The other night I was sitting at home, locked in a conversation about climate change and race. How is this a racial issue, I asked? I realize that the society I live in has pervasive racism, and one should always keep this in mind, but how specifically is climate change worse for nonwhites?
Well, it’s all about first and worst impacts, I was told. People of color are on the front lines. They are the one experiencing the most severe consequences, and therefore failure to act against climate change is environmental racism. The key example is Hurricane Katrina. That was an early impact of global warming, and what was it if it wasn’t a racist horror show? Whose houses were flooded? Who was forced to flee the city? Who were gunned down by police and blocked by white vigilantes along the way? Whaddyamean climate change isn’t about racism?
OK, I replied. I understand the racial geography of New Orleans, and the aftermath of Katrina was every bit the nightmare you say it was. But what about the recent Camp Fire in California? That was an early impact of climate change too, and lots of people were killed. Even more lost everything they had. But from what I could see in the coverage of it, most of the folks out there were white working people or retirees who were priced out of the Bay Area. I guess that makes the vanguard of the movement against climate change a bunch of older white dudes.
Climate issues may not discriminate, but the responses by our government do. Ask Puerto Rico.
When you have lost everything to fire, flood, tornado, or hurricane, even the best response will seem to be too slow. But some responses seem to be a lot slower, a lot less thorough, and the excuses less believable than others.
lol, Katrina wasn’t “climate change”, that was crappy infrastructure to a very mediocre hurricane. “Climate Change” is not what you say it is. Puerto Rico has had many canes over the last 200 years like the one last year.
Climate Change is the future destruction of the eco-sphere. Which will see by a jet stream swings being more wilder. Fires, blizzards, floods……..much more indications than Hurricanes which are not impacted as much.
Wealthy and middle income white people are beginning to be affected by climate change. This has given rise to a recent rash of stories pondering the notion that “we” are beginning to see the effects of climate change. Of course it takes some kind of denial not to have noticed the wild swings in the jets stream since the polar ice has retreated. It takes willful ignorance not to recognize the relationship between these two facts. Nevermind. Nature doesn’t give a rat’s ass about our debates.
The biggest “fear mongers” related to “climate change” are upper middle class people, by far. Most of them are white. I see little non-white interest in climate change outside intellectual or even them upper middle class non-whites sans Native Americans who have a long interest in degrowth. While climate change panic among white’s is much persuasive, even down into the lower middle class.
Conservatives are politically lost right now. Still fighting old wars that are passe(identity politics for sure, which is a bourgeois disorder at its finest, which they don’t seem to get). Reminds me of the far left in the late 70’s and early 80’s before the last great political shift came. Degrowth is the new “left”. The lesson’s have been learned. I bet if Marx had lived another 30 years, he would have been the Unabomber before the Unabomber lol……………