Climate Change Is Racist by Jeremy Williams

Author:Jeremy Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Icon Books Ltd
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Climate violence

Climate change is nobody’s fault. Nobody intended it. It has not been designed. It has been ‘created by generations of decisions from privileged people who seek to make themselves safe and comfortable, who contribute disproportionately to the problem of climate change while tending to avoid its worst effects’.16

That’s Kevin J. O’Brien, who argues that climate change is a problem of structural violence in his striking book The Violence of Climate Change. ‘It has no single architect and no direct cause, but it is nevertheless violence – a selfish expression of power that harms others.’

The book discusses structural violence and presents historical case studies in non-violent resistance as possible responses to the climate crisis. It isn’t specifically about race, but in adding the conclusions from earlier chapters to his insights, I reach an uncomfortable conclusion:

Climate change is racial violence.

There is a through line from George Floyd in Minneapolis to Archona and Priambandhu in Bangladesh. They have all suffered from acts of violence that spring from underlying patterns of inequality, where some people’s lives have greater value than others’. The convenience of White consumers, the right to drive or fly or eat beef, takes precedence over the rights of Black and Brown people around the world.

As demonstrators took to the streets of Minneapolis in May 2020, climate activists from the local branch of 350.org served food and provided first aid to protestors. Sam Grant, executive director and environmental justice campaigner, made the connection very clearly: ‘Police violence is an aspect of a broader pattern of structural violence, which the climate crisis is a manifestation of.’17

It is all part of the same struggle, the defiant cry that Black Lives Matter.

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