On… Diversity
What are we to do with privilege?
Last week the BBC released an excellent short film on diversity within the climate movement.
It was encouraging to see after such an infuriating report on flash flooding a few weeks ago when my parents’ house was among some of the homes affected.
The film follows Fatima Ibrahim, an 18 year old climate activist who investigates the accessibility of climate activism, rightly concluding that it is too white and too middle class to represent many of those who are currently on the frontlines of climate impacts.
The BBC documentary concluded that the climate movement is predominantly white and middle class.
Fatima says, ‘the way that we communicate the climate crisis needs to be rooted in peoples’ lived experiences… so really what it means to be on the frontlines.’
The Western world’s historical carbon emissions have disproportionately contributed to climate change, which is now affecting people of colour fastest and with the greatest severity. Which is why in my first ever blog post, On… Black Lives Matter, I argue that it’s not really possible to separate racial and climate justice.
But what are those of us who are privileged supposed to do with it?
Should we seek to purge our lives of as many privileges as possible? Should we step back in our involvement in order to make space for others to take leadership roles? Is it even possible to make amends?
So this week’s blog post on diversity is written from my perspective (which is all I can do), as a white woman who is very concerned about climate change.
Our Journey with Racism
I have been aware of racism ever since my best friend in primary school, the only person of colour in my class, described herself as a banana. White on the inside and yellow on the outside.
‘I’ll never know what it’s like to fit in’, she used to say to me.
As a white person, I was incredibly slow to understand what she meant by that.
But I didn’t become actively engaged until I did a week’s training for my gap year with Britain’s oldest missionary organisation, USPG.
The training was led by people of colour and knocked out of my head any stupid ideas I might have about what I thought I was doing volunteering on the other side of the world.
The colonial history of the organisation, and the work that had been done to restore relationships, provided plenty of mistakes and wisdom to learn from, and learn I did.
But awareness and engagement are different from commitment because for that we are required to actively go out of our way to challenge racism, rather than waiting for it to rear it’s ugly head before us.
And in that respect, I’m nowhere near as far along that journey as I need to be.
Like anything, we are all on our journey to understand racism and it’s impacts.
Check your Blindspot
In several of my previous blog posts, I have described climate change as something along the lines of ‘the biggest existential threat humankind has faced in modern history.’
What I have meant to say is that never before has a threat so universal risked so much for so many people.
But I have come to realise that there is something wrong about that statement.
Because it betrays something about my perspective on climate change that had remained in part concealed from my awareness until recently; my white privilege.
Until I learned of climate change a decade ago I took for granted that the ups and downs of my life would take place within a climate of relative stability. That, unless something went very wrong, I could expect to get a decent job, find a nice house to live in, marry if I wished and that for the years I am given on the planet I would be relatively free to pursue my dreams.
Sure, there are some aspects of my circumstances that cast more doubt on that than some others who share a similar level of privilege to me, but in comparison to most on this planet, I have expected more guarantees from life than many. Then I learned about climate change.
But a few weeks ago I read this short article by Mary Heglar about the civil rights movement in the USA. (Warning: the article contains some distressing images and written content).
It led me to understand that for many people of colour the experience of fighting for the right to exist in the world, as acting on climate change requires of us, is nothing new.
Heglar writes, ‘history is littered with targeted — but no less deadly — existential threats for specific populations’.
My understanding of how climate change fits into the arc of human history had revealed a gaping blindspot.
Privilege leaves us with blindspots in the way we see the larger picture.
The Fragility of Privilege
I remember once feeling absolutely infuriated as I watched a politician attempt to soothe (or rile) a group of campaigners by telling them ‘everyone has their pet issue and it can’t always be climate change.’
But in a sense, he was kind of right. You have to pick your issues otherwise the weight of everything that’s wrong in the world will be crushing.
That is, of course, until you can’t.
Because when you realise that something threatens everything and everyone you have ever loved, it becomes impossible to turn a blind eye. To do so would be like denying your very self.
I am privileged to be new to that kind of struggle because climate change is my first exposure to this level of existential threat.
But for African communities who were captured, enslaved, and sold on the other side of the Atlantic, and many of whose descendants today are threatened rather than protected by the police, for example, the survival of community and culture has already faced a level of existential threat that many white folk couldn’t begin to comprehend.
And so in those minority groups there is experience, insight, and wisdom about what it means to live in a world where survival is called into question.
Which is exactly why diversity must be at the heart of the climate movement.
Not just because it’s right, but because without those perspectives the climate movement cannot fail to be fragile.
To be white means that I am lucky enough not to have much experience in fighting threats of this nature, so building resilience to the shock, grief, and anger I feel about climate change is newer to me and the communities I have been raised by.
White folk have a great deal to learn about building resilience in an unsafe world.
Sensuous Knowledge
This is one of the reasons why Minna Salami, an influential black woman feminist and author of Sensuous Knowledge writes;
‘Even if black womanhood can make life more challenging, to be a black woman is nevertheless a blessing, not least because it reduces the risk of a naïve and ambivalent attitude to reality.’ (p. 3)
Minna Salami’s ‘Sensous Knowledge’ is both a wonderful and uncomfortable read.
Sensuous Knowledge is ‘a black feminist approach for everyone’ and I have found it both a wonderful and uncomfortable read.
As a woman I rejoice to hear my experiences of struggling against some male norms articulated so beautifully. As a white person I am left with a lot more to learn about and wrestle with.
‘Sensuous Knowledge’ is, according to Salami, a way of seeing and knowing the world that is beyond the Europatriarchy- that is the white, male perspective.
Specifically, Salami calls us to reject the monopoly that reason has had on what has been considered as valuable information in modern human history.
The supremacy of reason in Western culture was the subject of last week’s blog post, On… Feelings where I shared my own conviction (which, ironically, was evidenced by scientific data) that emotions are absolutely essential to our efforts to halt climate change.
Like Salami, I consider this a feminist perspective because emotion, often treated as suspicious and unreliable in comparison to reason, has been traditionally associated with the feminine.
Working in the world of politics and policy for six years, it did not often feel that there was much room for the woolly world of feelings. Science is about facts. Politicians (apparently) want facts. Policy is facts interpreted and manifested in the world with as much objectivity as possible.
That’s to say, I’ve been working in a masculine world where the insight that emotions could be so pivotal to climate lobbying was relatively new when I started, yet proved to be transformative in increasing the impact of lobbying efforts.
Female Leadership in Troubling Times
This insight, which broke through traditional approaches to lobbying and grew Hope for the Future into the national charity it is today, is what Salami would call Sensuous Knowledge.
It is this kind of knowledge that brings balance to the dominant ways of seeing the world, and which could prove essential in giving us access to the other forms of intelligence needed to address some of society’s most stubborn ills, such as war, poverty, disease, racism and, of course, climate change.
One recent example of how a balance in perspectives could benefit us all is that most of the countries that have the lowest death tolls and financial impacts of the pandemic, such as Iceland, Germany, and New Zealand, all have woman leaders.
And, contrary to stereotypes that women have either particularly soft or particular harsh leadership styles, the success of these leaders’ strategies rested on both their ability to prioritise protecting human life and to make the unpopular decision to bring in lockdown earlier and more strictly.
When the pandemic hit it was anyone’s guess which approach would fare the best but over time these leaders’ decisiveness, combined with their ability to take their public along with them, have proven to be the most effective so far.
But, in an attempt to advocate for why the world needs more representation of non-dominant or minority perspectives, I am in danger of writing a post that pits women against men, black against white.
That is not my intention and nor is it at all helpful.
The world is in desperate need of a greater balance in power, not so that a different ‘right’ perspective might have a monopoly on the world’s new direction, but so that together, as a species, humanity might function more healthily.
And we haven’t a great deal of time left in which to discover how to do that.
Why We All Need Diversity
In framing climate change as the issue to trump all issues, as I have previously done, I have been in danger of severing climate change from the rich traditions of centuries-old activism that have challenged other structural injustices such as racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, and transphobia.
And too often discussions about privilege centre on how inclusivity will benefit those on the margins, but a richness of perspectives and an equal sharing of power stands to benefit us all in the long term, even if it involves releasing certain privileges we are accustomed to in the short term.
Unequal privilege fragments us, inclusivity unites.
And what climate change shows us once and for all is that it is not possible to sever ourselves from one another.
The air I breathe, the water I drink, the weather my food depends on ultimately refuses to be divided by the lines that have cracked open across society.
For sure, some will be more affected than others, but not a single person could emerge unscathed from the consequences of a world that has not found a way to work together to tackle a global catastrophe like climate change.
On a Practical Note
One of the most challenging aspects of tackling the problem of privilege is that its impacts can be hard to spot if it doesn’t affect us directly.
Which is why taking the time to actively read, listen to, and learn about other perspectives is a vital part of our commitment to resisting the toxic effects of privilege.
I have been creating space to do that more since the murder of George Floyd, and I have a long way still to go.
A few weeks ago I did some training on privilege, called Embodied Activism, and I found a piece of advice on how to make amends when we realise we have caused harm through our privilege, which I will finish this post with.
We were recommended to take three steps to limit the damage and fragmentation that privilege can cause in community, and these were;
Resource and Care for yourself- it is an uncomfortable thing to realise that we have caused harm and we will not be in a position to respond helpfully if we do not check ourselves first to ensure we feel secure enough in ourselves to hear the difficult truths that need to be heard.
Acknowledge the impact- too often we can focus on what we meant by our communication or actions rather than giving space for the lived experience of the other. A good example is when we bump into someone in the road. We know to say sorry and to check on how the person is, rather than to explain that we hadn’t meant to cause harm because that is obvious.
Offer repair and then accountability- Ask what can be done to repair the damage that has been done, and be active in seeking to ensure that it won’t happen again. More generally this can include considering the way we vote, protesting where it might not be otherwise safe for marginalised people to protest and donating to causes that address the impacts of privilege.
About Me I’m Jo,
formerly the founder Director of national climate change charity, Hope for the Future. I am currently researching eco-anxiety and how we can build emotional resilience in our response to the climate emergency.
Welcome to Climate.Emergence- a place to emotionally process what on earth is happening to us and our planet.