Anthony Karefa
Rogers
The devastation
effectuated by Hurricane Helene represents yet another elucidation of a
quintessential climate crisis that is right here and right now. It demonstrates
that climate change is not a conclusion that awaits us, but a set of present
day precarities taking and altering lives right now. According to initial
assessments, Helene could cost U.S. taxpayers upwards of $175 billion, and of
course, there is no way to quantify the estimated 230 lives that were taken,
thus far, with the death toll expected to rise.
Meanwhile,
Hurricane Milton, which made landfall in Florida as a Category 3 storm,
continued this season of carnage and calamity with a death toll of
approximately 20 people and an estimated $50 billion in damages. To put this
into perspective, the roughly $225 billion in damages of both Helene and Milton
in one year easily eclipses the $36.9 billion per year of climate and energy
spending authorized by Joe Biden’s “historic climate change bill,” the
so-called Inflation Reduction Act.
The profound
pictures of inundated communities, everyday people using their own boats to
rescue people, and visits by Presidents Biden, Trump, and Vice President Harris
to impacted areas, as well as concerted attempts to politicize disaster
including bourgeois environmental organizations using the moment to demand
“accountability” for the fossil fuel cartels illuminates the set of problems
associated with how climate change is narrated, communicated, as well as who is
doing the narrating and the communicating. Indeed, as writer Patricia
Fitz-Henley noted in a recent piece about Helene, “There are people who we
think are worth headlines, urgency, and aid, and people we don’t”—more on this
in a moment.
One thing we
know that won’t be communicated by mainstream media, nor the vast majority of
the bourgeois nonprofit apparatus is that Helene and Milton are barely about
storms and more about the systems of oppression that have been in place long
before ExxonMobil and other big oil corporations knew the impact of their
products and extractive operations on the atmosphere. It’s no coincidence that
Milton’s path of destruction traversed one of the most vulnerable places in the
world to the effects of climate change, just as it’s not surprising that those
suffering the most from Helene are folk who reside in the poorest areas of
Georgia and Appalachia. Residents of both areas continue to experience some of
the most profound cases of systemic/institutional racism, bigotry and economic
injustice and exploitation.
Environmental
Justice practitioners Dr. Beverly Wright and Dr. Robert Bullard remind us in
their seminal work, The Wrong Complexion for Protection: How the Government
Response to Disaster Endangers African American Communities, “the unequal
protect and unequal treatment afforded African Americans have made them
vulnerable, including their physical location, socioeconomic status, race and
the lingering institutional constraints created and perpetuated by racialized
place.” This proclamation was vindicated, in part, by the fact that we recently
learned that the youngest victims of Helene, thus far, were two Georgia-based
5-week old Black twins who died along with their mother in her arms.
Helene and
Milton are the manifestations of extractive capitalism, which is to say they
are, therefore, manifestations of the root causes of climate change—white
“supremacy” ideology, colonization, and patriarchy. These two storms are also
about unchecked and unmitigated racism highlighted by inadequate government
programs that, in some cases, like the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act,
have been allowed to atrophy still further over time. These storms are about
slow genocide as lands are no longer just being snatched from Indigenous
people, they are being destroyed and poisoned by perilous pipelines and
extractive practices like fracking. If we are truly interested in Climate
Justice (not the co-opted variety that bourgeois environmental groups and the
Democrat party are peddling), we need to get to the bottom of where these
storms came from; we need to study their genealogies: JIM BEGAT Helene and JIM
BEGAT Milton
Study after
study has revealed that communities that are low-wealth and the majority of
people of color are hit “first and worst” by the impacts of climate change, and
they are disproportionately situated in the proverbial eye of the storm by the
processes that create harmful emissions. Climate and Environmental Justice
groups who represent “frontline communities” continue the Sisyphean task of
bringing this reality to the forefront of global warming communications. And
while some select, historically white-led environmental groups have recently
included this language in messages to their members, overall the concept of and
need for justice is typically transmitted as a secondary, if not tertiary issue
of the larger climate crisis.
The fusion of
Jim Crow segregation, redlining of neighborhoods and terrorism experienced by
Black and Brown families who attempted to move into “white” communities as far
south as Texas and as far north as Long Island, New York are still felt today.
Dr. Bullard recounts the impacts of Jim Crow and segregation in his hometown of
Elba, Alabama long before he became known as “the father of Environmental
Justice” offering, “Although Blacks made up one-third of the city’s population,
whites governed the town as if its African American citizens were invisible.”
He continues,
In Elba, Jim Crow translated into white
neighborhoods receiving the ‘best of the best,’ including libraries, street
lighting, paved roads, sewer and water lines, garbage pickup, swimming pools
and flood control measures years before Black neighborhoods received these
tax-supported services. For decades, Elba’s segregated Black neighborhoods
flooded, while white neighborhoods remained high and dry.
To be clear, we
don’t yet know the extent of damage by both storms in Black, Brown and poor
neighborhoods versus predominantly white ones. However, a simple review of
history allows us to infer that hardest hit communities will be low wealth and
majority people of color, with predominantly Black communities experiencing the
absolute worst of the storms. And the reason why this isn’t a stretch is
because the conditions of these communities before the storms provide most of
the evidence we need to project what the condition of these communities will be
after the storms. As we’ve seen with past storms, impacted communities from
Louisiana, Texas, throughout the Gulf South, Puerto Rico, and, indeed the
entire country, lower income communities of color are typically located within
low-lying areas that are vulnerable to flooding and exposure to pollution.
There are
probably many reasons why Brother Malcolm X once said, “the deep south of the
United States begins at its northern border with Canada.” Malcolm’s sage
aphorism compounds the conclusions offered by Dr. Wright and Dr. Bullard in
Wrong Complexion for Protection, specifically, the idea that the privileges
that have been afforded to whites increase their ability to escape
climate-exacerbated storm events, as well as their ability to rebuild their
lives in their aftermath. As Wright and Bullard point out,
Race and place in America have always been
connected. In the South, during the Jim Crow era and even after “separate but
equal” laws were struck down by the courts, there were places where black
people could not buy homes, ride public transit, play in parks and beaches,
gain access to schools and hospitals, or sit down at a restaurant. These
“special places” for whites and blacks were artificially created by racism,
with privilege and advantage biased in favor of whites.
To that end,
these storms that are wreaking and that will wreak havoc on the poor, Black,
Brown and Indigenous people were not formed themselves by racism and white
“supremacy,” but the disproportionate exposure to them and the buffers that
prevent these communities from rebuilding and sustaining their lives absolutely
is. And when Jim Crow gets toxic, literally and figuratively, the specter of
white “supremacy” becomes even more elucidated.
This brings us
back to the discussion of, “people who we think are worth headlines, urgency,
and aid, and people we don’t.” The recovery efforts of more and more powerful
climate-fueled storms like Helene and Milton are when we see the spirit of Jim
Crow in full force and effect. According to the U.S. Department of the
Interior’s website , the mission and duties of the Federal Emergency Management
Agency (FEMA) include, “support [for] our citizens and first responders
ensuring that as a nation we work together to build, sustain, and improve our
capability to prepare for, protect against, respond to, recover from, and
mitigate all hazards.” However, statistics indicate this mission statement
tends to apply mostly, if not only, for white and affluent people.
Recent studies
have revealed that FEMA is one the nation’s most racist and classist. One
analysis revealed more than half of the FEMA’s money to elevate homes with
stilts and other methods has gone to communities that are wealthy or almost
entirely white. In four states–Kentucky, Massachusetts, Ohio and West
Virginia–over 75 percent of the FEMA elevation money has gone to wealthy or
overwhelmingly white communities. And in six states, 40 percent or more of the
elevation money has gone to a single affluent or almost entirely white
community. FEMA even seems to play a role in post-disaster gentrification and
disaster capitalism writ large. For instance, a study conducted by Rice
University and the University of Pittsburgh examined counties that each
suffered, roughly, the same amount in hazard damage—$10 billion. In those
events, Black survivors’ wealth decreased by an average of $27,000 while White
survivors’ average wealth increased $126,000.
As the authors
of the study assert, the more FEMA and the U.S. government continue to ignore
or perambulate these trends, “FEMA perpetuates the cycle of systemic racism. As
a result, historically disadvantaged communities do not receive adequate
funding to rebuild properly.” It all comes down to the toxic equation that we
must immediately deracinate if we are serious about confronting the climate
crisis with the requisite scale of action—because storms fueled and exacerbated
by racism and white “supremacy” + relief efforts informed and exercised with
racism and white “supremacy” = making it right for the whites but calamities
for the coloreds.
Ameliorating and
eviscerating Jim Crow from our approach to the climate crisis and all systems
of oppression are more elementary than people may realize. It’s really quite
simple, People Powered Solutions vs. Disaster Capitalism—the people want to
rebuild their homes, communities and lives, and the regime in D.C. containing
both “major” political parties wants to increase capital for themselves and
their cronies, primarily, at the vast expense of the people. And when the
people are empowered to establish and maintain networks of mutual aid
initiatives, that’s how we get our Deacons for Defense on and run Jim Crow out
of town. This will require an entirely new mode of thinking when it comes to
climate change—it will require understanding why justice is no longer enough to
right the wrongs of the past and present, nor to enjoin the wrongs before they
occur in the future.
It’s been said
that justice is about harmony and balance—if this is the case, in the context
of climate change, justice alone is simply not going to cut it at this moment.
We need to embrace the reality that it may be time to let go of the notion of
“climate and environmental justice”, as it has since been co-opted and elite
captured by political parties and the non profit industrial apparatus. We’re
now in the epoch of requisite climate and environmental liberation. Simply put,
there can be no justice until there is first liberation—and this may very well
require less of an approach associated with Kingian “nonviolence” as made
famous in his landmark book, Where do we Go From Here: Chaos or Community and
more of an approach associated with V.I. Lenin’s epochal work, State and
Revolution. At any rate, we certainly need to embrace the idea of abolition of
the climate crisis rather than reforms to address it.
To that end, I
have never believed more than I do now that anyone who purports to be a climate
champion who is not also an ardent abolitionist is counterfeit and not to be
trusted. For the bottom line, climate change incarcerates all of us—and like
the criminal injustice system of the U.S., “the New Jim Crow,” its rates of
incarceration impact Black, Brown, poor, and Indigenous folk
disproportionately. The reason why elements of Jim Crow linger today is that
too many believed these elements could be eviscerated with tweaks and reforms
to the system rather than abolition of the system altogether. Approaching
climate change in the same manner, as we are seeing from the Democrat Party and
their bourgeois and petit bourgeois acolytes who hold the mantle of climate
“leaders,” is like acquiescing to the death penalty rather than deracinating it
like the poisonous weed that it is. Ironically, the Democrat Party removed
abolishing the death penalty from their national party platform this year—which
seems to continue the trend of specious lip service the party offers for the
most pressing challenges, perhaps in human history.
Climate change
exacerbates the power of storms, and the undead Jim Crow exacerbates the
disproportionate impacts that these storms have on marginalized communities and
how we treat them after storms take their leave. Until we keep Jim Crow dead
and buried via a people-led social exorcism, all major storms and other climate
shock events will contain his legacy, as well as his namesake whether we are
conscious of it or not. The ball is in our court, to tell the full story, not
just of the wind, rain, and flooding—but of the people who are suffering the
worst effects. It is in these narratives that we will find the root causes of
climate change, which better positions us, collectively, to address it through
a massive, people-powered climate resistance and resiliency project rooted in
an approach that delivers climate and environmental liberation for all.
No Compromise
No Retreat
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