Scientific American, which I remember still being sometimes pretty great when I was a kid, has published a piece by an environmental studies professor at Humboldt State, Sarah Ray. As with a lot of stuff published online, there are “twin titles” for the piece, which exist in a kind of motte-bailey or Ego-Id dyad. The motte/Ego title is what’s on the Sci Am’s site; the bailey/Id title is the thumbnail title that comes up on Twitter and other social media (and thus has all the potential virality).
Motte/Ego title:
Bailey/Id title (what gets shared on Twitter):
“The Unbearable Whiteness of Climate Anxiety”! In a vacuum, that sounds a bit like: “if you’re white and anxious about climate change, then you’re racist.” In fact it almost begins to sound like: “if you’re white and don’t want to be racist, then stop being environmentalist.”
But remember, in the motte/bailey dynamic, this is the bailey. Ray can always claim this isn’t the “real” title, or it’s an “editor’s” title (and the editor can blame it on the web intern, etc).
Here’s article itself. BTW in the Freudian formula above, the paragraphs are the Superego:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-unbearable-whiteness-of-climate-anxiety/
It’s a short read and I don’t intend to spend too much time picking it apart. Readers who want to figure out its logical through-line and what (or what “tf”) the argument here is supposed to be can have at it by just clicking that link and reading. Some lines therein are amusing examples of clumsily-executed rhetorical maneuvering (“concern” good! “anxiety” bad!):
“If people of color are more concerned about climate change than white people, why is the interest in climate anxiety so white?”
Or, of New Age pyschobabble:
“As writer Britt Wray puts it, emotions like mourning, anger, dread and anxiety are “merely a sign of our attachment to the world.”
Is that line there to encourage some kind of pseudo-Buddhic detachment from “the world”, i.e. from global warming itself? If you’re white that is? Or am I already asking too much of these sentences, by asking that they, you know, mean something?
To pitch the obvious opening-move logical critique of the whole premise behind the piece: do people in the Maldives, or Isle Jean Charles, Louisiana, not feel “climate anxiety”? Or has Ray defined “anxiety” tautologically, and racially, as something only white people can ever feel? (In which case: I wonder what other psychic forces Ray thinks only white people can feel?)
But, wait: let me unburrow myself from that particular den. I don’t think this is a piece that exists to be tackled in quite this way, to be “debated” in the sense of someone pointing to the Maldives and saying “but what about their anxieties?” (Similarly, academically-boosted open-borders maximalism doesn’t exist to be “debated” in the sense of someone pointing to Bhutan and saying “but what about their borders, would you ‘abolish’ their border with China?”).
I did reach out to Professor Ray yesterday via social media with questions — phrased, I suppose, with a certain critical edge. But I know a reply is unlikely, because the kind of debate I’d like (it could be logical, theoretical, empirical, metaphysical, historical) is probably not the kind of interaction Ray went into “the business” to have.
(Technically, no I’m not exactly an Env Stud prof, I’m a professor in a Geography and Urban Studies dept, with a PhD in Geography; and my department runs a quite-popular Environmental Studies major, and I’ve been writing about elephant-based transportation for the past 7 years. Ray’s credentialing and departmentalization are a bit different — but similar enough that the popularity of the formulation she’s tapping into alters the winds in my own neck of the woods.)
Ray is, I think, trying to be on the cutting edge of…something. And, when you’re surfing you don’t stop to debate. (To push/test that metaphor: you don’t stop to debate people who prefer diving to surfing). Stopping is how you fall off your board! But that something she’s surfing sure is whitecapping in a weird way heading into the 2020s.
Some years ago I might have supposed that a scholar-activist-author trying to stigmatize as “racist” a whole race of people who are anxious (i.e. who care?) about climate change might very well be receiving Big Oil money. These days it seems less likely to me that “Daniel Plainview’s behind it all.” (In fact, we seem to live in a version of reality where Eli Sunday, the self-made preacher-guru of fraudulent moral grandstanding, has won. “Get out of here, whiteness’s ghost!”)
So, no I don’t think there’s some kind of “funded conspiracy” behind Ray’s piece or Sci Am’s decision to publish and boost the piece. But I think Ray’s piece could be an early shot indicating that the environmentalist / social justice coalition is not going to survive for many more years, and is perhaps already unraveling. There is, of course, nothing inevitable about that coalition. Plenty of people have written about the environmental movement’s partial roots in historical colonialism, eco-fascist thinking, Malthusianism, antimodernist Traditionalism, etc. (similarly, K Crenshaw is just as genealogically linkable to Heidegger as to Gramsci). Environmentalism wound up as a “left wing” progressive issue; but in a somewhat different political landscape over the past half century or so, it could have wound up a conservative one. In much the same way that criticizing globalization used to be a running left-wing concern, until the populist right finally discovered and appropriated a version of this kind of thinking for their own bloc in the mid-2010s, the political right may yet discover and appropriate environmentalism (I’m sure Tucker’s at least thought of it).
You can, perhaps, have white people in the environmentalist movement who are also white people committed to “antiracism.” But you can’t coherently have white people in the environmentalist movement who are also white people committed to “antiracism” who are ALSO being told by the antiracist ideological priesthood that their environmental worries are racist. Something’s gotta give! At some point, people in that fraught position are just going to wind up choosing which value system is more important to them. There’s only so much intersectionalist duct tape which can force these two actually-contradictory things to continue to pretend to fit together.