The devastation effectuated by Hurricane Helene represents yet another elucidation of a quintessential climate crisis that is right here and right now. It demonstrates that climate change is not a conclusion that awaits us, but a set of present day precarities taking and altering lives right now. According to initial assessments, Helene could cost U.S. taxpayers upwards of $175 billion, and of course, there is no way to quantify the estimated 230 lives that were taken, thus far, with the death toll expected to rise.
Meanwhile, Hurricane Milton, which made landfall in Florida as a Category 3 storm, continued this season of carnage and calamity with a death toll of approximately 20 people and an estimated $50 billion in damages. To put this into perspective, the roughly $225 billion in damages of both Helene and Milton in one year easily eclipses the $36.9 billion per year of climate and energy spending authorized by Joe Biden’s “historic climate change bill,” the so-called Inflation Reduction Act.
The profound pictures of inundated communities, everyday people using their own boats to rescue people, and visits by Presidents Biden, Trump, and Vice President Harris to impacted areas, as well as concerted attempts to politicize disaster including bourgeois environmental organizations using the moment to demand “accountability” for the fossil fuel cartels illuminates the set of problems associated with how climate change is narrated, communicated, as well as who is doing the narrating and the communicating. Indeed, as writer Patricia Fitz-Henley noted in a recent piece about Helene, “There are people who we think are worth headlines, urgency, and aid, and people we don’t”—more on this in a moment.
One thing we know that won’t be communicated by mainstream media, nor the vast majority of the bourgeois nonprofit apparatus is that Helene and Milton are barely about storms and more about the systems of oppression that have been in place long before ExxonMobil and other big oil corporations knew the impact of their products and extractive operations on the atmosphere. It’s no coincidence that Milton’s path of destruction traversed one of the most vulnerable places in the world to the effects of climate change, just as it’s not surprising that those suffering the most from Helene are folk who reside in the poorest areas of Georgia and Appalachia. Residents of both areas continue to experience some of the most profound cases of systemic/institutional racism, bigotry and economic injustice and exploitation.
Environmental Justice practitioners Dr. Beverly Wright and Dr. Robert Bullard remind us in their seminal work, The Wrong Complexion for Protection: How the Government Response to Disaster Endangers African American Communities, “the unequal protect and unequal treatment afforded African Americans have made them vulnerable, including their physical location, socioeconomic status, race and the lingering institutional constraints created and perpetuated by racialized place.” This proclamation was vindicated, in part, by the fact that we recently learned that the youngest victims of Helene, thus far, were two Georgia-based 5-week old Black twins who died along with their mother in her arms.
Helene and Milton are the manifestations of extractive capitalism, which is to say they are, therefore, manifestations of the root causes of climate change—white “supremacy” ideology, colonization, and patriarchy. These two storms are also about unchecked and unmitigated racism highlighted by inadequate government programs that, in some cases, like the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, have been allowed to atrophy still further over time. These storms are about slow genocide as lands are no longer just being snatched from Indigenous people, they are being destroyed and poisoned by perilous pipelines and extractive practices like fracking. If we are truly interested in Climate Justice (not the co-opted variety that bourgeois environmental groups and the Democrat party are peddling), we need to get to the bottom of where these storms came from; we need to study their genealogies: JIM BEGAT Helene and JIM BEGAT Milton
Study after study has revealed that communities that are low-wealth and the majority of people of color are hit “first and worst” by the impacts of climate change, and they are disproportionately situated in the proverbial eye of the storm by the processes that create harmful emissions. Climate and Environmental Justice groups who represent “frontline communities” continue the Sisyphean task of bringing this reality to the forefront of global warming communications. And while some select, historically white-led environmental groups have recently included this language in messages to their members, overall the concept of and need for justice is typically transmitted as a secondary, if not tertiary issue of the larger climate crisis.
The fusion of Jim Crow segregation, redlining of neighborhoods and terrorism experienced by Black and Brown families who attempted to move into “white” communities as far south as Texas and as far north as Long Island, New York are still felt today. Dr. Bullard recounts the impacts of Jim Crow and segregation in his hometown of Elba, Alabama long before he became known as “the father of Environmental Justice” offering, “Although Blacks made up one-third of the city’s population, whites governed the town as if its African American citizens were invisible.” He continues,
In Elba, Jim Crow translated into white neighborhoods receiving the ‘best of the best,’ including libraries, street lighting, paved roads, sewer and water lines, garbage pickup, swimming pools and flood control measures years before Black neighborhoods received these tax-supported services. For decades, Elba’s segregated Black neighborhoods flooded, while white neighborhoods remained high and dry.
To be clear, we don’t yet know the extent of damage by both storms in Black, Brown and poor neighborhoods versus predominantly white ones. However, a simple review of history allows us to infer that hardest hit communities will be low wealth and majority people of color, with predominantly Black communities experiencing the absolute worst of the storms. And the reason why this isn’t a stretch is because the conditions of these communities before the storms provide most of the evidence we need to project what the condition of these communities will be after the storms. As we’ve seen with past storms, impacted communities from Louisiana, Texas, throughout the Gulf South, Puerto Rico, and, indeed the entire country, lower income communities of color are typically located within low-lying areas that are vulnerable to flooding and exposure to pollution.
There are probably many reasons why Brother Malcolm X once said, “the deep south of the United States begins at its northern border with Canada.” Malcolm’s sage aphorism compounds the conclusions offered by Dr. Wright and Dr. Bullard in Wrong Complexion for Protection, specifically, the idea that the privileges that have been afforded to whites increase their ability to escape climate-exacerbated storm events, as well as their ability to rebuild their lives in their aftermath. As Wright and Bullard point out,
Race and place in America have always been connected. In the South, during the Jim Crow era and even after “separate but equal” laws were struck down by the courts, there were places where black people could not buy homes, ride public transit, play in parks and beaches, gain access to schools and hospitals, or sit down at a restaurant. These “special places” for whites and blacks were artificially created by racism, with privilege and advantage biased in favor of whites.
To that end, these storms that are wreaking and that will wreak havoc on the poor, Black, Brown and Indigenous people were not formed themselves by racism and white “supremacy,” but the disproportionate exposure to them and the buffers that prevent these communities from rebuilding and sustaining their lives absolutely is. And when Jim Crow gets toxic, literally and figuratively, the specter of white “supremacy” becomes even more elucidated.
This brings us back to the discussion of, “people who we think are worth headlines, urgency, and aid, and people we don’t.” The recovery efforts of more and more powerful climate-fueled storms like Helene and Milton are when we see the spirit of Jim Crow in full force and effect. According to the U.S. Department of the Interior’s website , the mission and duties of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) include, “support [for] our citizens and first responders ensuring that as a nation we work together to build, sustain, and improve our capability to prepare for, protect against, respond to, recover from, and mitigate all hazards.” However, statistics indicate this mission statement tends to apply mostly, if not only, for white and affluent people.
Recent studies have revealed that FEMA is one the nation’s most racist and classist. One analysis revealed more than half of the FEMA’s money to elevate homes with stilts and other methods has gone to communities that are wealthy or almost entirely white. In four states–Kentucky, Massachusetts, Ohio and West Virginia–over 75 percent of the FEMA elevation money has gone to wealthy or overwhelmingly white communities. And in six states, 40 percent or more of the elevation money has gone to a single affluent or almost entirely white community. FEMA even seems to play a role in post-disaster gentrification and disaster capitalism writ large. For instance, a study conducted by Rice University and the University of Pittsburgh examined counties that each suffered, roughly, the same amount in hazard damage—$10 billion. In those events, Black survivors’ wealth decreased by an average of $27,000 while White survivors’ average wealth increased $126,000.
As the authors of the study assert, the more FEMA and the U.S. government continue to ignore or perambulate these trends, “FEMA perpetuates the cycle of systemic racism. As a result, historically disadvantaged communities do not receive adequate funding to rebuild properly.” It all comes down to the toxic equation that we must immediately deracinate if we are serious about confronting the climate crisis with the requisite scale of action—because storms fueled and exacerbated by racism and white “supremacy” + relief efforts informed and exercised with racism and white “supremacy” = making it right for the whites but calamities for the coloreds.
Ameliorating and eviscerating Jim Crow from our approach to the climate crisis and all systems of oppression are more elementary than people may realize. It’s really quite simple, People Powered Solutions vs. Disaster Capitalism—the people want to rebuild their homes, communities and lives, and the regime in D.C. containing both “major” political parties wants to increase capital for themselves and their cronies, primarily, at the vast expense of the people. And when the people are empowered to establish and maintain networks of mutual aid initiatives, that’s how we get our Deacons for Defense on and run Jim Crow out of town. This will require an entirely new mode of thinking when it comes to climate change—it will require understanding why justice is no longer enough to right the wrongs of the past and present, nor to enjoin the wrongs before they occur in the future.
It’s been said that justice is about harmony and balance—if this is the case, in the context of climate change, justice alone is simply not going to cut it at this moment. We need to embrace the reality that it may be time to let go of the notion of “climate and environmental justice”, as it has since been co-opted and elite captured by political parties and the non profit industrial apparatus. We’re now in the epoch of requisite climate and environmental liberation. Simply put, there can be no justice until there is first liberation—and this may very well require less of an approach associated with Kingian “nonviolence” as made famous in his landmark book, Where do we Go From Here: Chaos or Community and more of an approach associated with V.I. Lenin’s epochal work, State and Revolution. At any rate, we certainly need to embrace the idea of abolition of the climate crisis rather than reforms to address it.
To that end, I have never believed more than I do now that anyone who purports to be a climate champion who is not also an ardent abolitionist is counterfeit and not to be trusted. For the bottom line, climate change incarcerates all of us—and like the criminal injustice system of the U.S., “the New Jim Crow,” its rates of incarceration impact Black, Brown, poor, and Indigenous folk disproportionately. The reason why elements of Jim Crow linger today is that too many believed these elements could be eviscerated with tweaks and reforms to the system rather than abolition of the system altogether. Approaching climate change in the same manner, as we are seeing from the Democrat Party and their bourgeois and petit bourgeois acolytes who hold the mantle of climate “leaders,” is like acquiescing to the death penalty rather than deracinating it like the poisonous weed that it is. Ironically, the Democrat Party removed abolishing the death penalty from their national party platform this year—which seems to continue the trend of specious lip service the party offers for the most pressing challenges, perhaps in human history.
Climate change exacerbates the power of storms, and the undead Jim Crow exacerbates the disproportionate impacts that these storms have on marginalized communities and how we treat them after storms take their leave. Until we keep Jim Crow dead and buried via a people-led social exorcism, all major storms and other climate shock events will contain his legacy, as well as his namesake whether we are conscious of it or not. The ball is in our court, to tell the full story, not just of the wind, rain, and flooding—but of the people who are suffering the worst effects. It is in these narratives that we will find the root causes of climate change, which better positions us, collectively, to address it through a massive, people-powered climate resistance and resiliency project rooted in an approach that delivers climate and environmental liberation for all.
No Compromise
No Retreat