Here’s a hot take that I’ve never real seen before. Never discount the ability of cultists to come up with new stuff
How White Supremacy Caused the Climate Crisis
I write this today from California, a state currently besieged, yet again, by historic fires that are raging across the US West Coast just as other parts of the country also reel from the horrific outgrowths of the climate crisis — including deadly hurricanes on the US East Coast . In other places around the country, innocent people are being gunned down by police — and violent White supremacists — because of the color of their skin, or because they stand against the brutality of racism. How did the world arrive at a place where both nature and humanity suffer so severely, and in such a concurrent manner? And are these seemingly separate issues somehow profoundly linked? Did racism not only fuel horrific violence, but also global warming itself?
The climate crisis was and is fueled by a racial supremacy that has long devalued everything and everyone but the “chosen ones.†The hierarchical worldview of White supremacy means that moral value is measured by the profits and powers of that select group, to the detriment of everyone, and everything, else. Colonized peoples and lands are perceived only as tools for the accumulation of wealth and power. Oppression and destruction based on racialized, gendered, and other socially constructed categories are rooted in the idea that dominance and control are the “natural†rights of White people, particularly men.
The climate crisis “didn’t appear out of thin air. Someone did this to us: the fossil fuel industry and the governments that aided and abetted it,â€Â writes climate justice essayist and writer Mary Annaïse Heglar. “The fossil fuel industry was born of the industrial revolution, which was born of slavery, which was born of colonialism.â€
Adding to this, one could find a common thread present in colonialism, slavery, and the industrial revolution: White supremacy. For could colonialism or slavery exist without a culture and belief of racial supremacy? Scholars endlessly analyze the inner-workings of these complex and intertwined historical processes in search of causality. The truth is there are many chickens and many eggs in these stories, and yet a few constants as well. Hierarchical notions of humanity and race were ever-present in these histories — and they often serve as rationalizations for behaviors that have brought societies to various global crises, particularly the climate crisis itself.
In 1846, Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton embodied White supremacy in his exclamation that “It would seem that the White race alone received the divine command, to subdue and replenish the earth: for it is the only race that has obeyed it — the only race that hunts out new and distant lands, and even a New World, to subdue and replenish….†(Congressional Globe, 29:1 (1846), 917).
Wait a second
As a hotheaded youth on the frontier Thomas Hart Benton (1782-1858) once fought a duel with Andrew Jackson, who carried Benton’s bullet in his body for the rest of his life. Neither man could have anticipated that after Jackson was elected president, Benton as a Missouri Democrat..
So, this whole climate crisis as part of white supremacy thing is actually caused by Democrats? Huh.
