As an employee of the San Francisco Green Festival, Zakiya Harris knows that the mainstream eco movement is pretty much an all-white affair. There’s no green event in the country that targets people of color, she says. So three years ago Harris launched her Grind for the Green organization and held a music event of the same name at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, using hip-hop as a way to spread the message of a healthy, ecologically minded lifestyle to youth of color. But even holding the event became a challenge. “When you say ‘hip-hop’ and ‘youth,’ people get scared,” noted Harris. This year the folks at Yerba Buena didn’t offer a date to host her event (which, she says, has been incident-free since its inception).
- A performer from a past Grind for the Green event.
A performer from a past Grind for the Green event. Zakiya Harris
