Book Review Symposium: Is Racism an Environmental Threat? With a response from Ghassan Hage

Abstract

Hage’s book tells us that inequality is an insufficient explanation for the question of how the Grenfell Tower residents came to be living in what is now alleged to have been criminally unsafe housing while their neighbours lived in safety and luxury. He writes that ‘what is elided in the question “why do we live and they die?” is the question that in a way already contains the answer, which is “why do they die so that we may live?”’ (p. 53). The Grenfell Tower residents did not just happen to live in less secure circumstances than their wealthy neighbours. Their neighbours’ wealth was based upon their exploitation. Many of the residents of the Grenfell Tower were immigrants and refugees from the former British Empire and from conflict zones around the post-9/11 globe. They had escaped from the necropolitics of Syria, of Iraq, of Afghanistan to participate in the biopolitical life of London as students, teaching and health care assistants, artists and musicians. But necropolitics caught up with them in Grenfell Tower and utterly exterminated them.