When your inaction causes suffering predominantly to black and brown people, then your inaction is racism.
Instead of acting on it, energy is spent on greenwashing to hide what is happening. The climate crisis and the shape it takes is, therefore, inextricable from colonisation and oppression of black and brown lives. Surely we should be the ones in debt to them. Debt is a tool of neocolonialism which makes developing countries dependent on their former colonisers. Children like nine-year-old Ella Kissi-Debrah, who contracted severe asthma and died in 2013 due to shocking levels of air pollution in Lewisham, south-east London, where she lived.įor decades, governments have helped corporations extract oil and other resources from the global south, especially those countries that are heavily in debt. And it’s not just in the global south: in the UK, black and brown kids are most likely to live in deprived areas where pollution is at dangerous levels. That the safety and livelihoods of these people are not a priority is a reflection of the racist attitudes built into our political and economic systems. Our governments have allowed this to happen, in part, because the crisis has affected black and brown people first. The countries that make up the global north are responsible for 92% of excess global emissions, but it’s the people in the global south who are suffering from the climate crisis right now.
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