Whitewashing ‘Global Chicago'
by
Paul Street
Below we present an
excerpt (with annotation deleted) from the second chapter, titled "Whitewashing
Global Chicago," in Paul Street's recently published book Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A Living
Black Chicago History (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007).
"White Chicago corporate and civic elites' pursuit of
"global city" status deepens socioeconomic disparity, black misery and racial
inequality in and around the city."
In this new age of superficial post-Civil Rights
color-blindness and "personal responsibility," it has become impolitic,
impolite, vaguely sentimental and almost childish to speak seriously in
respectable circles about race and that tired old bugaboo "white supremacy." To focus on the persistent pain of
desperately poor black people is to engage excessively "negative" and
"obsolete" thinking from the bad old days when "angry" blacks sported Dashikis
and their purported white allies read Franz Fanon and Che Guevera. Wasn't the murdered
Fred Hampton's former Black Panther colleague Bobby Rush now a U.S.
Congressman, along with Reverend Jesse Jackson's son? Aren't Chicago's City Council and Ten O 'Clock news teams filled
with a refreshingly proportionate share of smiling and assimilated blacks? Isn't the black, Chicago-based New Age media
personality Oprah a global megastar, thanks largely to her largely white
(female) following? And isn't there now
a large new black middle class visible in various parts of the city and in the
city's growing black suburbs? It's
supposedly time to "move on," accentuate the positive," celebrate "progress"
and "get past race."
Deracializing Child Injury and
Household Hopelessness
Part of the "moving-off-race" advice, widely followed by the
dominant political culture in the post-Civil Rights era, involves simple
deletion of the color of deep social problems in and around the city. Following
the dominant color-blind counsel, urban researchers and reporters in post-Civil
Rights Chicago often went to remarkable lengths to avoid the racial dimension
of important subject matters.
A careful study issued by a team of public health
researchers at Chicago's Children's Memorial Hospital in 2001 is one
example. It reported on the
distribution of youth injuries and injury-caused deaths across the city's 77
officially designated community areas.
Neighborhood disparities, they found, were severe, ranging from one West
Side neighborhood where 146 children were hospitalized for injuries each year
to more than 30 neighborhood where fewer than 6 youths were hospitalized for
injuries each year. Nowhere did the researchers or the Chicago Sun Times writers reporting their findings link the injury
data to readily available census data showing that 10 of the city's 15 leading
community areas ranked by injury-related child youth mortality were 90 percent
or more black and that three-fourths of the 31 neighborhoods where 6 or less
youth injury hospitalizations occurred were disproportionately white for the
city.
The Non-Skin-Color of Neighborhood
Vitality
The exact same race deletion was graphically (literally and
figuratively) evident in a sophisticated, shiny, and ironically multi-colored
urban "economic development study" produced for the venerable downtown Chicago
Civic Committee by a slick new corporate-neoliberal think-tank called "The
Boston Consulting Group" (BCG). The study, titled "An Analysis of Economic Development and Funds Flow in Chicago,"
gave each of Chicago 77 community areas a composite "economic vitality" score
based on five key economic development measures: (1) business revenue and jobs
per square mile ("business vitality"); (2) business loans received as a
percentage of business revenue ("availability of capital"), (3) property value
per square mile; (4) workforce readiness (as measured by a metric combining
unemployment rates, high school graduation rate, and student test scores on the
state's 11th-grade Prairie State Examination; (5) safety and security (violent
crimes per 1,000 residents plus property crimes per 1,000 residents).
"The study's authors were careful to completely delete
the intimate connection between race, place, economic development, and economic
funding."
The neighborhood disparities discovered in the BCG report
were stark indeed. The top quartile of Chicago's community areas were denoted
by the color green in the study's elaborate and shiny tables. It included the Near North Side, with a 2000
"property value per square mile" (PVSM) of $263 million and an unemployment
rate of just 2.7 percent. It also
included the Loop, with a "business revenue per square mile" of $76,019 and un
unemployment rate of 1.9 percent. The bottom quartile (the least "vital" fourth
of neighborhoods) included the South Side community area Riverdale, with a PVSM
of just $1 million and an unemployment rate of 20 percent. Also in the bottom fourth was the West
Side's North Lawndale, with a BRSM of $205 and an unemployment rate of 15
percent.
The BCG study's authors were careful to completely delete
the intimate connection between race, place, economic development, and economic
funding. It was a stark omission in a
highly sophisticated and erudite research production that went out of its way
to include a diverse array of hard-to-find social and economic statistics and
break them down to the neighborhood level.
By simply adding the readily available race data from the 2000 Census to
the BCG tables, I learned and then reported in a 2005 Chicago Urban League
Study that "economic vitality" was a highly racialized proposition in Chicago.
Of the 16 community areas in the bottom quintile of BCG's index, all but two
were 94 percent or more black and all are disproportionately black when
measured against the city as a whole.
The city's least "vital" and most "distressed" and "isolated"
neighborhoods are concentrated in highly segregated, very predominantly black
stretches on the city's south and West sides. Conversely, of the 15 community
areas in the city's top "economic vitality" quintile, conversely, all were whiter
than the city as a whole. All but one
of those neighborhoods were more than 50 percent white, and 8 are at least
two-thirds white. Chicago's most "prosperous" and "connected" internal "cities"
were disproportionately Caucasian
De-Racing "The Geography of Money"
The same exact sin of skin-color omission was repeated for a
somewhat more popular and public audience by the glossy editors of the monthly
magazine Chicago in the spring of
2006. The magazine's special annual "Money Issue" was dedicated, its cover
advertised, to "Salaries" WHO MAKES HOW MUCH FROM OPRAH TO THE MAYOR TO THE
REST OF US."
"Chicago
magazine, it appeared, liked colors. But skin color was not part of its
elaborately multi-tinted presentation."
Chicago's own $225 million star" Oprah Winfrey was pictured
on the cover in an opulent gold evening gown.
In between short and catchy vignettes on the "All-time Richest
Chicagoans," "Chicago Entrepreneurs Who Have Recently Found Success," and the
like, the "Special Money Issue" included an elaborate two-page map giving "a
Color-Coded Look at the Distribution of Median Household Income Across
Chicago's Neighborhoods and Suburbs."
Based on household income data from the 2000 Census, the map was titled
"The Geography of Money." It colored
jurisdictions and (inside Chicago) neighborhoods as follows: pale yellow
(median household income of $20,000 and below), yellow ($20,000-20,999), bright
yellow ($30,000-39,999), yellowish green ($40,000-40,999), olive green
($50,000- 50,999), green 1 ($60,000-69,999), green 2 ($70,000-79,999), dark
green ($80,000-89,999), blue ($100,000--119,000); dark blue ($120,000-139,999),
purple ($140,000-159,000), and dark purple ($160,000 and up).
As anyone with a reasonably accurate sense of Chicago and
the Chicago area's highly segregated patterns of residential settlement could
easily discern, the purple, blue, and green -colored parts of the map were all
predominantly and disproportionately white when it came to the skin color of
the people who lived there. The pale-yellow and yellow communities were
concentrated on the predominantly black and highly segregated South and West
Sides and in the numerous poor black suburbs of southern Cook County. Chicago,
it appeared, liked colors. But skin color was not part of its
elaborately multi-tinted presentation.
Making the racial and related spatial linkages to the geography, the
magazine's editors concluded, would have made their mainly affluent and white
readers uncomfortable.
De-Racing the "Ex-Offender"
Population
In June, three years later, the Tribune repeated the core race deletion in a front-page story
reporting that a "record number" of "ex-offenders" were returning to the
streets of Illinois and Chicago. "About 21,000 inmates will leave the
high-fenced borders of Illinois prisons this year and re-enter society within
the city limits, enough ex-offenders to fill the United Center, about 10 city
bus-loads rolling in each week" While presenting a sensitive account of the
barriers to reintegration faced by these "ex-offenders," the story's
author Rex Huppke managed to completely ignore the very preponderantly black
composition of the returning inmate population and the desperately poor
communities that receive so many of the city's "ex-cons."
"The story's author managed to completely ignore the
very preponderantly black composition of the returning inmate population."
This omission occurred despite the fact that Huppke had
previously interviewed me about a major Chicago Urban League project study I
had authored and titled The Vicious
Circle: Race, Prison, Jobs in Chicago, Illinois, and the Nation. The
report's findings included statistics showing: that the state's incarceration
rate for blacks was ten times higher than that for whites; and that just ten
Chicago zip codes, all of which were predominantly nonwhite and seven of which
were 95 percent or more black, together received a quarter of all prisoners
released each year in the state of Illinois.
Given its refusal to acknowledge the heavily racialized nature of the
ex-offender "re-entry" problem, there was no chance that the Tribune would investigate the
graphically racist nature of the surveillance, arrest, sentencing, and
incarceration policies that do so much to create the "ex-offender" issue in the
first place.
"Chicago's One Dark Underside"
An especially telling example of the extent to which race
has been deleted from mainstream civic discourse in post-Civil Rights Chicago
comes with escalated media coverage of Richard M. Daley's policy performance in
the spring of 2005. Thanks to the
official color-blindness of the post-Civil Rights era, it was possible in April
of that year for Time Magazine to
delete the city's troubled race issues from its assessment of Daley. Ranking him as "the nation's top urban
executive" and "Best Big City Mayor," Time
praised Daley for "wielding near-imperial power" over city governance and for
"speaking with a blunt, blue-collar brio that Chicagoans find endearing" while
staying "cozy with big business" and "steering the Windy City into a period of
impressive stability, with declining unemployment and strong growth."
Basing its assessment on the counsel of "urban experts," Time gave Daley special praise for
"burnishing Chicago's business-friendly image by strengthening their connection
to global firms like Boeing, which relocated its headquarters to the town, and
to white-shoe industries like banking, financial services, and law. In his 16 years at City Hall," Time intoned, "Daley has presided over
the city's transition from graying hub to vibrant downtown, with a
newly-renovated football stadium, an ebbing murder rate, a new downtown park, a
noticeable expansion of green space, and a skyline thick with construction
cranes. As federal and state dollars
flowing to the city have dried up," Time added,
"he has used his influence to persuade corporations and the wealthy to kick in
for big ticket attractions, like the $475 million dollar Millennium Park,
nearly half of which was paid for by private donations." Along the way, Time claimed, Daley has "take[n] his risks" to attack "poverty and
privation" by demolishing ancient public housing projects, reforming schools,
and otherwise working to "keep the middle class from fleeing to the
suburbs." The only downsides to Daley's
reign that Time could identify were
the tendency of Daley's "unchecked power" to "sometimes short-circuit debates"
and the fact that "allegations of financial corruption have caught up some of
his political allies."
"Endemic black poverty across the city's vast stretch
of segregated and conspicuously non-beautified black neighborhoods did not
strike the wealthy, the city's leading corporations or the mayor as a ‘big
ticket' item requiring concentrated public investment."
Missing from this laudatory appraisal was the steep racial
inequity experienced by hundreds of thousands of black Chicagoans living on the
outskirts and in the shadows of Daley's "vibrant downtown." As Time
might have noted, endemic black poverty across the city's vast stretch of
segregated and conspicuously non-beautified black neighborhoods did not strike
the wealthy, the city's leading corporations or the mayor as a "big ticket"
item requiring concentrated public investment. The $475 million spent on
Millennium Park would have been more than welcome in those neighborhoods as
investment in job training and/or child welfare and/or after school programs
and/or "green space" expansion and/or drug treatment...the list of unmet
neighborhood needs went on and on.
As was understood by many of the more civically engaged
adults in the city's distressed and isolated black neighborhoods (where Daley's
"blunt, blue-collar brio" was not so much "endearing" as reminiscent of past
white Irish racist violence), Daley's "big risk" policy initiatives in housing
and education were actually parts of the hidden race problem in the "City that
Works" for some more than others. The
exact same deletions were evident in a page-one Chicago Tribune article that appeared in June of 2005 under the
title "Among Mayors, Daley the King."
There was nothing in Time's
glowing write-up about the curious fact that social and economic inequality
deepened between Chicago's black and white neighborhoods during the decade
between [Mayor Richard M.] Daley's ascendancy and 1999. That rising inequality was partly fed by the
mayor's corporate, downtown-centered, and globalist development regime, which
pushed many of the city's black poor further to the urban and suburban margins
of the metropolis.
Time's
critical and telling deletion of Chicago's race (and intimately related class)
problems set the tone for subsequent Chicago media coverage of the mayor's
escalating corruption scandal. On the
evening of June 20, 2005, on the same day that two top Daley city hiring
officials were indicted on corruption charges by federal prosecutor Patrick
Fitzgerald, veteran local ABC television reporter and municipal news analyst
Andy Shaw told a leading local radio talk show that "every great global city
has a major flaw or dark underside."
Chicago's single "dark underside," Shaw felt, was "corruption." The city's "corruption tax" was becoming "a
hot issue," Shaw argued, for city residents who were becoming frustrated with
the city's high and escalating property taxes. Shaw had nothing to say about the
terrible human consequences of the extreme racial and related socio-economic
segregation and black misery that could be viewed within a short drive from
City Hall. That misery was undoubtedly
related to the corruption being exposed by local media. It was also partly the
consequence of numerous city policies and practices that had little whiff of
formal corruption about them, including many initiatives that Shaw and others
saw as examples of City Hall's efforts to move forward on racially loaded
issues that had vexed past Chicago mayors (principally "public housing" and
"schools"). The real problem for much
of the city's black population was the generally legal and "business-as-usual'
conduct of concentrated public and private power in and around the city.
Missing from Global Chicago
"Former residents are dispersed and/or forced out of the
city to impoverished suburbs or other socially isolated low-income areas."
An especially significant and revealing form of
metropolitan, post-Civil Rights race deletion is a joint production of the
Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, the Chicago
Tribune, and the Chicago-based John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur
Foundation. In 2004, these institutions
collaborated in the publication of an ambitious book titled "Global Chicago." Including smart,
well-written essays by the eminent University of Chicago sociologist and
leading "global city" theoretician Saskia Sassen and the veteran Tribune economics correspondent R.C.
Longworth, Global Chicago celebrated
the Midwest Metropolis's emergence as an officially certified "global city,
replete with a large number of transnational corporate offices and
headquarters, a critical core of legal and financial firms servicing
multinational business, a rising new professional class tied to international
economic activity, a burgeoning downtown commercial and real estate sector
catering to global business, professionals, and tourists and an increasingly
diverse, immigrant-base fed by distant
corners of the planet. "While many
former industrial centers became mere shadows of themselves," Global Chicago exulted on its back
cover, "Chicago [has] succeeded by transforming itself again. The Chicago of today is a hub for corporate
headquarters like those of Motorola, Boeing, and United Airlines. It is a transportation and information
crossroads, with the most airport and Internet traffic in North America. With over 120 foreign language newspapers,
Chicago is also home to vast and vibrant immigrant communities, a focus of
global services, and a center for global law and medicine."
All of this, the book's editors proclaimed, reflected "a
catalogue of achievements that would make anyone proud to call the city home."
Nobody was more swollen with pride than Adele Simmons, former CEO of the MacArthur
Foundation and current vice-chair of a leading metropolitan
corporate-neoliberal think tank called "Metropolis 2020." In Global
Chicago's introduction, Simmons waxed lyrical about the city's multiple
cosmopolitan and planetary connections and the quiet, largely unnoticed (by
ordinary Chicagoans) way in which it had emerged as "one of the world's great
global cities" - an "economic and cultural powerhouse, a commercial and
artistic center of growing international importance" that was "daily making a
difference in lives all over the planet":
"In Chicago, my hometown, the local florist's lilies may
come from Holland, the grocer's grapes from Chile, the computer assembler's
chips from Taiwan, the bicyclist's brakes from Japan. While those goods are flying in, Chicago academics are flying out
- to advise the governments of Chile, Indonesia, and Nigeria, to name a
few. Scientists from all over the world
gather to conduct experiments at our laboratories - particularly Argonne
National and Fermi Laboratory - and human rights activists from every continent
doff their hats to their comrades here, without whom the International Criminal
court might not exist. Chicagoans
import and export goods, ideas, and people hourly. To us, this is no big deal....the fact that Chicago has become one
of the world's great global cities has yet to impress most Chicagoans, in part
because the global fabric is so thickly woven here. In a city with 130 non-English newspapers, where an emergency
call to 911 can be responded to in 150 languages, a foreign tongue turns few
heads. Similarly, no face seems out of
place - each one seems legitimate for a Chicagoan.... Immigrants make up 22
percent of the city's population and they send an estimated $1.8 billion
annually to the families they've left behind.
Entire villages depend on that Chicago money."
It was imperative, Simmons felt, for Chicagoans to know and
advertise the fact that they live in a global metropolis. "Being known as a
global city," she argued, "is an economic and cultural asset. It helps attract
corporations of Boeing's magnitude. It
reminds us and our friends around the world that we are no longer a city
defined by a manufacturing and industrial base, that we have a history of
transformation, that we welcome new ideas, new markets, and new kinds of
business opportunities. Being a
beautiful city with twenty-nine miles of lakefront," Simmons warned, "is not
enough to guarantee our future."
Simmons' clever and knowledgeable introduction deleted the
fact that few Chicagoans share her sense of identification with such
institutions as the Argonne National Laboratory and Boeing Corporation - a
leading manufacturer of sophisticated and expensive war weaponry put to deadly
use in such places as Iraq, Palestine and, more recently (the summer of 2006)
Lebanon. It showed no appreciation of
the persistent extreme racial segregation of the city and metropolitan
area's communities, real estate markets,
labor markets, and economic structure (all of which will be detailed in chapters
six and seven of the present study), which make black and Latino ‘faces" "seem out of place" in numerous local
social, residential, educational, cultural, and occupational environments.
"Simmons showed no appreciation of the persistent extreme
racial segregation of the city and metropolitan area's communities."
Simmons ignored the legendary and continuing hostility of
the city's power elite to "new ideas" calling for the democratic reconstruction
of key social institutions. She deleted
the mass-murderous and state-terrorist nature of many of Boeing's key products
(including the notorious Arab-killing Blackhawk Helicopter and the Stealth
Bomber), which hardly work to advance a benign or cosmopolitan model of
globalization, and the dangerously regressive (wealth-concentrating) and
imperialist nature of the "advice" neoclassical University of Chicago
economists (the "Chicago academics" to
which Simmons referred) have given to predominantly nonwhite Third World states.
She showed no concern for - or awareness of - the costs that
deindustrialization and specifically corporate-neoliberal globalization impose
on the city's working-class and poor.
Her comments omitted the ugliness of social and (often enough) physical
conditions in the city's large number of predominantly nonwhite low-"vitality"
neighborhoods (generally located at some distance from the beautiful
lakefront), where internationalization was making a significantly negative
"difference" in local "lives" right at home. They did not bother to engage the
critical reflections of those who observed that white Chicago corporate and
civic elites' pursuit of "global city" status and their eager engagement in the
process of metropolitan globalization deepens socioeconomic disparity, black
misery and racial inequality in and around the city.
One such observer was Pauline Lippman, a Chicago-based
academician, an education professor at the city's DePaul University. In 2004, Lippman raised the following issues
with the harsh, at once racialized and spatialized class consequences of
Chicago's supposedly fantastic emergence as a "command center of international
finance and production" in 2003:
"As is typical of other major international cities, in
Chicago globalization is producing ‘a new geography of centrality and
marginality' characterized by deepening inequality in salary and wages, in
housing, and in claims to public space.
The face of Chicago has changed from a manufacturing city of ‘big
shoulders' to a city of corporate headquarters, tourism, and gentrified
neighborhoods alongside sweatshops, substandard housing, and isolated areas of
deindustrialization and disinvestment.
Established working-class and low-income communities are being
supplanted by gentrified upscale housing, luxury shops, and hip leisure spots
for high-paid [and disproportionately white, P.S.] professionals. Across the city, economic development in
low-income areas has been sacrificed to renovation and development of the
downtown area as a glamour zone of tourism, expensive restaurants and cultural
venues, and luxury housing. This
pattern is matched by the increasing isolation of Latino and African American
communities divested of resources [diverted to]...developers and real estate
interests. Public housing, left to
decay by decades of disinvestment and mismanagement, is rapidly being razed to
clear the way for expensive new condominium and townhouse development. Meanwhile, the former residents are
dispersed and/or forced out of the city to impoverished suburbs or other
socially isolated low-income areas."
Metropolitan globalization's "simultaneous upgrading,
downgrading, and exclusion of labor" creates, Lippman noted, a plethora of
low-wage, non-union, low-skill service jobs paying inadequate incomes to
"woman, people of color, and immigrants," many of whom are "driven into the
informal economy in order to survive."
Ever more deeply excluded from the city's formal economy, the city's
black and Latino youth increasingly strike the city's economic and political
elite as "not only superfluous to the labor force but potentially dangerous in
a city designed to attract tourism and high-paid managers, technical services,
and business services at the core of the global economy." By Lippman's chilling
account, based on years of researching the social and education dilemmas faced
by the city's black and Latino children, metropolitan globalization under the
command of corporate capital "converge[s] with white racist ideology and
structures of racial power and privilege to foster a cultural politics that
pathologizes and criminalizes communities of color," consigning "a generation
of young African American and Latino men and women" to "the bowels of the
prison industrial complex" rather than "the offices of Chicago's new
informational and service economy."
"Economic development in low-income areas has been
sacrificed to renovation and development of the downtown area as a glamour zone
of tourism, expensive restaurants and cultural venues, and luxury housing."
Consistent with Simmons' exercise in stealth civic
whitewashing, Global Chicago rendered
the city's black population next to invisible.
Beneath repeated celebration of the city's new "diversity," the book
paid more attention to the city's newly acquired and supposedly wonderful white
Boeing Corporation than it did to the city's many deeply disadvantaged and
historic black neighborhoods. While
blacks made up 37 percent of the new global metropolis in 2000, Global Chicago contained a grand total
of six brief references to African-Americans in the Midwest Metropolis, some
quite trivial. The references included a short purported history of "black
civil rights activism" in Chicago that strangely culminated in the city's
dismantlement of its predominantly black high-rise public housing projects and
its effort to introduce "accountability" into the city's predominantly black
public schools. Both of these policies
were treated as efforts by the city to overcome "racial isolation" and
inequality. This curious "history" appeared, oddly enough, under a chapter
sub-heading titled "Julius Rosenwald" -
the name of a wealthy white-Jewish philanthropist who undertook a number
of charitable initiatives on behalf of
black ghetto residents during the early 20th century. It made no substantive reference to the
Chicago Freedom Movement. It ignored
the significant extent to which many black Chicagoans and activists see the
demolition of public housing and the city "school reform" initiatives as
policies designed to deepen racial apartheid and inequality.
Global
Chicago contained a map indicating the presence and location of the
city's "Hispanic" (Latino) population. No such graphic was included to show
readers where blacks lived, in far more concentrated fashion than any other
group in Chicago's "global city" period, as during the pre-"global" era. All in all, contemporary and related past
black issues and the question of how those issues related to the process of
metropolitan globalization were essentially missing in Global Chicago, consistent with the dominant culture's retreat from
race in the post-Civil Rights era. There was no direct reference in the book to
the uncomfortable experience of the tens of thousands of officially
impoverished black children living in the off-stage shadows of Chicago's expanding,
world-connected and corporate downtown and its growing ring of shiny,
gentrifying condo-complexes, restaurants, coffee shops, and cutting-edge
fitness clubs.
"Contemporary and related past black issues and the
question of how those issues related to the process of metropolitan
globalization were essentially missing in Global Chicago, consistent with the
dominant culture's retreat from race in the post-Civil Rights era."
Showcasing or even acknowledging their plight would have
worked against the book's boosterist determination to spark corporate
investment in the city. If "being known
as a [beautiful] global city" that "welcome's new business opportunities" and
"ideas" was what Simmons called "an economic and cultural asset" that "helps
attract corporations of Boeing's magnitude," being known as a racist city that
betrays the living ideals of the civil rights movement and is plagued by vast
stretches of black ghetto and highly racialized and concentrated poverty was
surely an economic and cultural liability that would tend to repel the
supposedly benevolent holders and agents of international capital. Global Chicago's editors saw no point in
messing up what they perceived as a good global thing by telling too much ugly
truth about life (and death) on the other side of Martin Luther King's "tragic
walls."
This
posting appears by permission of the author and publisher. This material
is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. Please contact the
publisher for permission to copy, distribute or reprint. Paul Street can be
contacted at paulstreet99@yahoo.com
“...white paranoia is here to stay/The white boy's scheming night and day/What you think about the King Alfred Plan?”
“Ethiopia just changed the continent of Africa forever.” - African development economist and electricity activist
"Department of War: What’s new is so old" is the latest from BAR's Poet-in-Residence.
Turning the Caribbean into a US bombing range requires local collaborators. Neocolonial governments have volunteered to play this role, betraying their people's right to peace and sovereignty.
The Africa Climate Summit is a greenwashing front for a new wave of colonialism. Under the guise of "nature-based solutions," corporations like the Gates Foundation are pushing schemes that will turn…
