Tag Archives: #Anti-Racism

“Geology, Race, and Matter” by Kathryn Yusoff

Core Text:

Yussoff, Kathryn. “Geology, Race, and Matter,” A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, 2018. 

https://manifold.umn.edu/read/untitled-5f0c83c1-5748-4091-8d8e-72bebca5b94b/section/6243cd2f-68f4-40dc-97a1-a5c84460c09b#ch01

Summary:

The discourses of the Anthropocene and of geology have embedded within them language and histories of racism that complicate legitimate understandings of climate justice. In her chapter “Geology, Race, and Matter,” Kathryn Yussoff describes the issues with using these words in the movement against climate change. Yussoff presents an archeological reveal of the relationship between mineralogy and racism (corporealism), showing how colonial deterritorialization, dehumanization and slave labor all extended from the interest in property. Based in the root preoccupation with property, cultivation and destruction of the world go hand-in-hand with racial injustice.  

Yussoff’s main objective is to expose this relationship, so that there can be a narrative that refuses to overlook the embedded injustices in climate change discourse and to assist in the establishment of a clear praxis of climate justice. Essential to this project is the determination of “the human” and “the inhuman” social legacies that fuse the historical anthropos of the Anthropocene. Failure to recognize the legacies of dehumanization based on racial social categorization and injustice is an automatic failure to see how climate change became an issue in the first place, as well as to recognize the issues preventing climate change solutions. Failure to recognize these issues maintains racial and social injustice by erasing the subjectivity and the struggle for recognition by Black people. 

While unveiling Blackness from the historical categorizations of inhuman-ness, Yussoff asks readers to understand Blackness as a presence, as a counteraesthetic to white supremacy, and, as such, as an insurgence to erasure, which, altogether, break through the embedded injustices of history and language. 

Questions: 

1) Does recognizing the human/ inhuman dichotomy of history help keep a reminder for social justice or does it maintain an aspect of otherness? Is a postracial “we” ever possible? 

2) If geology and subjectivity are relational, as Yussof demonstrates, does climate change justice entail a push for a reformation of “selfhood”? Does this ultimately change our economic and political organizations? 

3) What does solidarity look like for Yussof in the face of climate change? How does language affect the chances of solidarity? 

Additional Sources:  

McKibben, Bill. “Racism, Police Violence, and the Climate Are Not Separate Issues,” The  

New Yorker. June 4, 2020. 

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/racism-police-violence-and-the-climate-are-not-separate-issues

Climate change specialist Bill McKibben compares climate change with police brutality and determines that they lead to similar effects on black bodies. As black bodies are more susceptible to stress brought on by social injustices, such as financial inequality and police surveillance, increased allostatic loads for black bodies often leave them more susceptible to biological disorders. McKibben analogizes having a violent police force in your neighborhood to having a coal-fired power plant in your neighborhood: they destroy the body and toxify everything. McKibben continues to say that organized crime, partisan profit-oriented politics, support for oil companies, and climate denial, all still fueling during the COVID-19 pandemic, are all conditions that uphold the structures of social and racial injustice. Through these details and comparisons, McKibben allows readers to understand the biopolitics of black bodies in the U.S. that leaves them more prone to the troubles of climate change and less protected by governments.  

Godfrey, Phoebe C.. “Introduction: Race, Gender & Class and Climate Change,” Race, Gender & Class, Vol. 19, No. 1/2 (2012), pp. 3-11 

https://www.jstor.org/stable/43496857?seq=1

Pheobe Godfrey encourages analytical frameworks that help in understanding the interrelations between social inequalities and environmental problems. Modeling analysis on frameworks that are bigger than the limited scope of traditional individualist subjectivities, Godfrey’s work incorporates a true interdisciplinary approach that includes critical social theory, Buddhist spirituality, and ancient cosmology, to name a few, to address social injustices embedded within climate change discourse. The big issue for Godfrey is determining the “we” in climate change solutions. For Godrey, the “we” cannot be achieved for climate change solutions, until social inequalities of race, gender, class, sexuality, nationality, religion, ability, and other differences are sorted out first. 

Nieves, Evelyn and Ilana Cohen, et al. “There Is No Climate Justice Without Racial Justice,” 12 June 2020; 

There Is No Climate Justice Without Racial Justice

Given the current convergence of COVID-19 and the BLM protests, there has been a significant rise in the concerns of climate justice and racial justice and how they are related. This article brings together the interrelated structures of racial injustice and climate injustice. Gathering the individual and collective support of climate change organizations, such as the Sierra Club, Extinction Rebellion, and the Sunset Movement, this article highlights that climate change activism cannot begin without correcting racial injustice first. 

Our Best Chance: Igniting Social Justice through Climate Activism

Students march in DUMBO, Brooklyn during the September 2019 New York City Climate Justice Youth Summit. (Jesse Ward/for New York Daily News)

“We live in a strange world where we think we can buy or build our way out of a crisis that has been created by buying and building things.”—Greta Thunberg1

Death caused by the novel coronavirus is tied to climate change, as pathogens are carried to newer hosts by insects or animals, or released from the warming permafrost, to wreak havoc.  The communities hardest hit, for a number of environmental causes fueled by racism, including toxic atmosphere, inadequate healthcare, and economic inequality, are communities of color across the US and the world. 

The ground is shifting:  the national and global is connected to the local in unprecedented ways, and activism is alive and well in grassroots organizations of New York City.  Anti-racism and climate justice activism are uniting.

“I have found over and over that the proximity of death in shared calamity makes many people more urgently alive, less attached to the small things in life and more committed to the big ones, often including civil society or the common good.”– Rebecca Solnit2

In NYC, the Environmental Justice Alliance, its tag line On the Ground and at the Table, has published NYC Climate Justice Agenda 2020:  A Critical Decade for Climate, Equity, and Health in April 2020, marking the 50th anniversary of the first Earth Day.  It details an essential local strategic plan to reduce greenhouse gas and local emissions; to advance a just transition from an extractive economy toward an inclusive, regenerative economy; and to cultivate healthy and resilient communities.  In clear, concrete objectives is a comprehensive action plan for policy affecting low-SES neighborhoods:  reducing waste transfer emissions, rebuilding stormwater systems, blocking big-box retail centers on the waterfront in favor of retaining the industrial infrastructure to be put in service of eco manufacturing (and the better and better-paying middle-class jobs that industrial output creates).  It is an indispensable resource for understanding issues—such as unconscionably high rates of asthma in public housing—and paving a way forward.

Amplifying one of the goals in NYC EJA, Transform, Don’t Trash is a lecture by Justin Wood from the New York Lawyers for Public Interest (NYPLI) on waste transfer and the system that NYC has had in place since the 1950s, given as part of the Climate Action Lab in the Center for the Humanities, CUNY Graduate Center.  Municipal garbage collection is duplicated by private carters for all NYC restaurants and businesses.  The resulting truck traffic burdens already-congested routes creating more damaging emissions.  Add to this the abysmal rate of recycling from private carters (and, as noted in the NYC EJA report, compounded by the virtually non-existent recycling available to NYCHA residents), and there is action to be taken to reach 0 Waste to Landfill and composting goals.  NYC EJA gives a shout-out to Green Feen consultants who use “Hip-Hop to teach sustainability as a lifestyle through green technology and compost education.” 

The weaknesses of the NYC schools system continue to be highlighted in the crisis, as resources are scarce and access not just to the internet, but to stable housing and food security are lacking.  An encouraging initiative is the one described by Saara Nafici in another Climate Action Lab Rethinking Food Justice in New York City who galvanizes youth from NYC’s 2nd largest housing project on the Value Added Red Hook Farms.  Joining forces to address environmental changes by empowering youth and community engagement—while creating a source for fresh, healthy food—is a great example of the types of transformation needed. 

The situation is dire.  Greta Thunberg asks, “What do we do when there is no political will?”  We begin on the ground, drawn together for common cause.  We reverse the effects of neoliberal privatization for what Solnit calls “the lifeless thing that is profit.”  Solnit writes that the times may lead us to consider universal healthcare and basic income. 

Instead of standing idly by, aghast, change is being enacted locally, a model on which to build.  It cannot supplant sane national policy on emissions, the fossil fuel industry, or support for renewal energy sources, but it will absolutely inform the policy debate as more people realize that climate chaos affects all aspects of our lives, unequally. It is a time when the critical fight to end racism and climate degradation are joined. We must all be at the table, together.  The resource that NYC EJA provides is a welcome local focus for change. 

1https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Lw_qHVaJk8-QIpGv42m6bGHWo7Bg4bOG/view

2https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/07/what-coronavirus-can-teach-us-about-hope-rebecca-solnit?