Equality: Industrial Capitalism’s Trojan Horse—Environmental Racism, Green Colonialism, and The Renewable Energies Revolution

Published in:
Philosophy as Practice in the Ecological Emergency: An Exploration of Urgent Matters, Ed. Lucy Weir, Palgrave Macmiilan, 2023

Summary:

“I think the big crisis of our times is that our minds have been manipulated to give power to illusions.”—Vandana Shiva

Race, equality, and social ecology are inherently incompatible concepts. Our immigrant nation following modern “civilization,” was founded on white supremacy; and today, ironically, is sustained through the bewitching lure of the charade of equality—itself founded in xenophobia. Racism is insidiously intertwined with the histories of transportation, urban planning, agriculture, education, and energy infrastructures since the founding of the United States. Orthodoxy of equality, the bedrock of “democracy,” has become a euphemism that perpetuates environmentally racist capitalism. Equality and its fallacious language of equity is the Trojan horse that ferries corporate capitalism into the mainstream. Disentangling the roots of systemic psychic, corporeal, and social violence, “Equality: Industrial Capitalism’s Trojan Horse—Environmental Racism, Green Colonialism, and The Renewable Energies Revolution” explores the crucial distinctions between “equality” and equilibrium; “access” and freedom; “privilege” and justice. The reference point for equality as manifested in the US is not freedom nor justice nor power; the reference point is convenience-waste culture that reinforces racist power structures of Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Ag, Big Banks, etc. While powerlessness is the problem, redistribution of power as it is currently defined is not the solution

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