Racism increases environmental risks for those who are not white – 01/20/2024 – Reinaldo José Lopes

I want to believe that colleague Joel Pinheiro da Fonseca was not having one of his happiest days when writing his recent column about the floods in Rio and the application of the concept of environmental racism to them by minister Anielle Franco.

In a spirit of interpretative charity —a charity that, I dare say, the columnist lacked a little when he addressed the minister’s statements—, I will now make a careful reading of her arguments. Furthermore, I seek to show why the category of environmental racism is an important tool for understanding the world under the shadow of the climate emergency we face today.

Right at the beginning, he writes: “So now we must believe that the floods in Rio are the result of racism?” If the minister’s speech really had that meaning, it would, in fact, be absurd. But it is worth reproducing Anielle Franco’s phrase quoted by the columnist himself:

“I am following the effects of yesterday’s rain in the municipalities of Rio and the state of alert with imminent tragedies, also a result of the effects of environmental and climate racism.” There are two interesting details here indicating that the colleague’s interpretation of this Sheet is not the most appropriate.

First, the word “fruit” is next to “imminent tragedies”, not “rain”. The minister links the disastrous effects of the floods, and not the climate phenomenon itself, to environmental racism. The distinction is important. Furthermore, she uses the word “too”. It is, therefore, a factor that worsens the problem, which increases vulnerabilities, and not a simple cause and effect relationship. To state anything other than this is to falsify what was said.

Our scribe goes on to say: “According to data that the minister herself cited, 69% of favela residents in Rio declare themselves black or mixed race. If the flood is the result of racism, weren’t those 31% of white people equally affected? If they were —and obviously they were—so the cause is not racism.”

In addition to the repeated confusion between causality and vulnerability (it’s the latter that the minister is talking about), he doesn’t seem to stop for a moment to ask himself about the meaning of the number. A quick check of data from the latest Brazilian Census shows that, in the municipality of Rio de Janeiro as a whole, those self-declared as black or mixed race make up 54.29% of the population, while 45.43% consider themselves white.

The racial difference between the populations in the favela and in Rio as a whole should turn on a light in the head of those who attacked the minister. Talking about environmental racism simply reflects the fact that, although the rain falls equally on the just and the unjust, as the Gospel says (and the atmosphere in which we are spitting fossil carbon is also one for all), some are less equal than others. the others.

The cool guy from the South Zone can have a reasonable degree of certainty that his apartment won’t flood or fall down the ravine, unlike what happens with the average resident of Rio’s favelas. The chance that the first is white and the second is black is high. And, most importantly, the processes that led each of their families to end up in their respective places were mediated by racism — including social and job market prejudice, which the columnist says he finds relevant in other contexts.

And, of course, none of this only applies to urban contexts. It is no coincidence that traditional land ownership by non-European populations is one of the first victims of the advance of deforestation. It is no coincidence that non-white residents of Pacific island countries have far fewer resources to deal with rising sea levels than the British or Dutch who colonized many of these countries. None of this is a mirage or invention.

To conclude, I quote another of my colleague’s arguments that seems worrying to me. “Academia is not an oracle that downloads its truths to us,” he says. “On the contrary: today the academy is the one that needs to prove its relevance.”

Well, I’ve been working as a science journalist for more than 20 years. This means that part of my work is to make academic knowledge come down from the pedestal and dialogue with the population in an uncomplicated and unarmed way.

But to speak like this in the voice of “lowly laymen” who want to contest a branch of knowledge without considering its implications seems hasty and dangerous to me. The price of following this path was paid with the blood of hundreds of thousands of Brazilians during the pandemic years. Just in case, I leave Joel with a brief piece of Gandalfian advice: a wise man only speaks about what he understands.

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