White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism by Andreas Malm & The Zetkin Collective

Author:Andreas Malm & The Zetkin Collective
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso

The comments caused an uproar, but the baseball player received support from fans, and the Georgia Highway Contractors Association took the opportunity to run TV ads against what it called ‘radical environmentalists’ promoting public transport. It showed dilapidated apartment blocks and black people disembarking a bus. A voice-over warned that the rights of Atlantans to drive and live where they wanted were in peril. 169 Then in early 2019, the suburbs were again importuned to rejoin the city and accept MARTA; as the gateway to integration, Gwinnett County had a third referendum. The naysayers recirculated the classical arguments – trains and buses would be used by ‘illegals’ aka immigrants; ‘we don’t want more riffraff’; rails are an antique technology; ‘we just want value for our money’ – and carried the day. 170 For the third time, the County voted to keep its distance and stay behind the wheel. By now, it was also a de facto referendum on the climate crisis.

Drawing on the Atlanta case, Jason Henderson has proposed the term ‘secessionist automobility’ for the process and practice of seceding from the city of others by means of the car . 171 Owners can physically separate themselves from perceived foreignness, gender deviance and non-white menace, coil up in their private cocoons and maintain necessary links to the city by commuting. Known as a means for bringing people from place A to B, the car also keeps people X apart from Y, working as wall as much as bridge. But this is to say, of course, that secession depends not only on the car, whose shell would be immobile on its own. It takes gas to go: the white automobile and suburb from the very start presupposed superabundant petroleum products. Ideology did not always mask this fact. In his germinal Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital , Matthew Huber studies hundreds of petroleum advertisements from the 1950s and finds little visual variation: ‘Man works, women stay at home, and everyone is white and lives in a single-family home with a garage, children, and sometimes pets.’ 172 As in Margaret Bourke-White’s smiling family, but with the blacks out of sight.

‘Race’, writes Mimi Sheller, ‘is a performance of differential mobilities.’ 173 People sorted into the privileged location move fast and freely, in and out as they wish, across and beyond borders in pursuit of their interests, while the others are stuck, blocked, hemmed in. The history of race in the US is one long history of differential mobilities: whites crossing the sea to shackle black bodies and hold them on plantations; Jim Crow laws fixing ‘Negroes’ in certain compartments; mass incarceration keeping an African American population behind bars. 174 ‘The highway machine’, writes Kevin Douglas Kuswa, reproduced a pattern where ‘the have-nots become the move-nots, resigned to remain within a crowded cage contrasted with the adjacent freedom of superhighways and airports.’ 175 And first-class mobility has its special energy carriers. Just as the steam-engine enabled white colonisers of the British Empire

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