Homes on fire and palm trees blowing in wind during LA fire, courtesy bbc.com/weather.
The fires that have been raging in southern California for days are destroying the cities and homes of tens of thousands of people. This disaster, driven by the worsening climate crisis, is emblematic of the deterioration of society caused by capitalism and colonization.
Originally published in Black Alliance for Peace.
The incendiary cataclysms in Los Angeles, California remind us that the root cause of the climate crisis exacerbating the fires spreading throughout that city and surrounding areas is fossil fuel production emblematic of runaway capitalism fueled by white “supremacy” ideology, patriarchy, and colonization. And while it’s easy to focus solely on the fires, it’s important to note that the associated smoke will be the main culprit in the loss of life due to environmental racism that has assaulted the public health of Black, Brown, Indigenous and all poor and working class people in Los Angeles and throughout the country. As revealed during the height of the Covid pandemic, Black and Indigenous peoples suffered a higher morbidity rate due to decades of exposure to poisoned air and the intentional siting of pollutive industries and operations in our communities from Los Angeles, to the Bronx, and Cancer Alley in Louisiana. These communities remain at high risk because what’s happening in Los Angeles, won’t stay in Los Angeles - the smoke generated from these fires will traverse our communities as it travels eastward, and exacerbates existing public health emergencies that are consistently overlooked and ignored by lawmakers representing both the corporate Democrat and Republican political parties and their wealthy acolytes.
To this end, while we sympathize with those who have lost their homes in affluent communities like the Pacific Palisades, Malibu, and the Hollywood Hills, we empathize with communities that will suffer long term public health impacts, including, but not limited to, respiratory and other illnesses due to years of being treated as energy and economic sacrifice zones. This pattern was most recently exemplified by the environmental travesty of New York City’s congestion pricing program, which will divert high volumes of traffic to poor, Black and Brown communities in the Bronx and Staten Island, thereby sacrificing them to accommodate affluent communities in Manhattan.
Will President Biden, the incoming Trump administration, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), an agency whose racism, classism and contempt for the poor is well documented, consider environmental justice communities across the country being choked out by smoke they had no hand in creating while billions of dollars are doled out to primarily accommodate wealthy people? It should be noted that many of these wealthy people benefit from and advocate for the capitalist system that fuels and maintains these crises. These are the kinds of questions BAP must perpetually ask as a principled and radical Black formation; and that we must ask as a people who understand confronting and dismantling the climate crisis requires confronting and dismantling racialized and classist capitalism - hence why we refer to climate change as the racial/class capitalocene.
Finally, it is not lost upon BAP that, very recently, many of the people enlisted to fight California wildfires were incarcerated people, some of whose prison sentences were extended by soon to be former Vice President, Kamala Harris when she served as Attorney General of California. This was an effort to generate cheap labor from lives she and far too many others deem expendable and disposable. There is an axiomatic nexus between how these inmates/political prisoners are treated and how Black, Brown, Indigenous and poor communities are treated in the context of the climate crisis. This nexus extends to the treatment of Palestinian people who continue to be dehumanized and exterminated while also being displaced from their homelands due to an inferno of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and militarism. Such is the pathology of settler colonialism, which too many still refuse to connect with environmental degradation and the climate crisis in the United States.
We must and will continue making these requisite connections and intersections as we develop a multi racial/multi ethnic poor and working class response to this latest episode of the racial/class capitalocene’s atlas of destruction.
No Compromise!
No Retreat!
Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly is an Associate Professor of African American Studies at Wayne State University. She is the author of Black Scare Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United…
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