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