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Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to a black member of Extinction Rebellion, the movement he supports is too white.
When I look at Extinction Rebellion, all I see is white faces. That has to change
Athian Akec
Sat 19 Oct 2019 16.00 AEDTXR must realise its lack of diversity, middle-class image and glamorisation of arrest puts young black and brown people off.
Some Extinction Rebellion activists present climate warming as a disaster waiting to happen. But for my cousins in the global south, the dystopian future has already arrived. A staggering 12 million people in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia are facing hunger caused by low rainfall. Deadly tropical diseases are spreading more easily as the climate warms, and 780,000 people a year are dying in Africa because of air pollution. But for many black inner-city teenagers like me, the climate change movement conjures up nothing but apathy. Last week, beneath the cloudy skies of north-west London, I asked some of my comprehensive school classmates what they thought about Extinction Rebellion. One answered flatly: “What’s that?”
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The short, frank answer is that the tactics of Extinction Rebellion are designed by and for middle-class, white Britain. Their central rhetoric about a dystopian future fails to cut through for those of us already faced with a nightmarish present, surrounded by poverty and austerity.
Meanwhile, the tactic of being purposely arrested strikes an uncomfortable note for many people of colour, given the adverse experiences people in my community have had with the police. The climate movement’s failure to stand in solidarity with our political struggles adds to this sense of disconnect.
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One friend of mine was stop-and-searched by the police 12 times last year. When I told him that the Extinction Rebellion protesters were purposefully getting themselves arrested, he rolled his eyes in sheer irritation. “That’s not an option for black people,” he said, adding that if he was arrested, the police would undoubtedly treat him differently, and his future career prospects might also be destroyed. The tactic of deliberately seeking arrest has further alienated disenfranchised communities like mine who, across generations, have had bad experiences with the police.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/19/extinction-rebellion-white-faces-diversity
Athian might be right that climate activism is mostly a club for rich white kids, but I suspect the apathy is a lot more widespread than Athian realises. There are plenty of white people who think the climate crisis is a joke.
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I see colorful clumps of cells… I mean, people… persons.
The Guardian of “too many white girls from next door in the Olympics” fame is a known diversitist organization. We should be wary of indulging their bigotry. Diversity (i.e. color judgment) breeds adversity.
They don’t care if a minority gets arrested and loses their job, just as long as they get their poster child.
Well maybe the black people are smart enough to not fall for it.
That’s a prejudiced observation. According to statisticians, we should reasonably expect that an equal proportion of each color class to be believers and skeptics. Any disproportion is evidence of diversity (e.g. racism, sexism), perhaps untoward privilege.
Liberalism is a white western religion. White liberals see themselves as superior to all others. They see themselves as fighters, fighting for the poor, the white working class, the Blacks, Asians, Muslims and women. White people are expected to live to the high standards set by white liberals. Blacks, Asians are not as advanced as us white folk so they are not expected to live to these high ideals.
The are the real white supremacists.
“The are the real white supremacists.”
Seriously. They believe they were ordained by Gaia to tell black and brown people how to live their lives. It’s the modern ‘White Man’s Burden’.
The same people would probably whine about ‘White Saviour Syndrome’ if they read a book where a white person is responsible for saving brown people who somehow can’t save themselves.
It a certain level, it is about white supremacy (a team I loathe). Heck, look at Greta and her handlers, and their assorted worshipers: they are already very wealthy, healthy and privileged, and living in luxurious first world conditions. What they demand are restrictions on energy use in developing and struggling countries, preventing them from ever attaining the first world luxuries the XR crowd take for granted.
Comment from a German hotel worker on the food service people they saw when vacationing in NYC.
I’m currently traveling in Northern Italy and hear a lot of this stuff. Tried to explain that this is the kind of job people can expect when they emigrate to any new country and try to integrate, learn the language, skills, etc.
Those that don’t should not expect a large social safety net.
This seems to be a very hard concept for some EU citizens to comprehend. They also believe that global warming is human caused, we are doomed and that Trump is insane. I pointed out the basic facts about CO2 and also that Trump is not a politician, he cannot be bought and is also anti-war. So he quickly became an enemy of the Deep State.
This kind of information seems to cause a great deal of Cognitive Dissonance and mental sputtering.
“…those of us already faced with a nightmarish present, surrounded by poverty and austerity.”
This person would do themselves a big favor to acquire some education as to the source of the wealth and prosperity the world has enjoyed since the industrial revolution.
It is all the result of inexpensive energy.
Given this, his adherence to a cult whose goal is to make energy more expensive, and in such short supply only the elite few will have access to any, is arguably an institutionalized form of suicidal ideation.
Last time I checked, being a willing participant in mass hysteria is not a prescription for economic prosperity.
The goal of the movement he has joined is depopulation and impoverishment and the end of industrialized civilization.
It is becoming clear that entire generations are not being educated, they are being programmed and indoctrinated, their heads filled with lies and disinformation, and they have been taught to not think, only to believe and recite.
XR just go from one cock-up to the next; the failed attempt to spray the Treasury building red, the badly misjudged tube protest, and now…
Today they’re outside the Department for Education asking teachers to indoctrinate kids with their anti-scientific conspiracy theories…
Unfortunately for wonks at the Adam Smith Institute, their office directly overlooks the protest. To get their own back for having their work disrupted, the ASI team took to blasting music out at the protesters- starting off with ‘People Will Always Need Coal’ by Public Service Broadcasting, before moving on to ‘Rule Britannia’.
It wasn’t long before Extinction Rebellion asked the ASI to stop disrupting their protest…
ASI promptly responded by ignoring their complaints and continuing to blast their tunes, including ‘Money’ by That Poppy and The Beatles’ ‘Taxman’. They’re still blaring music, so get your requests in now…
https://order-order.com/2019/10/21/asi-give-extinction-rebellion-protesters-taste-medicine/
Whites seeking environmental and climate justice on behalf of people they believe to be too ignorant and too stupid to know what they should be fighting for.
Thats isostatic rebound. Sweden is rising
Does this count as ‘White male privilege’?
There many more like this.
The Sahara desert is “greening” from CO2. Apparently, nobody in Africa is smart enough to take advantage of this.
All I can see there is people who know what sex they are. Surely this is hugely insulting and offensive to the Qwerty mob?
I would be much more impressed if they refused donations from white multi-millionaires….
Looks like the Guardian are letting XR hang out to dry, because they are clearly failing and just annoying people. The tag of ‘whites only’ liberal left elite hung over them is a way to torpedo, even punish XR for making such a mons of it. The BBC now seen to be ignoring them rather than the exceedingly gentle reporting they have received up til very recently.
Ethiopia and Somalia are on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert, and have always had a hot, dry climate. When they had low populations, they could survive on fishing in the Red Sea or Indian Ocean, but the fish populations have not multiplied in proportion to the human population of those countries, and agriculture is difficult in a dry climate.
Kenya is on the northern edge of the Intertropical Convergence Zone, where a band of rainy weather moves northward (over Kenya) in the Northern Hemisphere summer and southward (away from Kenya) in winter. There are some large lakes in Kenya from which farmers could draw water in dry years, if an irrigation system was in place.
Even global-warming scare-mongers believe that increasing CO2 concentrations cause more warming in high latitudes than in tropical areas like Ethiopia and Kenya, so it’s difficult to blame declining rainfall in those countries on CO2. Has Athian actually traveled to East Africa to report on the climate there, or is he relying on the BBC?
Good post. Ethiopia is land-locked and the only way to the Red sea is through Eritrea, and that won’t happen. Lake Tana is huge and very fertile. A big problem in Ethiopia is transport.
Swedish Armed Forces kill Taggen wind farm
https://www.4coffshore.com/news/swedish-armed-forces-kill-taggen-wind-farm-nid14328.html
Vattenfall and Wallenstam have stopped the development of the Taggen offshore wind farm located 12 km outside Sölvesborg, Sweden. The project development was brought to a halt due the fact that the Swedish Armed Forces said no to it.
When you said that the Swedish armed forces killed a wind farm, I was hoping it involved extensive use of high explosives.
He might change his tune if he realised that those dying from “pollution” are dying from lung disease caused by cooking over cow dung fires. People like ER want to prevent the creation of power stations to provide the electricity so that people no longer have to die from these diseases.
Note that regardless of the cause, global cooling, acid rain, global warming, climate change, whatever, part of the solution has always been to prevent the third world from developing. (Developing in a way unapproved by the white West that is.)
It follows from their “Sustainability” assumptions. If resources are finite, then the fewer black and brown people there are, the more is left for the greenies white children.
” 780,000 people a year are dying in Africa because of air pollution”
Which, of course, has nothing to do with climate change. Which is also a fairly easy and inexpensive (relatively speaking) problem to solve – inexpensive fossil fuel cooking stoves. Or even solar ovens. Anything but what they use now which is extremely dirty.
Anthia clearly hasn’t been to Africa. Most people don’t have a choice, it’s either wood, charcoal, dung, even bitumen. In my time in Ethiopia no household had natural gas or electrically powered cooking facilities. It was usually an open fire pit, or hearth, in a small, roofed, room, usually full of smoke with no flue to take the smoke and fumes out. Some people had kerosene burners with an open flame and no flue to take fumes out of the room being used to cook in, which is usually the same room people sleep and live in.
But then Anthia probably doesn’t cook in her home. I would hazard a guess most of her food would be dialled-in and delivered.
Hoisted on their own PC petard.
They are the bourgeois enemy of working persons.
They deserve…piano wire.
He evidently wants to be an activist in a group that wants arrest but he doesn’t want to be arrested. And the group is too White for him because he prefers more black faces. So whats his problem, move on, find another activity and stop complaining. His concern is in Africa, that should be a clue.
“A staggering 12 million people in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia are facing hunger caused by low rainfall. ”
12 million people are facing ‘hunger’? Three equatorial African nations where drought is historically as common as regular low levels of rainfall compared to elsewhere, with a population of approximately 180 million between them. Well colour me concerned /sarc
As for XR being very white, why shouldn’t it be? The majority of the population of the UK is white. XR’s guilt based nonsense is largely being pushed in North America, Europe and Australasia, ergo, nations with a predominantly caucasian population. Given the fact that most of those dumb enough to jump on the death cult are far left anti capitalists, student socialist larpers, middle aged retirees, and brainwashed kids I wouldn’t expect much in the way of ethnic minorities to rush to support this crap as they prioritise going to work, if they didn’t they too would be suffering from ‘hunger’ much like their African brethren.
Sooo … Extinction Rebellion is a “white supremacist” movement?
Who knew?
Extinction Rebellion too many white faces ?
That’s because the people of non white color are busy at work .
The whites all go home to their cozy little rooms in their MOM ‘s house
trying to figure out who their DAD’s are .
I’m not sure they are all white supremacists though . It say unhappy and angry
wishing to get attention they never had .
Pissing people off is a sure fired way to get attention and become extinct .