No Justice, No Peace

With above 100 degrees Fahrenheit inside the Arctic Cirlce, climate change and other environmental disasters remains as urgent as ever. But there really is no separation between multiple forms of injustice. Jacqueline Patterson:

[What] drives one group to oppress drives others to recklessly extract from the earth. Being dominated and exploited serve a wealthy white few.

Thanu Yakupitiyage:

There’s a history of decoupling environmental issues and race issues. But if we don’t think about climate and climate solutions in the same vein as thinking about other solutions to injustice, we’re never going to succeed.

Eric Holthaus:

[T]he crisis of marginalised people dying from climate disasters around the world is not so different from the crisis of Black people dying from police brutality in the United States or Indigenous people in the Amazon from Covid-19. Wherever inequality persists, the web of poverty and injustice infects marginalised people, like a deadly disease. 

Robert Bullard:

[T]he Covid-19 hotspots are where the pollution is. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out why. If you have areas with the highest concentration of pollution and sick people, people who have been made sick by racism, zoning, and permitting, and you have lots of diabetes, heart disease, and kidney disease there, the virus is going to seek that out. The coronavirus is like a heat-seeking missile zeroing in on the most vulnerable. When you look at redlining and discriminatory zoning patterns that resulted in the pollution of black communities, it’s those same communities where we’ve been fighting against environmental racism for years that are now getting hit hard by Covid. The footprint for Covid is lining up with the redlining maps from the 1930s.

Henry Giroux:

[T]he spirit of revolt now gripping the U.S. and a host of other countries suggests we are witnessing more than mass protests and short-lived demonstrations. A new political horizon has opened up that points to a growing rebellion against the lethal merging of racism, class division and the punishing registers of inequality. The failed state has lost its oxygen and is on life support. We can hope that this growing rebellion will extinguish its last breath so that a radical democracy can fulfill its promises and ideals.

Update (June 25):  Behrooz Ghamari Tabrizi links U.S. imperialism to racism at home.

Racism was and is not about an attitude. Rather, it is the problem of a political order that sustains and perpetuate that attitude through a complex system of legal and economic institutions at home and around the world.

Black American will not be recognized as equal citizens so long as people of color around the world remain subjected to the brutality of imperialized nations such as the United States of America. The drones that kill the Iraqi, Yemeni, Pakistani, Somali civilians, the bombs, the fighter jets, the missiles and guns that are sold to the tyrants, they are all parts of the same system of oppression that brutalizes Black Americans. The Palestinians know the meaning of ghettoization in American cities. The immigrants who are dehumanized by ICE understand the depth of police brutality and the meaning of murder with impunity. These voices need to hear one another. Black America has given voice to a global movement.

And Richard Wolff connects racism to the "business cycle".

U.S. capitalism solved its instability problem by making cyclical downturns afflict chiefly a minority subpart of the whole working class. It positioned that minority to bear the brunt of each cycle and suffer its damages disproportionally. That minority was repeatedly drawn into and then thrown out of jobs as the cycle dictated. Any savings it might accumulate when working would be lost when unemployed. Repeated firings precluded such a minority from enjoying the benefits of job longevity (seniority, promotion, household stability, etc.). Poverty, disrupted households and families, unaffordable housing, education, and medical care would haunt such a minority. It would become capitalism’s “business cycle shock-absorber”—the last hired, first fired—across the four-to-seven year average duration of its cycles.