My name is Ash Williams. I am a Black trans femme from occupied Fayetteville, NC . I was recently fired by Greenpeace, in the middle of a pandemic, for reasons I and others find highly questionable. They offered me one month’s severance and housing, but only on the condition that I sign a non-disclosure agreement. One month’s severance and housing simply isn’t enough for a Black, disabled trans person to start over during a pandemic, and the NDA would have prevented me from explaining this crisis and how it happened to my community, which would also limit my ability to seek help. Marginalized people have always been our own first line of defense. We take care of us because no one else does, and when these traumas occur and we are discarded by people with more social and economic power, we pick up the pieces together, materially, spiritually and emotionally. Sacrificing that for one’s month’s pay would have been incredibly self injurious, and I could not do it. Furthermore, anyone Black and indigenous who has ever trained or done actions with, alongside, and for Greenpeace USA, knows that GP as an organization is steeped in a toxic culture of white supremacy.
I was conflicted, because I know I need resources to survive, but I was encouraged by friends and attorneys not to sign the NDA, to reserve my right to tell my story. They said that I needed a community recovery fund that could grow to meet my needs, rather than a severance package that would limit my ability to speak and explain my struggle and traumas. So I let the clock run out on the NDA. I am free to speak, but that ability comes at a cost, and I am asking for your help to begin again.
My time at Greenpeace included experiences of ableism, transphobia, anti-Blackness and other problems that I raised with HR to no avail. In the run-up to my termination, management expressed frustration that I was "doing too much other activist work,” which, in reality, were protests against police murders in defense of Black people and my community. I find it disturbing that so many liberal people and organizations, cuddled up with the idea of abolition and the struggle against police violence when it was fashionable over the summer, but now discard people for devoting too much time to trying to save their people from police violence. I was told by one senior manager Brent M., that abolition is not aligned with with the goals of Greenpeace. However, Greenpeace’s goals are supposed to include environmental justice. For Black communities on the frontlines of environmental justice movements, the struggle for prison abolition is inextricably linked to the fight for healthy and sustainable communities. Decades of scholarship and organizing directly contradict the idea that environmental justice and abolition are not aligned, but to many people, abolition is a buzzword, rather than a framework they should be expected to understand, and prison abolitionists themselves are just props to be discarded when we are no longer in style.
Management also complained that I missed meetings, but there were complex issues at work there as well. Complex issues that include anti-Blackness, transphobia, and ableism. I want to get into more detail about what happened and what I want people to learn from it, but for the purposes of this page, I just want to communicate that these things happened, because I have given myself the power to do that. As my bank balance runs lower, I am increasingly afraid that power may have cost me the means to survive. But I have been told to be hopeful that people will help, so I am putting my faith in my community and asking for some love and solidarity. Please consider making a donation towards my goal.
