in the New Yorker last August. But this is exactly where U.S.-based nonprofit, the Hip Hop Caucus is heading in a chartered bus the day after I meet with its director of operations, Luther Adamson, whose professional name is Blak Foks (pronounced “Black Folks”).
“We have all the world leaders here today at once,” says Adamson, “and no one is reaching out to those communities outside the circle of Paris. I have been here twice in the past month and talked to those communities. The average poor person or person of color has no interest in COP21. We’re gonna let them know what’s going on, that it affects them more than they know.”
Founded in 2004, Hip Hop Caucus is a nonprofit organization that connects the hip hop community to the civic process to build power and create positive change. It does this by developing community leaders to organize for collective action, increasing public support for solutions that achieve justice and sustainability, and helping disadvantaged communities become political advocates across a range of issues to improve their own communities and lives. Climate change has become a major priority for the caucus.
You may remember The Hip-Hop Caucus from campaigns that asked the world to 'Respect My Vote,' with more recent efforts honing in on climate solutions. Hip-Hop Caucus President, Rev. Lennox Yearwood was even honored alongside Blessed Tomorrow faith leader, Rev. Durley, at the WhiteHouse for their climate initiatives this past summer.
“We use hip-hop, which we all know is a universal language…hip hop is everywhere…so we use that vehicle to influence, to get people involved,” says Adamson, who spent 12 years in the army before joining the music industry. “We have more than a hundred artists actively engaged with the Hip Hop Caucus doing different projects, including voting rights…and that project is heating up again and about to kick off in 2016. We have another artist that I don’t want to announce yet, but it’s gonna be huge.”
Interest will likely be high in the Hip Hop Caucus bus headed for one of the poorest suburbs, as on board will be Malik Yusef, a poet and five-time Grammy-winning artist who also writes lyrics for stars like Kanye West, and Antonique Smith, a Grammy-nominated artist who played Faith Evans in the film “Notorious,” and Mimi in the musical Rent on Broadway.
The Hip Hop Caucus will conduct a roundtable with officials, hip hop artists, and everyday citizens in one of the poorest Banlieues. “We are a movement that looks like the people, feels like them,” says Adamson. "That’s important, because one thing about poor communities and ethnic groups, they know what’s real when it comes to them. If it doesn’t feel right, doesn’t look right, they won’t even show up. Would you?”
It’s hard to imagine a better messenger on climate for the Banlieues than Malik Yusef. Raised in the Chicago South Side neighborhood known as the “Wild 100’s” and a former member of an Islamic street gang, Yusef has evolved from a street hustler to a street poet and a staunch advocate of urban revitalization and extensive social reforms.
“We need this real authentic, organic climate movement with continuous communication,” says Adamson. “Black and Hispanics have the highest rates of cancers, of respiratory diseases. The factories are always in the poor communities. A lot of people think that things like asthma are hereditary, which it is not. It is in the air.”
These are messages the Hip Hop Caucus brings to poor communities, along with ideas of what they can do about it.
For example, if a new power plant is proposed for someone’s neighborhood, and jobs are being promised to the locals, says Adamson, “We tell them a factory could still be built, they could still have a job, but it could be using clean energy. So it’s important that this community activate and demand that this factory switches to clean energy. We let them know that ‘we have this voice.’”
It is not always an easy task. “There are disconnects,” says Adamson, “The average person, they are just focused on getting by. They are focused just on paying the bills, on food for their families, not on climate change.”
But with stars like Yusef and Smith (who is making the circuit here in Paris with a moving rendition of Mercy Mercy Me, a 1971 song by Marvin Gaye that resonates hauntingly true today; the lyrics are below), communicating through the universal language of music. Messages about climate change will certainly reach far beyond the Avenue des Champs-Élysées.
Woo ah, mercy mercy me
Ah things ain't what they used to be, no no
Where did all the blue skies go?
Poison is the wind that blows from the north and south and east
Woo mercy, mercy me, mercy
Ah things ain't what they used to be, no no
Oil wasted on the ocean and upon our seas
Fish full of mercury
Ah oh mercy, mercy me
Ah things ain't what they used to be, no no
Radiation under ground and in the sky
Animals and birds who live nearby are dying
Oh mercy, mercy me
Ah things ain't what they used to be
What about this overcrowded land
How much more abuse from man can she stand?