White Supremacism and the Earth System
By: Nafeez Ahmed
Tags: Politics, News, BlackLivesMatter, Racism, Environment

Chapter 3. Slavery, empire and the Anthropocene

The structural racism behind current national and global health inequalities was woven from the blood of slaves. Slavery lives on in the discriminatory structures that inflict health inequalities across our societies today. In the words of public health expert Professor Sando Galea:

“The legacy of slavery, especially, remains core to many present health challenges, undermining health through segregation, mass incarceration, and other pernicious influences. There are even patterns of present-day poor health which roughly match the geographic outlines of where slaves were imprisoned. For example, a high concentration of stroke mortality in the US, especially among African Americans, aligns with where slaves were concentrated in earlier eras — a haunting rejoinder to those who would dismiss history as irrelevant to contemporary life and health. These stroke patterns also inform yet another racial health disparity — black Americans are at greater risk of stroke than any other group in the US; risk of experiencing a first stroke is about twice as high for blacks than for whites.”

As Africana studies pioneer Professor Locklsey Edmondson of Cornell University wrote over twenty years ago, the consequences of the slave trade “are still secreted in the contemporary world.” By conditioning the nature of developing contacts between Europe and Africa, slavery affected “the original systematization of white-world and black-world relationships” as part of a “developing European and white-world search for global influence and power.” It thus laid the foundation for “emergent patterns of a white dominant international order.”

The systemic enslavement of Africans was integral to the emergence of the global economy as we know it. It was part of a trans-Atlantic emerging capitalist world system, designed to establish a labour force for the expansion of plantations across colonial America, which fuelled Britain’s industries and helped augment the processes behind the Industrial Revolution.

The acceleration of slavery also coincides with the dawn of the age of the ‘Anthropocene’, what some scientists consider to be an entirely new geological era characterized by the predominant impact of human activities on the Earth’s geological processes. British geographers Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin put the pivotal date for the onset of this new geological epoch at 1610. “This date marks the irreversible exchange of species following the collision of the Old and New worlds”, which coincided with “an associated unusual drop in atmospheric CO2 captured in Antarctic ice cores.”

It’s truly shocking that this historic drop in CO2, visible today in the ice cores, resulted from “vegetation regrowth on abandoned farmlands following the deaths of 50 million indigenous Americans (mostly from smallpox brought by Europeans),” write Lewis and Maslin. “The annexing of the Americas by Europe was also an essential precursor to the Industrial Revolution and therefore captures associated later waves of environmental change.”

This dating for the Anthropocene associates it directly with the violence of empire, with the 1610 date bridging the destruction of mass Native Americans with the mass slavery of Africans, both acts of genocidal violence integral to the emergence of capitalist industry.

From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, between nearly 17,000,000 and 65,000,000 Africans were killed in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, according to R. J. Rummel in his Death by Government.

University of Essex sociologist Robin Blackburn in The Making of New World Slavery demonstrates the centrality of slavery to the emerging extractive capitalist economy. The momentous profits of slavery were accumulated in the “triangular trade” between Europe, Africa and America, and contributed directly to Britain’s industrialization. Profits from triangular trade for 1770 would have provided from 20.9 to 55 per cent of Britain’s gross fixed capital formation. These profits were reinvested in manufacturing, ship-building, canals and coal-mining — the core arteries of British industry — which in turn triggered industrialization across Europe, and beyond.

The dawn of industrialization was, in turn, an inflection point for the human species. It ushered in the age of fossil fuels — oil, gas and coal — which enabled a bold new era of exponentially increasing material throughput, fuelling a new paradigm of ‘endless growth’ economics.

This economic paradigm has widened income inequalities for more than 70 percent of the world population, even as it has also escalated the destruction of natural ecosystems.

We have produced and consumed at rates equivalent to the exploitation of two whole planets.

And worse, multiple warnings backed by a global consensus of climate scientists have warned that human activities, through the escalating consumption of fossil fuel resources, is destabilizing the Earth’s natural carbon cycle with potentially catastrophic consequences for al life on the planet within our lifetimes.

Chapter 4. Structural racism as a planetary boundary effect

For hundreds of thousands of years, the planet has sustained an equilibrium, a ‘safe operating’ space offering an optimum environment for human and other habitation — in which the quantity of carbon emitted and absorbed by planetary ecosystems remains stable.

But since the Industrial Revolution, built on the back of empires — enabled by the sinews of slavery — human civilization has inexorably expanded, consuming greater quantities of fossil fuel energy along the way, and exponentially increasing associated carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions — overwhelming the planet’s capacity for absorption. The result has been a steady increase in global average temperatures. Scientists warn that the extra addition of CO2 into the atmosphere, capturing greater heat, is in turn playing havoc with the Earth’s climate, weather and ecological systems.

As human civilization continues its expansion, burning up escalating quantities of fossil fuels along the way, the climate science community warns that above a certain level of CO2, planetary ecosystems could shift passed a key tipping point into a new, dangerous era — one outside the stable boundaries of the preceding hundreds of thousands of years, and certainly outside anything human beings have ever experienced.

Our civilization is on the brink, right now. A landmark study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that at the current level of an approximate 1C temperature rise above the pre-industrial average, we are already breaching so many planetary boundaries at such scale, that we could be at immediate risk of triggering a cascade of runaway processes leading to an uninhabitable planet. The complexity of these boundaries is such that we may not even be able to detect whether these processes are in play until after the fact. We just don’t know.

What we do know for sure is that if we continue on this pathway of business-as-usual, conservative projections suggest we are heading toward a 3 to 6 degrees Celsius global average temperature rise within 80 years. Even a 2C planet, to which at minimum we are already heading within 16 years, should be considered “extremely dangerous” for human societies; and a global average temperature rise within the 3–4C threshold would probably create conditions that make the core infrastructures of human civilization increasingly unviable.

The same process of relentless global industrial expansion laid the conditions for the COVID-19 pandemic. As industrial activities have grown exponentially, they have encroached increasingly onto wildlife and natural habitats, forcing animals carrying tens of thousands of unknown exotic diseases into closer interaction with human settlements. That’s why scientists have warned for decades that a pandemic would be inevitable this century.

Yet this very expanding global industrial system which is breaching planetary boundaries and triggering increasingly dangerous disease outbreaks is the legacy of colonial racism.

It is a legacy all too few of us are aware of, and so it lives on in invisible structures and institutions shaped by a grim history of imperial bloodshed and conquest. The global expansion of industrialization was inseparable from the empires that enabled it, via the systematic construction of new racial categories designed to legitimize imperial conquest and expansion.

It was precisely within the crucible of colonization that we saw the dawn of scientific racism, the biologically-justified concept of multiple races, the grotesque legacy of which we continue to struggle with today. The idea that there are different ‘races’ can be traced back to the political appropriation and distortion of neo-Darwinian theories of evolution. The concept of ‘race’ was used to underpin racial hierarchies which positioned white Europeans at the pinnacle of civilized human advancement in this juggernaut of global industrial expansion.

Racism, then, is not discrimination against other ‘races’. It is the very act of creating the notion of distinctive ‘races’ of people who possess fixed, generalized characteristics and behaviours within a hierarchy of superiority.

In the early nineteenth century, racism manifested largely as a religious ideology linked to interpretations of the Bible, viewing non-European groups as inherently inferior due to their heathen beliefs and ancestry, and frequently targeted Jews. From the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, racism evolved on the basis of scientifically-justified biological theories which attributed fixed traits, behaviours, characteristics, abilities and disabilities to constructed groups of people based on their supposedly distinctive biological characteristics. Since then, racism has continued to evolve until it became underpinned by subliminal cultural theories.

The late sociologist Stuart Hall famously described “race” as a “floating signifier”. Rather than being a fixed concept, he explained, race has always been an inherently political construct, projected by powerful dominant groups, justifying unequal power relations with other groups. As such, it is a construct that changes and adapts to historical circumstances of power. That is why the new cultural racism focuses on the imagined fixed cultures of imagined fixed groupings of people, permitting homogenized abstractions about their natures, beliefs and practices, projecting a hierarchy of inferior and superior cultures with Western Europeans consistently at the apex. Racialized stereotypes can then cut across colour divides, while encompassing ‘non-racial’ categories like faith, culture and civilization, which end up becoming racist code for the same brand of longstanding discriminatory practices.

That’s why contemporary racism has become so insidious and difficult to detect. It often operates by disavowing its biological roots. So Black people — and other minority groups — are still homogenized and demonized as repositories of inferior behaviour and characteristics such as crime, terrorism, lawlessness and beyond, without necessarily believing in biological or genetic inferiority, enabling the refrain, ‘I have Black friends. I don’t hate people because of their skin colour. I’m not racist. But…’

And this is why identity-politics has not gone away. That’s why racism is deep-rooted, because it’s structural; it’s embedded in our societies; racism’s impacts and consequences and behavioural patterns and assumptions are embedded in who and how we are, due to the power relations that define our ways of living and being.

Racism therefore won’t be fought by parading ourselves as wonderful non-racists, but only by owning up to this horrifying heritage so that we can learn how to move beyond it by creating new systems, behaviours and understandings.

As industrial civilization continues on its relentless path of maximum extraction, exploitation and centralization of resources, its power centers continue to invent and entrench multiple ideological divides between human beings, and between human beings and the natural world, to justify its unequal power relations. And so, the devastating impacts of the Earth system crisis remain racialized, with the worst consequences disproportionately affecting poorer, darker peoples all over the world.