Racial capitalism creates expendable “sacrifice zones” on racialized communities justifying extraction of wealth from nature – green energy is used as a guise for reform that increase poverty and reduce healthcare and education

2.2. Racial Capitalism and the Anthropocene An analysis of climate change would be incomplete without situating the anthropogenic breach of planetary boundaries in the larger context of the Anthropocene. The concept Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3626490 Gonzalez of the Anthropocene was introduced by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer (2000) to describe the unprecedented human dominance and disruption of Earth system processes essential to the flourishing of human and non-human life. The authors attributed the emergence of the Anthropocene to the destructive technologies developed by humanity and sought “to guide [hu]mankind towards, global, sustainable, environmental management” (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000, p. 18.). This undifferentiated view of humanity has been widely criticized for obscuring the underlying social and economic drivers of anthropogenic Earth system disruption, including colonial conquest, imperial dispossession and the imposition of a global capitalist order that systematically abuses nature and exploits large segments of the world’s population (Moore 2015, Haraway 2016, Baskin 2019). Some scholars propose the notion of the Capitalocene to better address the role of capitalism as the underlying cause of contemporary social and ecological crises (Moore 2016). Others have emphasized the role of racism and colonial violence as the means through which humans and nature are objectified and exploited (Yusoff 2018). Political theorist Cedric Robinson (2000) and sociologist Aníbal Quijano (2000, 2007, 2014) argue that racism and capitalism are inextricably intertwined. The extraction of wealth from nature was operationalized through slavery, the conquest and dispossession of indigenous peoples, and the colonial and postcolonial domination by white Euro-American elites of large segments of the world’s population. Robinson (2000) uses the term “racial capitalism” to denote this symbiotic relationship between racism and capitalism. He argues that capitalism emerged from a feudal order thoroughly infused with racial hierarchies, and then evolved into a world system that transforms regional and cultural differences into racial forms of domination, including slavery, imperialism and genocide. Quijano introduces the term “coloniality of power” to refer to the Eurocentric racial and cultural hierarchies and institutional forms of domination (such as the nation-state) imposed through colonialism that structure the contemporary capitalist world system – including the North-South divide. These hierarchies persist long after the departure of the colonial administration, and continue to structure economic and social relations (Quijano 2000, 2007). Scholars in a variety of disciplines have extended Quijano’s definition of the coloniality of power to encompass the interlocking systems of oppression that constitute the capitalist world system, including those that privilege core (North) over periphery (South), men over women, Christians over non-Christians, Europeans over non-Europeans, heterosexuals over homosexuals, and Western knowledge over non-Western knowledge (Grosfoguel 2006). What distinguishes this decolonial perspective from Robinson’s approach is that it emphasizes race and racism as a cross-cutting principle of the capitalist world system while also recognizing other intersecting forms of subordination (Grosfoguel 2016). For example, racial hierarchies shape the national and international division of labour, consigning those constructed as non-white to the most dirty and dangerous forms of employment (Fraser 2016, Bhattacharyya 2018, Faber 2018). Similarly, gender hierarchies relegate women to unpaid domestic labour including cooking, cleaning, and raising children that reproduces the workforce (Bhattacharyya 2018). Hyper-exploited racialized women generally perform the waged domestic and care work that enables more privileged Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3626490 Racial capitalism… women to enter elite labour markets in addition to performing unpaid domestic labour in their own homes (Battacharya 2018). In other words, race and gender hierarchies intersect, conferring greater status on some white women than many non-white men, and generally placing non-white women in a subordinate position in relation to both groups (Crenshaw 1989, Grosfoguel 2006). While informed by the insights of critical race theory, including scholars of intersectionality, this article adopts a structural approach to race and racism grounded in political economy. Building on the work of Quijano and Robinson, the article examines the ways that capitalism deploys race and racism as techniques of exclusion and control, creating expendable geographic locations (sacrifice zones) and expendable people. As planetary boundaries continue to be breached (Steffen et al. 2015), racialized populations, including those displaced by climate change, will be exposed to increasing levels of violence and exclusion. Racism is thus not simply a form of bias or discrimination, but an integral part of a world system that subjects growing segments of the world’s population to precarity and premature death. The term “racism” is used in this article to refer to the degradation and objectification of human beings based on a variety of indicators, most commonly physical characteristics (such as skin colour), but also ethnicity, indigeneity, culture, caste, language, religion, geographic location, and geographic origin (Grosfoguel 2016). Racialization is the process through which specific bodies are classified as superior or inferior based on the distinct set of markers adopted in a region or nation at a particular time (Grosfoguel et al. 2014). Which groups are racialized and the narrative that accompanies that racialization varies substantially across place and time in relation to changing economic and political conditions (Reed 2013). For example, some groups that are currently recognized as white (such as Jews and the Irish) have a long history of being classified as non-white (Ignatiev 1995, Brodkin 1998). Racial hierarchies serve distinct economic objectives and maintain population-specific modes of control. In the US, for example, the founding logic of anti-Black racism was labour exploitation (Saito 2014, Wolfe 2016). When slavery was abolished, other mechanisms of exploitation and control became dominant, including share-cropping, debt peonage, convict-leasing, lynching, and segregation (Sassen 2014, Wolfe 2016). By contrast, the logic of anti-Native racism was the elimination of the Native in order to appropriate indigenous lands (Saito 2014). Consequently, settler-colonial states like the US, Australia and Canada sought to dissolve Native societies and extirpate Native land claims through genocide and various forms of ethnocide, including “the breaking-down of Native title into alienable individual freeholds, Native citizenship, child abduction, religious conversion, resocialisation in total institutions such as missions or boarding schools, and a whole range of bio-cultural assimilations” (Wolfe 2016, p. 33). Eurocentric racial and cultural hierarchies correspond, at least in part, to Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ notion of the “abyssal line” demarcating those deemed fully human from those deemed less than human (Santos 2014). Conflicts involving those on one side of the abyssal line are managed through discourses of liberty, equality and autonomy. Those on the other side of the abyssal line are treated as non-humans/sub-humans and occupy a zone of violence and dispossession (Grosfoguel 2016). As Sundberg (2008, p. Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3626490 Gonzalez 570) observes, “[r]acial thinking provides a powerful rationale for why inequalities and injustices between groups of people are socially and legally acceptable”. This article focuses on the subordination of those below the abyssal line while recognizing that abyssal and non-abyssal exclusions coexist and that some groups cross between these two forms of exclusion in their daily lives. Santos (2018) provides examples that illustrate the distinction between abyssal and non-abyssal exclusion. First example: In a predominantly white society, a young Black man in secondary school (…) may well consider himself excluded, whether because he is often avoided by his schoolmates or because the syllabus deals with materials that are insulting to the culture or history of peoples of African descent. Nonetheless, such exclusions are not abyssal; he is part of the same student community and, at least in theory, has access to mechanisms that will enable him to argue against discrimination. On the other hand, when the same young man on his way back home is stopped by the police, evidently due to ethnic profiling and is violently beaten, at such a moment, the young man crosses the abyssal line. (Santos 2018, p. 22) The abyssal line operates on a global scale between centres and peripheries – the North and South. It also operates within nations. In the global North, indigenous peoples, racial and ethnic minorities and immigrants from the global South are disproportionately classified as subhuman or non-human. In the global South, Westernized elites frequently engage in internal colonialism, reproducing racist practices against particular social groups (Grosfoguel et al. 2014, Gonzalez 2015). The abyssal line is perhaps most evident in the zones of extreme violence and degradation, such as Guantánamo, Darfur, Iraq, Palestine, and Yemen. It is also evident in the prisons and migrant detention camps of the global North (Santos 2014). The distinction between abyssal and non-abyssal exclusion is not grounded in the intensity of the pain and deprivation experienced by individual or collective bodies, but “refers to the indifference with which suffering is inflicted, indifference meaning both cold-bloodedness and impunity” (Santos 2018, p. 95). The regulation of migration is “among the most consistently racialized practices of most contemporary states” (Bhattacharyya 2018, p. 129). European nations and settler-colonial states historically encouraged European mobility while restricting the movement of persons classified as non-white. Between 1800 and 1925, for example, approximately 48 million Europeans migrated to New Zealand, Australia, Argentina, South Africa, and the United States as a consequence of migration policies designed to “whiten” these states and territories (Massey 2000). During the same period, the newly sovereign states in the Americas adopted a series of laws and policies to reduce the migration of racialized populations, including head taxes, outright prohibitions (such as the infamous 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act in the United States), and racially coded naturalization and immigration policies (Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2018). Australia adopted a “White Australia Policy” in 1904, and banned migration from Africa, Southeast Asia, and South Asia (Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2018). In the decades following World War II, the demographic composition of Europe and the US changed due to migratory flows from the global South, challenging Euro-American white national identity (Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2018). Until the 1960s, the US imposed racially discriminatory national origin quotas on new migrants that favored Northern Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3626490 Racial capitalism… Europeans (Tichenor 2002). When these quotas were lifted, migration from Asia, Africa, and Latin America increased significantly – triggered by war, poverty, and neoliberal economic reforms (Gonzalez 2011). European States also grew more racially and ethnically diverse due to the influx of racialized citizens from the former colonies and migrant laborers recruited from Turkey, Morocco and elsewhere (Telford 2018, Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2018). Notwithstanding these demographic changes, the current “refugee crisis” has revealed the profound racial animus against persons classified as non-white. In Europe, the US and other settler-colonial nations, the population is generally divided “between those whose movement is a manifestation of liberty, and should therefore be maximized, and those whose freedom is a problem, and should therefore be tightly regulated” (Kotef 2015, p. 100). While corporations freely roam the world, racialized bodies are policed, detained, incarcerated, and deported (Sheller 2018). This racialized abyssal line has profound implications for climate-induced migration. The following section draws upon these insights to expand our understanding of climate justice. 2.3. Racial Capitalism and Climate Change An analysis of climate change through the lens of racial capitalism and coloniality reveals additional aspects of climate injustice that are obscured by the four-part definition articulated in this article (distributive, procedural, corrective, and social). In order to appreciate the full extent of climate injustice, it is important to examine the ways that race is inscribed in the history of carbon capitalism and the sacrifice zones of both the fossil fuel economy and the emerging green energy economy. First, the colonization of the Americas and the transatlantic slave trade established the material and ideological foundations of capitalism – a system based on extraction, accumulation through dispossession, and white supremacy (Davis and Todd 2017, Yusoff 2018). The Anthropocene is the epoch under which ‘humanity’ – but more accurately, petrochemical companies and those invested in and profiting from petrocapitalism and colonialism – have had such a large impact on the planet that radionuclides, coal, plutonium, plastic, concrete, genocide and other markers are now visible in the geologic strata. (Davis and Todd 2017, p. 765; emphasis added) The genocide of the indigenous populations of the Americas in the 1500s was so massive (nearly 50 million deaths) that farming collapsed and forests rebounded. The forests removed such large amounts of carbon from the atmosphere as to cause a significant dip in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels in the 1600s, measurable in Antarctic ice cores – leading Lewis and Maslin (2015, pp. 175-177) to propose 1610 as the beginning of the Anthropocene. This early marker of the Anthropocene coincided with the importation of slave labour to extract gold, silver and copper and later the sugar and cotton that fueled the Industrial Revolution (Yusoff 2018, pp. 29-33). Starting the Anthropocene at 1610 captures all impacts of the Industrial Revolution, which many scientists and historians consider a key part of the Anthropocene – because European annexing of the Americas was an essential factor in providing food energy and raw material imports that were critical elements allowing an Industrial Revolution to take place. (Lewis and Maslin 2018, p. 319) Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3626490 Gonzalez Colonization and slavery were therefore central rather than peripheral to the Industrial Revolution and the birth of carbon capitalism (Williams 1994, Beckert 2014, Blackburn 1997, Yusoff 2018). Second, the “slow violence” inflicted by the fossil fuel industry on racialized and poor communities throughout the world remains a central feature of contemporary capitalism (Nixon 2013, Soyapi and Kotzé 2016). The extraction, processing, transportation, refining and combustion of fossil fuels has placed disproportionate environmental burdens on racialized communities in the global North and South. From the Niger Delta to the Canadian tar sands and the countless communities living in the shadow of polluting petrochemical facilities and power plants, the life cycle impacts of fossil fuels include eviction from ancestral lands; desecration of sacred sites; poisoning of air, land, and water; fires, explosions, and industrial accidents; loss of subsistence fishing and hunting rights; and exposure to significant health hazards (Klein 2014). Local and transnational environmental justice struggles against coal mining, petroleum drilling, fracking, oil and gas pipelines, and polluting refineries and power plants are thus inextricably intertwined with the struggle for climate justice. Third, fossil fuels are concentrated in particular countries and regions such as the Middle East that have been targeted over and over for invasion, occupation, and exploitation. The North’s bloody resource wars, its collusion with despotic petro-states, and the resulting death, destruction and displacement of racialized Muslim and Arab populations are amongst the most violent ongoing manifestations of climate injustice (Klare 2004, Natarajan 2012, Klein 2016). When persons displaced by these conflicts seek refuge in the global North, they are branded as potential terrorists and subjected to restrictive border controls, including the notorious “Muslim ban” on travel to the US from certain predominantly Muslim countries (Liptak and Shear 2018, Telford 2018). Fourth, those most susceptible to climate-related disasters and slow-onset events are overwhelmingly persons classified as non-white (Haas Institute 2017, Pulido 2018). They reside in locations such as low-lying coastal zones, small island states, and agriculturedependent nations disproportionately exposed to hurricanes, floods, drought, desertification and rising sea levels (Anand 2004). In addition, they have been rendered socially and economically vulnerable to climate change by the North’s economic and military interventions. The North’s “under-development” of the global South during the colonial and postcolonial era, so eloquently described by Walter Rodney (1972) and Eduardo Galeano (1997), has been exacerbated by decades of neoliberal economic reforms imposed initially by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and subsequently through regional and multilateral trade agreements and bilateral investment treaties (Gonzalez 2015). These reforms increased poverty; reduced access to health care, education, and other social services; undermined the development of climate-resilient urban and rural infrastructure; created mass displacement; and deprived states and communities of resources for climate adaptation and disaster response and recovery (Haas Institute 2017, Saad 2017). Finally, racialized communities in the global South are being displaced not only by climate change, military interventions and neoliberal economic policies, but also by the measures deployed to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. For example, wind farms are being developed in Oaxaca, Mexico on indigenous lands to provide energy to Walmart, Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3626490 Racial capitalism… Coca-Cola, Heineken and Cemex (a Mexican cement manufacturer) without public debate; adequate compensation; free, prior and informed consent; equitable sharing of benefits with local communities; and mechanisms to provide compensation for damage and loss to land (Baker 2015, Zárate-Toledo et al. 2019). In Canada, a controversial proposal to build an enormous hydroelectric dam on the Peace River threatens to displace indigenous peoples and replicate the sacrifice zones of carbon capitalism – this time in the name of “green energy” (Scott and Smith 2017). In Brazil and throughout the global South, forest conservation schemes developed through the climate regime’s Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) mechanism undermine the rights of local and indigenous communities to harvest plants, timber, or fish in their ancestral territories (Klein 2014, Kronk Warner 2015). Lastly, legislation in the US and the EU mandating the blending of biofuels into transportation fuels has increased food prices and incentivized large-scale land transactions in the global South that destroy forests and displace rural dwellers in order to make way for large plantations to cultivate biofuel feedstocks (such as oil palm). These mandates remain in place even though the life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions of many biofuels exceed those of the fossil fuels they replace (Gonzalez 2016). An analysis of climate change grounded in the coloniality of power reveals a key thread that unites these abuses – the abyssal line dividing those deemed human from those deemed non-human or sub-human. While everyone is vulnerable to climate change, those who occupy the sacrifice zones of racial capitalism are particularly susceptible to harm due to their classification as sub-human and disposable. Racialization justifies and naturalizes violence and dispossession in war zones, in resource extraction zones, in the green energy economy, and in the refugee camps and migrant detention centers of the global North. As Naomi Klein candidly observes: A culture that places so little value on black and brown lives that it is willing to let human beings disappear beneath the waves, or set themselves on fire in detention centres, will also be willing to let the countries where black and brown people live disappear beneath the waves, or desiccate in the arid heat. When that happens, theories of human hierarchy – that we must take care of our own first – will be marshalled to rationalize these monstrous decisions. (Klein 2016, p. 9) Even though they have uprooted “the darker races” (Du Bois 1900/2007) throughout the world through the ecological and economic crises of colonialism, militarism and predatory capitalism, Northern governments use a variety of border controls to exclude “those whose very recourse to migration results from the ravages of capital and military occupations” (Walia 2013, p. 5). For those below the abyssal line, racism is not simply prejudice or discrimination, but “state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” (Gilmore 2007, p. 28). International law has been deeply complicit in the project of racial capitalism. As Antony Anghie (2004) explains, international law originates in the colonial encounter and has been used to justify successive Northern interventions in the global South through a variety of doctrines – including terra nullius, the doctrine of discovery, the mandate system, trusteeship, modernization, development, good governance, humanitarian intervention and pre-emptive self-defense. International law has depicted Southern peoples as so primitive, savage, uncivilized, backward, and under-developed that their Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3626490 Gonzalez lives, livelihoods, and cultures are unworthy of protection (Anghie 2004, Gonzalez 2015). This history raises serious questions about the ability of the climate regime to secure climate justice for racialized communities displaced by climate change.