Race and racism

I admire Stacey Abrams and the way she and her colleagues registered 800,000 new voters in Georgia prior to the 2020 election, securing a win for Joe Biden, and putting Rafael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in the U.S. Senate. I’ve also had a lot of respect for Rewiring America, a non-profit formed in 2020 to “help mobilize America to address climate change and jump-start the economy by electrifying everything.” So when I read that Stacey Abrams has just joined Rewiring America as their lead counsel and will lead their outreach to individuals and communities, it really caught my attention.

A friend of mine recently talked to me about white supremacy. He said the white supremacy groups like the ones that marched with torches in Charlottesville in 2017 at the “Unite the Right” rally really scare him. “But when people start talking about white supremacy being everywhere, I don’t get it. We’re not all like the KKK.”

His confusion is understandable. The term “white supremacy” is often used today in two rather different ways. On the one hand it refers to the beliefs of various right-wing hate groups that are quite explicit about wanting the U.S. to be a country for white people and seeing black and brown people (and sometime all Jews, LGBQT+, Asians, and Indigenous people) as the enemy.

On the other hand, “white supremacy” is also used to describe the, often implicit, ideology that has been prevalent throughout the United States, from the beginning, that has led to laws, policies, and institutions that have favored white people. This more common, often unexpressed, way of thinking has affected all of us. It has led white people, in general, to feel more comfortable with other whites, and to see most white people as more responsible, trustworthy, and intelligent, and less violent than black and brown people. Even those of us who are committed to racial justice can find these ideas arising in our minds against our will. Studies show that even a significant percentage of black and brown people have internalized some of these messages, as well.

Some of the primary features of white supremacy ideology are superiority, domination, and entitlement. Especially entitlement for white people to pursue what they want and to seek their personal wealth, power, and comfort without regard to the effects of their actions on other people (especially black and brown people) or on the natural environment.

Sometime on November 15th, according to demographers, a baby was born somewhere in the world who brought the number of humans living on the planet to 8 billion. That’s a lot of us!

How does population growth relate to our efforts to solve the climate crisis? This is a sensitive subject. It can bring up differing viewpoints and strong feelings about everything from women’s rights to religion to racism.

There’s no question that, all other things being equal, more people means more consumption; and more consumption means more stress on multiple global systems, including the climate. However, population growth does not have as large an impact on the climate crisis as one might suspect.

First of all, worldwide population growth has slowed significantly and is now less than 1% per year.

Secondly, most population growth is occurring, and will occur in the coming decades, in sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia–areas of the world where per-capita greenhouse gas emission rates are very low. Population growth in these areas contributes to climate change, but the contribution is extremely small compared to the amount of climate change driven by the consumption patterns of people in the wealthy nations. In other words, our over-consumption problem in the wealthy nations is far greater than the population growth problem elsewhere.

Seventy percent of the U.S. population is worried about climate change. Scientists are clear about what needs to happen. It is possible and doable, yet it isn’t happening.

Clearly there are forces at work preventing our government, businesses, and society from turning to face the climate crisis and do everything that needs to be done as rapidly as possible. What is it that is pushing the other way?

This is a complex question with many answers, but in this post I’d like to look at the role that white supremacy is playing. My goal is not to blame white people, but to help us all to deepen our understanding of what is happening so we can all be more effective in contributing to the changes that are needed for our planet to remain a habitable home for human beings.

Indigenous people’s resistance to fossil fuel projects in the United States and Canada has had a major impact. Many people are familiar with the opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline led by the Standing Rock Sioux tribe starting in 2016 and the current struggle against the Line 3 pipeline through treaty-protected Anishinaabe land in Minnesota. Less well known are more than 20 other projects that Indigenous people have organized to fight. Some of these fights they have won, some are ongoing, and a few have been lost.

A new report has calculated that Indigenous resistance has stopped or delayed 1.587 billion tons of carbon emissions in the last 10 years through highly effective campaigns. This is an amount equivalent to the pollution of approximately 400 new coal-fired power plants, or roughly 345 million passenger vehicles (more than all the vehicles on the road in the U.S. and Canada). It is also equivalent to 24% of one year’s total carbon emissions in the U.S. and Canada combined.

Conservatives in the U.S. have been attacking Critical Race Theory (CRT), or what they think is Critical Race Theory, everywhere from angry school board meetings to the halls of Congress. The progressive press has derided these critics for not knowing what CRT is, but this attack is widespread and dangerous. It goes to the heart of our country’s relationship to racism, threatens efforts toward racial justice, and fundamentally seeks to interfere at all levels with teaching an honest account of our history.

Whatever our feelings about the present situation, the reality is that racial injustice as been a major feature of the Unites States from long before we were a nation, right through to the present. No attempt to build a sustainable, just, healthy society can go forward successfully without making dismantling racial injustice central.

I’m often asked by white people, “What can we do?” There are many answers to this question. Here are three that are close to my heart today. Each of them I learned from African Americans who have guided and corrected me.