Weathering the Climate

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter examines how racial climates are experienced, their bodily and psychological impacts on individuals and communities. Racial climates are not singular; they are impacted by complexly different histories for different racialized groups. Racial climates also inform conceptualizations such as the distinction between the Global North and the Global South. This formation, central to climate change narratives, enacts and reinforces a set of dualisms that are linked to race as well as to gender. Racist lineages of this distinction permeate discussions of population—both overpopulation and population migration—as crucial factors in global climate change. Cloaking the racial climate with environmentalism or protectionism is just one of the many mechanisms of the ecology of racial climates.