Standing at the Edge of the End?

In the small moments I snatch for myself throughout the day, I weave together my dreams of the future. I think of the house I want to live in, the places I want to visit, the career milestones I want to reach. Mostly, I think of the children I want to have. I think about what their names will be, whether they’ll have chubby toes, whether they’ll be the kind of babies that laugh non-stop or give awkwardly cute open-mouth kisses. I can’t explain why, but I’ve always wanted to have children more than anything else. But this other thought always snakes its way through my daydreams: whether my children or their children will survive the climate crisis. 

My grandmother was raised in Jim Crow-era Alabama, the daughter of sharecroppers and a sharecropper herself. As a child, her life was always a question mark. She lost her siblings to lynchings, murder, cancer, and broken hearts. Back then, Black people were constantly aware of the threat towards their children, an existential anxiety that passes on through generations. 

I say back then, but the existential anxiety hasn’t diminished. In my daydreams, my children’s lives are question marks too, and I’m searching for answers to questions posed by the onslaught of Black tragedy I see on the screen, the onslaught of Black tragedy that it’s my job to write about. If I don’t lose my children to police brutality or childbirth, I’m still not in the clear. Because eventually, unless something changes, I can’t help but think that I will lose them to this climate crisis that’s rapidly swallowing us whole.

In some ways, it feels melodramatic to write these words. I’m in a coffee shop in a stylish Chicago neighborhood, sipping a chai tea latte. Compared to most people, I want for nothing. But I’m haunted by the awareness that the class privilege that protects me is a thin veil, snagging every day. And even if I were safer, if my existential dread was more irrational, Black people across the globe are still dying from the climate crisis at wildly disproportionate rates. How could I rest, knowing that?

A few days ago, I interviewed Leah Thomas, author of The Intersectional Environmentalist: How to Dismantle Systems of Oppression to Protect People + Planet. She told me that we have not recognized as a society the rights or even the existence of endangered humans. It was the first time I had heard the word endangered applied so closely to the word human, but what other word can we use when swaths of Black people in the South are getting cancer and dying from environmental toxins? When Black people in prisons drown as if they’re trapped during hurricanes, with no one coming to save them and when Black neighborhoods are intentionally subjected to rising heat, increasing deaths among elderly Black people, are we not endangered?  When the entire continent of Africa is at a much higher risk of decimation from the climate crisis than Western countries, because of centuries of leeching from the land and genociding and enslaving its people, is our continued existence a certainty or something those in power are attempting to render debatable, negotiable?  And it can all be traced back to those original sins — the genocide of Indigenous people, and the enslavement and genocide of Black people all over the world, all to extract from the land, the waters above us and the waters below.  

I feel like to be Black is to constantly feel like you’re being stalked by something—to never feel truly free to love or have children or relax. The next existential threat is always around the corner. And the last existential threat is always something that never really ended. 

I’ve always felt that to bring Black children into this world was primarily an act of joy. It’s resistance too, but I’ve never really felt that deep down, although many people do. But lately, when I think of my children, I think about how I want them to survive. How I want them to learn how to grow their own food and prepare for environmental disasters. When I think of where I want to settle down, I obsessively Google locations predicted to be the least impacted by extreme weather events. The areas are always majority-white places in majority-white countries, and I ponder whether I want my children to experience daily racism or the worst ravages of chaos. 

Projecting your own desires onto your children is usually ill-advised, but I also can’t help but think that I want them to be fighters. To be outspoken, to be educated about the climate crisis, to feel motivated to do something. And immediately, I feel horrible. Because who wants to bring children into this world just to prepare them to struggle? 

Having children is an urge I don’t think I can suppress. I don’t think I’d feel whole if I did, which I’ve attempted to psychoanalyze but have recently decided to simply accept. Black people should embrace our desire to be parents. Simply wanting to have a family is resistance, too. 

But when I used to think of my children, I imagined an ellipse. I imagined these tiny people I made growing up and making more tiny people, who would then make even more tiny people that I’d never meet but that I’d be part of somehow. I imagined myself extending as far as time can go. I didn’t think that having children would start to feel like more of a period, as I started to feel more and more aware that, if nothing changes, I’m living at the end of time itself. 

I vacillate between hopefulness and despair daily, and I know that giving up is an insult to those who came before me and those who are at much more risk than me. But from what I’ve observed of life and power, it’s hard not to feel that I am living at the edge of the end of the world. It’s such a strange sensation to realize that I might not be as infinite as I thought. That I can just… cease to be in every way. And that my family, starting from the most vulnerable in Alabama to the most privileged ones who moved to the comfort of affluent neighborhoods, will also cease to be. After all, our ancestors endured, what will become of us? 

This generation of Black people are not the only ones who faced death and the end of their worlds, but  we are reckoning with the end of the world. For many of us, it feels like there will soon be no trees for our children to climb, no lakes for them to swim in, no air for them to breathe. We have so little time for the world to change. 

When I was a little girl, my grandma used to tell me Bible stories, from a book that was imposed upon us centuries ago but has given so many Black people comfort as we dealt with unimaginable threats to our existence. My favorite story was Esther because I just couldn’t imagine what strength it must have taken to realize that your people might cease to be, might come to an end, and to step in and do something. I would read the story repeatedly by myself, obsessing over every detail. 

Did I know, even at that young age, that my world might come to an end? That my children might not have a future? Did I feel the intensity of the storms, listen to the grown folks remark about how the thunder and the rain felt different than it had at their age, and hope that one day, I could find the strength to be like Esther? I’m not sure. What I do know is that I know now; I know what’s at risk, not just for me but for all my people. The only thing that’s changed is that I wonder if strength is enough every day. I hope, for all our sakes, that it will be.