Here’s a pretty grim look at the racial violence that came in the aftermath of Katrina. White militias in Algiers Point, a white enclave in New Orleans, declared war on African-Americans. They viewed African-Americans venturing into their neighborhoods as “fair game” and many homicides resulted.
Many of my friends and comrades in anarchist and anti-authoritarian communities immediately put their mutual aid where their mouths were and went to New Orleans to form Common Ground Relief and provide solidarity not charity. Part of their response was self-defense against these white militias.
This article makes a great case for why we need to transform ourselves from a climate movement to a climate JUSTICE movement.
Lately, when I hear climate activists talk about numbers and percentages in stemming emissions and stopping climate change through legislation and governmental intervention I don’t hear enough about stemming the effects of global warming on the most impacted. Poor and marginalized communities are already suffering the worst effects. While super-hurricanes and erratic weather patterns are a top threat to them, so are reactionary and racist elements that target them in the post-storm chaos.
Video by the Nation Institute of African-Americans describing post-Katrina violence and white vigilantes defending their actions -
thank you for posting this! to take action and ask state and local officials to do the same go here: http://www.colorofchange.org/nation.
Thank you so much for posting this and bringing this up. I just wrote a paper on Climate Justice actually. I’ll show you an interesting quote I used in it that I think illustrates another big reason why our movement needs to include a justice focus.
This is a quote from Lawrence Summers, former chief economist of the World Bank and chosen by Obama to head up the National Economic Council, an advising body to the president. This memo was published by the Economist in 92 under the title “Let them eat pollution.”
“Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Least Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons:
1) The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.
2) The costs of pollution are likely to be non-linear as the initial increments of pollution probably have very low cost. I’ve always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.
3) The demand for a clean environment for aesthetic and health reasons is likely to have very high income elasticity. The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostate cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostate cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality is 200 per thousand. Also, much of the concern over industrial atmosphere discharge is about visibility impairing particulates. These discharges may have very little direct health impact. Clearly trade in goods that embody aesthetic pollution concerns could be welfare enhancing. While production is mobile the consumption of pretty air is a non-tradable.
The problem with the arguments against all of these proposals for more pollution in LDCs (intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral reasons, social concerns, lack of adequate markets, etc.) could be turned around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalization.”
thanks scott, a really crucial topic that must be at the forefront of our movement’s thoughts.
Katrina was something that affected many people and due to this many people had to find a new place to live. When thinking about the aftermath it is important to think about the situation these peoples had to deal with.