Despite the undeserved loyalty of Black people to the Democratic Party, lawmakers continue to push policy that ignores concerns about climate change and environmental damage in their communities.
Last week, Professor Jerel Ezell (University of California, Berkeley) penned a piece for the New York Times suggesting that Joe Biden and the Democrats greatly underestimate how salient an issue climate change is for the Black voters who will certainly have a marked impact on the outcome of the upcoming elections in November. In their piece, Ezell posits, “Democratic strategists seem to see climate change as a key political issue only for white liberal elites and assume that other groups, like Black voters, are either unaware or apathetic about it.” Unfortunately, this sentiment is held not only by, majority white and affluent, Democratic Party strategists, but has also long been held by the environmental nonprofit apparatus as well as far too many liberal and conservative elements of the Black Misleadership Class who continue to transmit a feckless notion that environmentalism is a “white people’s thing.”
The data empirically suggests otherwise.
As Ezell points out, according to a recent poll conducted by CBS News, 88% of Black folk view climate change as “somewhat” or “very important” compared to 67% of white folk and 80% of Hispanics. Moreover, data collected by the Brookings Institute in September of 2023 revealed that for Black folk, climate change is of higher political concern than abortion/reproductive justice and the state of democracy - two issues the Democratic party believes it can utilize to defeat Trump and the GOP. That Black people are viewed by Democratic strategists as apathetic to, or unable to comprehend the perilousness of the climate crisis is nothing new. So the question becomes, why do Democrats hold this view despite myriad data sets that demonstrate otherwise?
The fact that these Democratic strategists seem to believe that white folk from the San Francisco Bay Area, Upper West Side of Manhattan, Westchester and Los Angeles County suburbs are somehow more rooted in the impacts of climate change than Black folk from the Gulf South, Cancer Alley, Asthma Alley, and myriad environmental justice communities nationwide forms the circumference of a special brand of ignorance and an all too familiar brand of white “supremacy” ideology. It would be like proclaiming that KC and the Sunshine Band are more rooted in the rudiments of funk than James Brown, Bootsy Collins, and George Clinton while suggesting Taylor Swift give voice lessons to Chaka Khan.
Five years ago I wrote a piece entitled, White Supremacy and Climate Change, A Sinister Symbiosis. Therein, I declared that the people on the frontlines of the climate crisis, Black, Brown, Indigenous, and the poor, understand better than anyone that confronting and dismantling white “supremacy” is requisite for achieving even a modicum of climate justice. Furthermore, frontline communities, and the organizations accountable to them, also know this confrontation is increasingly necessary for the Democratic Party and the environmental nonprofits that largely support it, as both exercise more racism and white “supremacy” ideology than they are ready and genuinely willing to admit and accept. This has consequences that are disproportionately impacting and killing far too many Black lives and communities.
One week ago we witnessed deadly storms in the Houston, Texas area that took at least four lives and knocked out power for an estimated 900,000 customers. The worst instances of the storm were felt in Black communities which are now forced to contend with a heatwave while many have no power - literally and politically - or the financial means to cool their homes. It should be noted that morbidity from extreme heat impacts Black folk between 3.8 and 4.6 times more than white people.
As the Democratic Party and environmental nonprofits continue to take the concerns of Black folk for granted, communication about the climate crisis and policies that purport to address it will continue to be inefficacious. Indeed, as the Brookings Institute reports, “Because public opinion shapes the design and structure of policy, the exclusion of how preferences vary along lines of racial identity—and its intersection with other factors such as age, income, education, geography, and political ideology—can bias policies toward the preferences of white Americans.” Due to this practice of “data invisibilization,” Brookings further concludes that climate policy is skewed away from the concerns of communities and populations most impacted by the climate crisis. In fact, most national surveys on the issue characterize the typical “climate concerned voter” (someone who believes global warming is occurring and represents a serious threat) is young, Democrat-leaning, liberal, highly educated, wealthy, and likely female - an archetype typically taken to largely mean white voters.
Joe Biden and the Democrats' “historic climate bill,” the so-called Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), elucidates Brookings’ findings profoundly. As a colleague explained, the fact that the IRA contains generous subsidies for affluent homeowners paired with more oil and gas drilling, subsidies for technologies, like carbon capture and sequestration and hydrogen combustion, that will bankroll fossil fuel cartels, who in turn will continue to disproportionately pollute Black, Brown, Indigenous, and poor communities. This vindicates the Brookings Institute's findings as well as the white “supremacy” ideology contained in the Democrats’ approach to addressing the climate crisis. My colleague further described this as nothing more than race and class warfare, which Biden and his party attempt to obfuscate with rhetoric about jobs and the economy.
At a time when polls indicate that Black enthusiasm for the Democratic Party and Biden is fleeting faster than when we left the South during the Great Migration, you would think that environmental nonprofits would be sounding the alarm and using any access and influence they possess to ameliorate the situation less than six months from an election they claim, albeit hyperbolically, will determine the fate of the world. However, because the largest, wealthiest, and whitest of these organizations, who continuously struggle to come to grips with their own racist and classist issues, were among the first to endorse Biden it’s not surprising that they haven’t. Rather, they have committed to spend millions of dollars to help Biden’s re-election bid instead of holding him accountable for his inadequate approach to addressing the climate crisis. Doing so would be a markedly better way to assist him and the Democrats in improving their electoral chances. Rewarding bad policy leads to more negligence in understanding that the climate crisis is a system of interlinked oppressions.
The world’s largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels petroleum and correspondingly, the largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gasses. We haven’t witnessed Joe Biden and the Democrats present this truth, which, in part contributes to their perpetual failure to galvanize a multiracial, multi-class, multi-sector movement necessary to develop and promulgate transformational policies that rapidly reduce emissions and deracinate political influence enjoyed by fossil fuel cartels. At a time when the world is witnessing a genocidal pogrom launched against Gaza by the State of Israel, it’s reprehensible that more Democrats, more environmental groups, as well as their anointed climate change imprimaturs, have been silent about the impacts of militarism on people and planet. It’s inimical to basic morality as well as effective political and electoral strategy especially when one considers that Black voters, statistically, show more solidarity with Palestine than any other racial/ethnic group, save our Indigenous comrades who, of course, suffer from data invisibilization more than anyone.
I recently discussed this issue with Ajamu Baraka, co-founder of The Black Alliance for Peace and an internationally renowned human rights and peace practitioner. Comrade Baraka, in part, posited, “It’s ironic that too many U.S environmental nonprofits have still not established the nexus between militarism and climate justice at a time when Gen Z, a key voting constituency, have only known war in their lifetimes - never a sustained period of peace. It’s clear these organizations are exercising conservatism and neoliberalism by prioritizing their position with the Democratic Party over people and the planet.” Baraka continued, “It’s obvious that they are behaving this way to put themselves in a position to receive more private and governmental largesse as we have seen more and more environmental organizations, mostly white-led, but too many Black and Brown led, compromise their purported theories of change to receive Inflation Reduction Act funding - this is a profound dereliction of duty and very unprincipled.”
I concur with Baraka and would take it a step further because it’s not just the U.S. military. Any discussion of militarism and the climate crisis that also aims to appeal to and mobilize Black folk must also indict the militarization of local and State police forces which, like climate change, disproportionately impact Black lives and communities.
As we commemorate four years since the public lynching of George Floyd, we are reminded he pleaded, “I Can’t Breathe” 28 times before his life was eclipsed by state-sanctioned violence. And rather than this atrocity serving as a long-term clarion call for long-term organizing and mobilization, we witnessed anodyne statements and commitments to racial justice by Joe Biden, the Democrats, complete with kente cloth photo ops - and many environmental nonprofits were not much better. This, in part, led me to write a piece No Whites After Labor Day in which I discuss how white people’s support for the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as the percentage of white folk who believe that racial injustice is a major issue in this country has declined to lower levels than before the “racial reckoning” protests in the summer of 2020.
The failure to connect Floyd’s murder with the reality that Black people continue to be choked out by toxic air, toxic police, and toxic policies further vindicates Professor Ezell’s thesis. As such, between the proliferation of 69 Cop Cities in 47 states across the country, and rising budgets for the U.S. military and local/State police forces under Joe Biden and the Democrats, we can expect rising emissions and, thus, rising temperatures, which means rising threats to public health and safety for Black folk and their communities. It also represents another failed opportunity by Joe Biden, the Democrats, and their panoply of loyal nonprofits to exercise intersectionality, rather than just treating the brilliant theory as perfunctory rhetoric.
Incidentally, a study on fossil fuel usage and associated emissions by local/State police forces is long overdue, especially considering the fact many of these agencies use their cars/vans as personal cooling stations during hotter months as their vehicles idle and spew dirty emissions in the Black communities they disproportionately over-police. I believe such a study would further compound the many reasons Black folk, more than any other racial/ethnic group, express solidarity with Palestine while rejecting increased militarism. Chief among them, I would argue, stems from the parallels of over policing/occupation and disproportionate environmental degradation in the Occupied West Bank and Gaza with the conditions of myriad Black communities in the U.S. There are clear and indisputable connections between the genocide in Gaza and the environmental racism in Black communities, and, therefore profound connections to the climate crisis.. The same corporations profiting from war also fund and profit from the proliferation of fossil fuels as reported by our comrades at Oil Change International. The unwillingness of the Democrats to embrace this truth is a function of their unwillingness to deliver climate and environmental justice, and this will likely lead to adverse electoral consequences. It must also be noted that the New York City Police Department, the largest in the nation, has a branch in Israel and it, like many police forces in the U.S., is trained by the same military force currently committing genocide in Gaza.
In his book, Brown is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority, author Steven Phillips argues, “A lethal combination of a poor understanding of demographics data and a myopic focus on white swing voters is leading political candidates and their strategists to election disaster.” This salient conclusion not only describes the ineffective approach of the Democrats and environmental nonprofits associated with showcasing climate change as a major issue for Black voters. It also acts as a reminder that racism and white “supremacy” ideology can be exercised consciously and/or unconsciously, as well as intentionally and/or unintentionally.
Phillips, Ezell, and so many other great thinkers like Rhiana Gunn-Wright, Kali Akuno, and Mary Annaise Heglar, as well as collectives like The Back Hive remind us as Black folk that waiting for Joe Biden, the Democrats, and historically white-led environmental nonprofits to emancipate themselves from the white “supremacy” ideology that misinforms their communications, policies, and overall climate change methodology is not only bad process, but could also, in too many instances, represents a death sentence.
Dismantling the climate crisis and its root causes must be done by us if it’s ever going to be for us.
No Compromise
No Retreat
Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright is a national racial and climate justice advocate. He is a proud member of the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) and is blessed to be the father of his eight-year-old son, Zahir Cielo. The opinions expressed in this piece are his own.
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