I am honored to present this conversation with Dr. Jayson Maurice Porter, a brilliant, dynamic young scholar whose passion is justice. Dr. Porter is a public thinker and writer who ensures that his work can be consumed by the academy yet writes so that his family and community can see a reflection of themselves as well. In this discussion, you will see a scholar who is actively engaged in creating spaces for learning and respect that elevate those who are often overlooked and ignored in discussions about the environment. His analysis includes public school students in Chicago; community environmental literacy; and the links between Black rural, US southern, and Mexican agricultural workers. These conversations create the space for us to work together toward justice. We talked about personal vulnerability, public healing, and the importance of being interlocutors in community and academic conversations and serving as translators between the two. Dr. Porter made me feel that the future of this work is in good hands.

Monica White (MW): Do you consider yourself to be a public thinker?

Jayson M. Porter (JMP): That’s funny, I was just talking to my sister and my grandmother about this concept over the last few days. And, separately, both of them said: “What is a public thinker?” Once I explained to them, they each said, in a different way, “I think you are, because I read your work.”

I do think out loud. That’s part of what attracted me to Twitter at a young age: just being able to ask questions and express myself when I had doubts. Once I started graduate school and I started doing work in Mexican history and Black environmental history, some of the questions I was asking on social media resonated with people. So I do think out loud and in public in a public-facing way that hopefully makes people see my curiosity and join me.

However, I’m also a public healer. Now, I don’t heal anybody. What I have done for the past 15 years, and even as a kid, is heal in public. I’ve healed with publics, too.

I had a difficult high school and home life. I made mistakes and had to grow up fast. During my senior year in high school, I lost a great friend in a car accident in October and got jumped in March. Getting jumped left me needing reconstructive surgery and losing my friend left me in shambles, but I was very fortunate that the surgeries kept me in Jackson. By staying in Mississippi, I was able to rebuild myself and find a way to love myself.

I was lucky enough a school down the street heard my story. They asked me if I wanted to go to school at Millsaps College in downtown Jackson at a moment in 2009 when they were trying to rebuild themselves because they literally and physically had turned their backs on the Black community since the 1980s. I was able to be a part of that transformation and transform myself and heal in the process.

I developed a vulnerability working in Jackson, an active vulnerability to be very transparent and open about my mistakes, open about what I don’t know, open about how I want to become a better person, open about what that even means, to be a “good person.” And it’s led me, in a way, to continue healing in front of people. Just like my curiosity invites people into conversation, I hoped my vulnerability and my healing invited people to join me in that as well.

So as much as I feel like my family considers me a public thinker, I’m honored that people extend me that trust and that care and that time, because if someone thinks that of me, they’ve given me some trust, they’ve given me some time. They’ve extended care to me, and I’m grateful for that. I want to think with them too, because that’s what thinking in public and healing in public really requires.

MW: And it’s earned, right? It’s not just something gifted, it’s something earned.

So you talked about dissemination of knowledge and I’m wondering if you can speak a bit about your approach to writing. Do you consider yourself a writer?

JMP: I do consider myself a writer.  But hopefully I’ll be a better writer five years from now. I approach writing by trying to find my own love for it.

I want to write for my family, I want to write for young and old audiences in an intergenerational way. Then, as someone who writes about Mexico, I want to write about land, politics, and agriculture. Land and the environment are things in Mexico that have really inspired me. It is a place that has produced so many of the botanical legacies of commodities and foodways today. Chocolate, tomatoes, onions, vanilla. All these things that create our everyday experiences are things that come from long colonial extractions of botanical knowledge in Mexico and struggle for land there.

But I also feel so grateful to have had experience close to Mexico, to have so much support in Mexico for  my work, particularly in Mexico City and the state of Guerrero.

I also feel blessed to live so close to a country that’s had a revolution inform how people struggle for land around the world. A place whose abolition of slavery influenced Black escape patterns in the US during enslavement.

MW: You’re talking about how close Mexico is here, and so maybe you should talk about places that have inspired you or your writing.

JMP: Monica, this [talking with you] is so cool. So, places. I’ll talk about two in particular: Tucson, Arizona, and Jackson, Mississippi, which are the two places I lived for 13 years from the ages of 10 to 23.

So I moved eight times before I was 10 years old. I was born in Baltimore, I’m from Philadelphia, but I moved all over. And when I was 10 years old in 2002 I moved to Tucson, Arizona, and I was there for 6 years. It was the first place I literally saw one full year and it was also the most different and dynamic environment I’d ever seen.

You have to move through Tucson with humility and grace. There are things in Tucson that could hurt you. You’ve got rattlesnakes and scorpions. My sister was actually bit by a scorpion and was taken to the hospital so we had that close encounter. But there’s also javelinas and coyotes, owls and mountain lions.

I was a soccer player who spent so much time outdoors. I spent so much time in the wash, which is the desert space between properties or the dry river, dispersal corridor, I used to spend so much time out there just getting the soccer balls I accidently kicked into the wash, hoping they didn’t get popped by cacti.

MW: Right, right.

JMP: Tucson was also important to me politically. I always had a sense of Black pride from my maternal grandparents. Always wanted to go back to Philadelphia with them every summer, where I held a sense of myself and my history, but Tucson further politicized me at a young age.

Moving to Tucson in 2002 right after 9/11, I started to see the militarization of the border. I remember the first few years I was there we were able to go to Nogales and Sonora, Mexico, and eat lunch. But within a couple of years, ICE formed, in 2003, then the first wall went up in 2006. The so-called War on Drugs in Mexico started that year, too. I remember I had someone in my high school OD on black tar heroin in 2006. I remember. And I remember homes in my neighborhood being tied up in drugs and all that violence.

And I also remember how difficult it was to be a Black person in Tucson. Tucson was a place where Mexicans and Mexican Americans felt like they could use the N word like candy. I heard it so much that I almost internalized it as normal. It was so common to hear players on my soccer team use the N that it felt regular.

And so I was really politicized in Tucson before I moved to Mississippi. Tucson was the first place I saw cotton plantations, not Mississippi. I remember going to soccer training camps near the border and the region was almost nothing but cotton plantations and expansive apple orchards. I remember when I found out that my favorite apple orchard—one that sold the best, most fresh apple cinnamon ice cream—made a habit of calling ICE on their laborers before payday. They only paid workers every three months and would call ICE right before pay day. I loved that ice cream but hope they’re closed now.

So Arizona definitely informed my politics and why I write about Mexico, and why I feel so deeply about the environment and working the land. This country has never cared about agricultural labor. Doesn’t matter, Black, poor, Mexican, migrant, or immigrant. This country has always extracted from and oppressed people who grow food and raw materials and has subjected them to so much harm and so little care. I learned that in Arizona, Mississippi, and in my own family. My Uncle Sonny was a farmer, and my grandma Winona worked the land into her 90s.

Jackson, Mississippi, also informed my thinking and writing for reasons that I mentioned earlier. It was the place I started to rebuild myself. The city held me. I got to Millsaps College at a time when the school was trying to face its racism and establish healthy relations. In many ways, I became a liaison for that work.

I want to write for my family, I want to write for young and old audiences in an intergenerational way.

I was one of the people always with community, building houses, doing landscaping, doing food justice work, and engaging with youth. The Mississippi Children’s Museum hired me when it first opened in 2010. There I designed curricula and facilitated literacy programming. I also read hundreds of stories to thousands of kids. My storytelling became so well-received that schools would invite me to hold story times for entire grades at a time, sometimes one after the other. I also developed the first philosophy for children program in the state of Mississippi, teaching teachers on how to bring more critical thinking and imagination into K–8 classrooms. My literacy work at the children’s museum got me a job facilitating community art installations at the Mississippi Museum of Art, which informed both how I write and how I healed in community, especially working with youth.

As a philosophy major working with youth, I saw them asking such deep and curious questions that weren’t always cultivated and cared for. The desire to make my thinking more accessible for young people and my family sharpened my writing and communication styles and strategies. As Beronda Montgomery has said to me, “I’m trying to meet my audience where I’m most curious” and hopes it’s infectious. Writing for the light and wonder in young people’s eyes is for me, writing to heal.

MW: Can you talk about environmental literacy education such as Environmental Justice Freedom School in Chicago?

JMP: Yeah, yeah. So that was a project really inspired by my good friend Ayesha Qazi-Lampert in Chicago, who started these climate action kits with her friend Ylanda Wilhite. They focused on high schools that you could say were abandoned but in fact, they were actively gutted by the Chicago Public Schools. They reimagined these as spaces for teachers to do environmental education with these kits that centered environmental education literacy in the classroom.

So I just reached out while I was in graduate school, because I thought the project was phenomenal. Ayesha and I have stayed connected since then.

After I graduated and left Northwestern for Brown, Ayesha invited me to have a conversation with the Chicago Teachers Union while I was back in Chicago to give a talk. Jackson Potter, vice president of the union, imagined building environmental justice into their Freedom School model, and his leadership helped make it a reality.

We wondered how to center environmental justice in youth education in a way that supports students learning outdoors, spending time outside and developing personal love for the environment, while also meeting leaders and activists in space across Chicago in this space so they could learn from the models.

We had about 16 students and 6 teachers from about 8 different Chicago high schools for two weeks. We paid both the teachers and the students to do the same program. And, talking about intergenerational work, we expected and pushed the students and teachers to learn and teach together. The teachers were acting as students, especially when they needed students to help them craft a decent TikTok video.

Among other things, the students and teachers practiced asset mapping and read detailed utility reports of their schools. They were able to see, for instance, that the tiles in one room needed to be replaced two years ago. The pipes in another building need to be replaced in two years. And then they can say, given all of this, this is how we think you should invest in our school, because this is where I’m going.

Finally, the students made their case to the mayor of Chicago and the CEO of Chicago Public Schools. And we got the funding for it to be a summer program in June 2024.

MW: Wow, that’s great.

MW: You’ve talked about your sister and your grandmother. Do you have other family that influenced you and how you write?

JMP: I get so much of my pride and my humility from my maternal grandmother.  I think my nana’s whole side of the family is just amazing. They were some of the first Black landowners in the state of Maryland, out on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, not too far from where Harriet Tubman used to make the seemingly impossible, possible.

Out in Snow Hill, Maryland, we still own a little land, but our main relationship with land is that of loss. We had land out there for generations, but lost most of it over the years. My uncle Lefty, 89, still lives in Snow Hill and works toward securing more Black home and landownership. After years doing real estate, and actually working around Black landownership in Snow Hill, he was recently elected to the Snow Hill city council in May 2024.

MW: Yeah, love it.

JMP: My uncle Lefty was first an elected official in Philadelphia in the 1970s working for Black justice and his sisters—my nana and Aunt Shirley—joined the Nation of Islam. They didn’t just grow up on land that was sacred for Black liberation struggle, they also did radical movement work. My family really dreamed those dreams and did that work. When my aunt Shirley went to the Bahamas in the 1950s, the FBI followed her, because they thought she was spreading the Nation of Islam to the West Indies.

My aunt Shirley’s husband was Jeremiah Pugh, one of Malcom X’s right-hand men in Philadelphia. My family really did some moving and shaking in Philly. I get a lot of pride and comfort from that. And the last thing I’ll say is once they left politics in the ’80s, my nana started a tree-cutting business where she, with the help of her sons, went out in Black communities throughout Philadelphia cutting the trees, making sure our canopies were good. She did that until I was a kid, so we’re talking about for 30 years my nana had a Black-owned tree-cutting business. She went from Black movement work to environmental stewardship for our communities. Meanwhile, my uncle Lefty went back to Snow Hill to start of pig farm—of all things—on the family land. He ended up fighting with Perdue over these pigs and Perdue ended up—I’m actually going to write about it in the future because I—

MW: You should, yes, this is a story, that’s a book. That’s a story we need—that’s what’s up.

JMP: Yeah. So I just get a lot of my love and my care from my family. And the last thing I’ll say about my grandmother is that she takes care of a plant that she calls Granddaddy’s plant. And this plant, she has been taking care of for generations.

MW: Oh, I want to see it.

JMP: I’ll send you a picture. And the thing is, my grandmother’s a very prideful person. She’s prideful when her grandkids are around. You can see her chest puff up as she claims us; she likes to say “he’s mine,” in reference to me. She is also very humble. So like in taking care of this plant, you know, when she thinks something’s wrong with it, she doesn’t necessarily assume she knows best. She’ll take it to somebody else or she’ll ask around or she’ll read a book. Just seeing her do that care work reminds me of how she cared for my great-grandmother Winona who passed away in 2012 at the age of 103. Or how she took care of my grandfather until he was 97.

She just reminds me that one of the best ways to combat grief proactively is to love while you can, how you can. And if you really love and you care for people while they’re here, when they’re gone, you know you did everything you could. 

Featured-image photograph: Jayson M. Porter alongside students of the Chicago Teachers Union Environmental Justice Freedom School, making and throwing seed bombs on the Wild Mile, the world’s first floating eco-park. Used with permission CTU Freedom School.