Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design-certified energy projects have cropped up in the most peculiar of places: Northside Elementary School in Chapel Hill, the courthouse in downtown Durham, the Greenbridge mixed-use development in Chapel Hill and the Genome Science Building on campus. And, early last year, I learned that Orange County hired an architecture firm “well-versed in correctional center and energy-efficient design” to plan a new $20 million jail.
Yet, for me, these developments incite disdain, rather than excitement.
Below the skylights of Northside Elementary School, school discipline and policing policies are actively surveilling and pathologizing Black and Brown youth. Black students are deemed defiant, disruptive and disrespectful and are five times more likely to receive suspensions than white students across Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools. Beyond these glaring disparities exists a reality in which our schools are operating as spaces of racial violence.
Beneath the green roof of the Durham County courthouse, the court and prison systems are reproducing the racialized underpinnings of chattel slavery. Black and Brown people are being criminalized, contained and killed. “The judicial branch of the government was made to recycle us,” writes Thomas Clayton, an inmate in the detention facility awaiting trial.
In the shadows of the solar installations at Greenbridge, developers are exploiting urban rent gaps and uprooting the neighboring Black, working-class Northside community. The development perpetuates insidious and racialized processes of gentrification that have marginalized Northside residents for decades.
The Genome Science Building, our campus’ latest fixture, is situated within a racialized campus geography. Our university’s commitment to sustainability and innovation competes with its commitment to preserving a tradition of white supremacy and racism.
The more I see LEED certification, the more I realize that commitments to sustainability are false metrics of ethics. Greenness permeates within sites of oppression to mask systems of racial capitalism.
The capital leveraged to “greenwash” institutions is the same capital repurposed to oppress Black and Brown people. The recycling of physical material juxtaposes the recycling of Black and Brown bodies, just as the commodification of carbon emissions parallels the commodification of Black and Brown labor.
Such insidious processes of marginalization have been sanitized under the guise of energy efficiency and sustainability. Oppression is OK as long as it’s LEED certified.
