Last month, Nexus Media reported on a study in Environmental Politics showing that racial resentment, specifically against President Obama, is perhaps one reason for the increased polarization in climate change. The general idea of the study is that old white men who make up the denier demographic saw a black man in power who cared about climate change, and that pushed them further into denial. The Sierra Club’s magazine covered the study this week, which brought it to the attention of James Delingpole at Breitbart.
Interestingly, Delingpole didn’t even really bother trying to refute in his post, instead just suggesting that because Republicans are “more skeptical of the mainstream media” and are “better-informed generally,” they “have been quicker to grasp the truth than Democrats.” Given the expose last year showing how Breitbart “smuggled Nazi and White Nationalist ideas into the mainstream,” it comes as no surprise that Delingpole doesn’t bother trying to disprove the idea that deniers are racist.
While the study doesn’t say it outright, anyone who’s spent any amount of time in the dredges of a comment section or dealing with trolls on social media knows that it generally doesn’t take much scrolling through a denier’s feed to find some barely or not-at-all disguised racism. Granted, those who focus specifically on climate tend not to stray into other areas, but the generalists, so to speak, tend to hold a range of… we’ll say “deplorable” opinions.
A Forbes piece published yesterday by Dr. Marshall Shepherd, the second African American President of the American Meteorological Society, on deniers using his race to push back on his work offers just the latest example of the latent undercurrent of racism within the denial community (even from those with PhDs). Shepherd’s experiences are just one part of why it’s so important that climate and environmental groups face our own whiteness problem, an issue addressed by sociologist Dorceta Taylor in a new Yale360 interview.
Unfortunately, it’s not just America’s age-old grapple with the legacy of slavery that’s making headlines these days. The kidnapping, drugging, and physical and mental abuse of children, now likely turned to an illegal semi-permanent detainment with well-documented and horrific long-term psychological ramifications, is an absolute crisis of humanity.
And as much as we might like to focus on anything but this atrocity, like most everything else, it too has a climate connection. One of the tent cities erected to house children in Texas is facing 100+ degree heat, offering little respite for those thrown into its terrible conditions. And many of those facing that threat are coming from the Dry Corridor of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, where the climate change-boosted swing of drought and deluge has wreaked havoc on subsistence farming. Combined with years of horrific violence stemming from US policies, the agricultural crisis is yet another factor leaving people with little choice but relocation.
And as climate change continues, things will only get worse. Which is why, as Kate Aronoff wrote recently, “Abolishing ICE is Good Climate Policy.” As climate change continues making it harder for those only barely scraping by to survive, we’re going to see more migration. The only moral response is compassion, not militarism, opening our arms and our borders to those who like all white American families at one point or another, are seeking a piece of the American dream and an escape from an increasingly hostile homeland. This spirit of kindness and compassion is beautifully expressed in a Scientific American piece by NASA’s Kate Marvel, whose experience as a mother formented her concern about climate change.
Much like our need to incorporate people of color more fully into the climate community, so too must women’s voices be heard. Fortunately, that message is starting to ring out, with former president of Ireland Mary Robinson saying us on Monday that “climate change is a man-made problem and must have a feminist solution.” One paleoclimatologist leading that charge, with an admirable humility, is Dr. Sarah Myhre. Her recent profile in Grist deals not only with the constant struggle of balancing emotionally honest outreach to the public with the outdated maxim of scientific objectivity, but also the constant assault of misogyny that women face, much like the ever-present racism Dr. Shepherd endures.
And finally, given that it’s Pride month, we would be remiss to not point out that the LGBTQ+ community faces similar discrimination from the same old white status-quo men. (Let’s not forget that climate deniers like those in Britain's UKIP party or supposed Christian leaders in the US regularly blame extreme weather disasters on homosexuality.) It’s also worth noting that members LGBTQ folks are particularly vulnerable to climate disruption due to the discrimination they face by church-run shelters, for example.
This all comes together in a story from Michigan this week, where GOP state senator Patrick Colbeck proposed major overhauls to the state’s social studies curriculum, removing climate change, mentions of the accomplishments and challenges facing the LGBT, American Indian, Latinx, immigrant communities, while also claiming that giving rights to some is an infringement on the rights of others. (He also explained to the state’s education regulators in his notes on the draft that the KKK was created to be an “anti-Republican” organization, not an “anti-black” one.)
The status quo, of white men with power who couldn’t care less about the lives of others so long as the paychecks keep coming in, is a multi-faceted enemy which will only be overcome by a coordinated effort among all the rest of us.
Nothing exists in a vacuum, both literally and figuratively. And climate change is certainly no exception. Happy Pride Month and Refugee Week everyone. Celebrate our shared humanity, then there’s work to do.
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