Racial Capitalism, Climate Change, and Ecocide

This paper proposes that “development justice” be taken up as an analytical concept and praxis‐driven framework for research on disasters, resilience, and climate change. The piece begins with a synopsis of the historical‐structural factors exacerbating risk in the Caribbean before reviewing the concepts of vulnerability, resilience, and development justice. Next, drawing from empirical data and via a development justice lens, we highlight how the logics, practices, and debts of colonial underdevelopment, racial capitalism, and neoliberal extraction continue to erode resilience across the region. We end by recommending that future adaptation and mitigation strategies related to disasters, catastrophes, and climate change be more attentive to structural and slow violence, as well as the historical trajectories of imperialism, racial capitalism, and hetero patriarchal norms. In sum, the piece constitutes an evidence‐based assertion that development justice perspectives alongside theories of non‐metaphorical decolonisation be used by scholars, activists, scientists, and states alike who are committed to mediating climate change and preventing/reducing the damage caused by disasters.

Migrants, Vagrants, and the Making of the Anthropocene

Mental health and climate change: tackling invisible injustice

Background/Context: For over three decades, Jean Anyon produced scholarship that revealed the deep-structural causes of educational inequality. Anyon’s work in political economy includes a racial analytic; she argues that access to education does not reduce economic disparities in urban communities of color, and that schools in poor and working-class communities of color in particular often serve to reproduce inequality across generations. It is common, however, for critical scholars analyzing educational inequality to be steeped in either Marxism or critical race theory, and less knowledgeable about the other. As a result, analyses rarely place equal emphasis on both theoretical frames or synthesize race and class. Using theories of racial capitalism to extend Anyon’s political economic analysis, we contend, brings forward conceptual tools and angles that capture the material and ideological work being done by current, highly racialized neoliberal restructuring in and beyond the school walls. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: We focus on the ways race operates as a material force that is part and parcel of the capitalist dynamics that create and require inequality, and argue that racial violence structures capitalist development, making the systematic impoverishment of urban schools and neighborhoods possible and permissible. First, we provide an overview of two key theories of racial capitalism from Cedric Robinson and Jodi Melamed. We then revisit Anyon’s work on school knowledge and the hidden curriculum to consider how these operate as forms of epistemic and psychic racial violence that (re)produce racial capitalist conditions. Next, we consider Anyon’s work on political economy and public policy in light of the ways neoliberal racial capitalism links the production of differential human value to capitalist development in urban neighborhoods, deploying public policies that limit the life chances of working class and poor youth of color. Finally, we consider the implications of these dynamics for the “radical possibilities” that inhere in urban schools, arguing that opposition to racial capitalism stretches Anyon’s formulation of the “radical” and the “possible,” as youth oppose racial capitalism by resisting the school itself. Research Design: In this theoretical article, we use theories of racial capitalism to analyze Anyon’s major works in urban education. Putting core concepts from these theories into conversation with Anyon’s findings and her own theorizations, we offer an analytical synthesis that braids together race and class to unpack the production of urban educational inequality. Conclusions/Recommendations: We propose that reading racial capitalism into Anyon’s work can extend her political economic analysis, and through such extension, her findings, analyses, and arguments can be leveraged to help us better understand how race and racism interlock with the ideologies, social structures, and chaos of capitalist development and neoliberal reform. We contend that such an analysis can build out both the “radical” and the “possible” with implications for how we think about opposition and organizing not just within but against schools.

As the effects of austerity continue to ravage cities and the impacts of climate change become more pronounced, municipal officials around the world are struggling to pay for climate adaptation. Some cities have already begun to anticipate the new infrastructures that climate change will require, while others have been forced to adapt in real time as climate crises have arrived in spectacular ways. Two of the most emblematic events are Superstorm Sandy, which drenched New York City in October 2012, and the drought-induced crisis of water scarcity in Cape Town, South Africa, which was most visible between 2016 and 2018. In both cases, the cities turned to green bonds, a form of municipal finance that foregrounds environmental ambitions. In this paper, we track the forms of adaptation projects that green borrowing are earmarked to fund. Drawing from scholarship on the financialization of nature alongside recent work on racial capitalism and austerity, we find that rather than transformative municipal change each city is largely carrying on with projects that reinscribe existing inequalities in the city. In addition to reflecting inequalities already present in the two cities, however, the use of municipal debt for adaptation intensifies risks, both financial and environmental, borne primary by the poor or working class people of color. Building on qualitative fieldwork in Cape Town, New York, and across the green bond investment chain, we argue that the risks posed by climate change in the city cannot be financialized away. Ultimately, we call for the end of municipal austerity driven by national and supranational budgeting choices in favor of increasing national funding of municipal adaptation by rescaling borrowing to higher political scales that can more progressively distribute risks.

Author(s): Gonzalez, Carmen | Abstract: This article examines the relationship among climate change, racial subordination, and the capitalist world economy through the framework of racial capitalism. It argues that climate change is a logical consequence of an economic system based on extraction, accumulation through dispossession, and white supremacy. Climate change imposes disproportionate burdens on racialized communities all over the world, many of whom will be expelled from their homes in record numbers as the climate emergency intensifies. International law has been deeply complicit in the project of racial capitalism and is now being deployed to address climate change-induced displacement. This article evaluates the emerging legal and policy responses to climate displacement, and proposes alternative approaches based on the perspectives of states and peoples facing imminent displacement, including their demand for self-determination. Climate change is not an isolated crisis, but a symptom of an economic (dis)order that jeopardizes the future of life on this planet. Through a race-conscious analysis of climate change grounded in political economy, this article seeks to engage scholars in a variety of disciplines in order to develop more robust critiques of the laws, institutions, and ideologies that maintain racial capitalism and pose an existential threat to humanity.

The Negative Bidirectional Interaction Between Climate Change and the Prevalence and Care of Liver Disease: A Joint BSG, BASL, EASL, and AASLD Commentary

This article explores left critiques of neoliberalism in light of the Black Lives Matter movement’s (BLM) recourse to the notion of ‘racial capitalism’ in their analyses of anti-Black oppression. Taking a cue from BLM, I argue for a critical theory of racial capitalism that historicizes neoliberalism within a longue duree framework, surfacing racialized continuities in capitalism’s violence. I begin by revealing how neo-Marxist and neo-Foucaultian approaches to neoliberalism, particularly that of David Harvey and Wendy Brown, respectively, partition race from the workings of contemporary capitalism. Such analyses obscure neoliberalism’s differential impact on non-white racialized populations, while simultaneously casting anti-racist struggles as divisive. In contrast, I then trace how the Movement for Black Lives policy platform invokes Cedric Robinson’s work on racial capitalism, investigating the utility of this framework for the movement’s demands. Building on BLM’s turn to the concept of racial capitalism, I finally offer an outline of a critical theory of racial capitalism to better theorize neoliberalism. By historicizing neoliberalism within racial capitalism’s historical arc, such a theory unravels the qualitatively different mechanisms through which racialized populations are pressed into circuits of capital accumulation. It also paves the way to move past the entrenched class-versus-identity debate on the American left.

Climate change is increasingly being framed as a “climate crisis.” Such a crisis could be viewed both to unfold in the climate system, as well as to be induced by it in diverse areas of society. Following from current understandings of modern crises, it is clear that climate change indeed can be defined as a “crisis.” As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 1.5oC special report elaborates, the repercussions of a warming planet include increased food insecurity, increased frequency and intensity of severe droughts, extreme heat waves, the loss of coral reef ecosystems and associated marine species, and more. It is also important to note that a range of possible climate-induced crises (through, e.g., possible increased food insecurity and weather extremes) will not be distributed evenly, but will instead disproportionally affect already vulnerable social groups, communities, and countries in detrimental ways. The multifaceted dimensions of climate change allow for multiple interpretations and framings of “climate crisis,” thereby forcing us to acknowledge the deeply contextual nature of what is understood as a “crisis.” Climate change and its associated crises display a number of challenging properties that stem from its connections to basically all sectors in society, its propensity to induce and in itself embed nonlinear changes such as “tipping points” and cascading shocks, and its unique and challenging long-term temporal dimensions. The latter pose particularly difficult decision-making and institutional challenges because initial conditions (in this case, carbon dioxide emissions) do not result in immediate or proportional responses (say, global temperature anomalies), but instead play out through feedbacks among the climate system, oceans, the cryosphere, and changes in forest biomes, with some considerable delays in time. Additional challenges emerge from the fact that early warnings of pending so-called “catastrophic shifts” face numerous obstacles, and that early responses are undermined by a lack of knowledge, complex causality, and severe coordination challenges.

“Narrating Slow Violence: Post-Reconstruction Necropolitics and Speculating beyond Liberal Anti-Race Fiction” explores through the works of W.E.B. Du Bois and Charles Chesnutt a post-Reconstruction racial order’s more dispersed, yet more virulent attritional biopolitics of “slow violence” and argues that turn-of-the-twentieth-century African American writers turned to a speculative realism as a narrative strategy to give shape to the differential vulnerabilities, risks, and devaluations of black life within early modern racial capitalism. To trace out this unstoried history of slow violence, the essay first looks at W.E.B. Du Bois’s study of “Negro Health” in The Philadelphia Negro (1899) and then turns for a more detailed narrative analysis to his ignored first novel The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911) to argue that Du Bois in his fictionalized account of his earlier economic study of the tenant farmers in Lowndes County, Alabama, re-imagines a repressed story of negro health by showing how a necropolitics of contamination cooperated with a neo-slavery of debt and foreclosure. After recovering Du Bois’s speculative realism, the essay then examines how the fiction of Charles Chesnutt worked both to circulate and overturn liberal anti-race fiction’s representational strategies. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901) is a text haunted by a never quite fully named slow violence that is finally closed off in the novel’s healing image of racial sympathy through a colorblind vulnerability to disease and death. In contrast, Chesnutt in his earlier conjure tales (1899) speculates beyond this liberal protest narrative by turning to the time of conjuring, which in its accelerated injury, overlap of temporalities, and blurring of human and nonhuman agency invokes the unrepresented story of the New South racial capitalism’s slow violence.

A “lifeline out of the <scp>COVID</scp>‐19 crisis”? An ecofeminist critique of the European Green Deal

The United States is the biggest cumulative contributor to greenhouse gases to date. While Climate Change is a globally shared issue, its roots can be traced to the United States and its material and cultural dependence on automobility – a petroleum-based infrastructure that supports an auto-centric built landscape. But nothing is natural about this relationship between US automobility and Climate Change. In this article, I emphasize the narrative underpinnings of US automobility as an under-examined origin of Climate Change. In particular, I examine post-1945 literary narratives that explore US automobility and the American exceptionalist narrative of liberal individual freedom that legitimized it. If American exceptionalist narratives of freedom facilitated US automobility (and its corollary, Climate Change), I demonstrate the ‘wild possibility’ of literary narrative forms to challenge the liberal progressive time of US automobility and offer us alternative relations with time, history, and freedom. By examining the deep history between racial capitalism and US automobility in Ragtime and Get On the Bus, I demonstrate how the history of Climate Change and US automobility are founded on similar roots: racial capitalism. These stories offer alternative understandings of time and history beyond progress and liberal individualism through what I call ‘spectral literary ecologies’ – haunting relations that challenge linear time through nonlinear intimacies across time and space – thereby granting us hope in alternative ways of being in this American Anthropocene.

Urban climate resilience under racial capitalism: Governing pluvial flooding across Amsterdam and Dhaka

The ‘question of labour’ and its exploitation in the Third World has not been given ample consideration by contemporary international legal scholars in their historical examinations of the making of the international order. This article revisits the history of the interwar institutions of the League of Nations, particularly the International Labour Organization (ILO), to argue that international law reformulated imperialism through its re-articulation of labour relations, beginning with its quest to suppress slavery and ultimately regulate forced labour in Africa. International institutions contributed to the valorization of ‘free wage labour’ in Africa and the Third World through its international ‘native labour’ policies, the development of international labour standards, and especially the passing of the 1930 Forced Labour Convention. The article argues that international institutions safeguarded the processes of capitalist racial/colonial accumulation and labour exploitation by ideologically dis-embedding the violence of slavery and forced labour from ‘free wage labour’, veiling the structural unity and totality of the international legal order with racial capitalism. Drawing on the ‘Black radical/internationalist tradition’, I propose an expansive critique of the international order as a form of ‘enslavement’ to the structures of capitalism, so as to adequately expose international law’s structural embeddedness with labour exploitation, white supremacy, and racial capitalism.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with cleaning workers in the railway stations of Hyderabad, I present a “minor theory of racial capitalism” centring the humble jhadu or broom as a heuristic tool to understand how racialization and racial capitalism intersect with caste. Employing a relational approach to study how caste intersects with gender, capitalism, sanitation, and labour, I demonstrate the perpetuation of caste and gender-based practices in railway stations. I argue that racial capitalism is operationalized through management practices related to cleaning activities, differential allocation of spaces and technologies, and the purposeful absence of cleaners from policy articulations on cleaning. My research places racial capitalism in conversation with caste and extends its application beyond the Atlantic, to demonstrate that caste is instrumental in organizing space and labour within urban public infrastructure like Indian railway stations.