Chris White Tech Reporter
February 07, 2020 2:49 PM ET
The climate change movement’s supposed whiteness drove one young activist to bail on her fellow environmentalists as they try convincing skeptics who believe fears about climate change are exaggerated.
Organizing on behalf of the environment became depressing and soul-sucking to Karin Hermes, who argues that her fellow activists only used her when they needed a non-white person to preach about climate change. The only solution is to “walk away,” she wrote Thursday in a Vice editorial.
“Whenever I would question the whiteness of these spaces and how strategies didn’t take race into account, I would be met with uncomfortable silences,” Hermes wrote. “The last time, at a nationwide movement-building workshop last April, I was asked, ‘Well then, why are you even here?’”
She added: “After four years of helping organize direct actions, speeches, workshops, and countless video calls, I started hiding and declining requests. I was burned out.” (RELATED: Here Are The Scenes From DC’s Climate Protest)
Hermes cited examples of climate activists ignoring what she says are important issues.
Sometimes activists ask her why “whiteness, capitalism, and inequality” have to do with climate change, she noted.
Using so-called die-ins to highlight the urgency of climate change is offensive to black people, Hermes added.
“Anti-racism and anti-capitalism need to be made part of organizing,” she concluded. “If ‘Green’ policies fail to consider anti-racism and migrant rights, how is any person of colour supposed to feel voting for them or organizing in the same spaces?”
Activists and Democratic politicians are starting to come around to Hermes’s side of the discussion. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, for instance, sponsored the so-called Green New Deal in 2019 to draw a linkage between climate issues and racial issues.
The GND resolution called for “10-year national mobilizations” toward goals aimed at fighting global warming. The resolution also called for a variety of social justice and welfare state goals, such as a “family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations and retirement security.”
Senate Democrats did not support of the GND in March when Republicans forced a vote.
Title error. Not whiteness, rather anti-whiteness made her leave the cult.
The climate movements whiteness. Her anti-whiteness.
As one young liberal once told me, all whites are racist. It’s just that some whites are better at hiding their racism. She assured me that if dig deep enough and hard enough, you will always find proof of their racism.
I would have asked her about whites who marry blacks.
SR
They’re even MORE racist.
They declare that such whites are engaging in a conspiracy to eliminate the black race by breeding it out of existence.
No sarcasm, I’m not making that up.
Cheap and reliable grid based electrical supply will allow for cheap and reliable reticulated water and wastewater, which will improve the lives of 100s of millions of Non-white females in Africa an India.
This isn’t the first time the American hard Left has exploited African Americans. American Communists tried the same thing, exploiting the exploited for a “higher purpose”. The writer Richard Wright, not a favorite of mine, left the CPUSA because he was “told” what to write.
Ms Hermes’s position is understandable, insofar as her being used for someone’s else end. Ofay “activists” see her as a relatable conduit and reliable “worker” for their cause. It’s disgusting. Her reaction does indicate the worldview that society is fundamentally disordered and must be reordered. She’s wrong there, but no one deserves to be exploited for any cause.
Die-ins, real or imagined, are offensive to dark skinned? Please ask her to explain why that is so because I do not believe it is any more offensive to the non whites than it is to ANYONE.
GET REAL LADY, the world is not always nice, and it never has been .
If you say to some Black people, “You speak well,” this will be heard as a microagression. A thoughtless, race-based insult. That’s how angry many Black people are. If you’re Black and a white person who obviously wants to make friends gives you a sincere compliment, you are justified in hitting them with the “you’re a racist” club.
Of if you’re white and you say to a Black person, “I don’t see race,” that’s another microaggression. You’re denying the validity of the Black person’s experiences with racial discrimination. Well come on. When a white person says, “I don’t see race,” he’s just indicating that he doesn’t judge people by their race. That’s what that sentence means. But an angry Black person hears a white person say this and immediately understands that he can bully the white person by ascribing guilt. These tactics do very little to promote racial harmony.
fwiw, this chick is a filipina, not black.
Filipina is still non-white and as every good anti-racist knows, if you’re not White, you’re black
just saying, some comment here are assuming her to be ‘black’ specifically
Who cares? One idiot disagreed with the other idiots for an idiotic reason.
What’s better than watching “intersectionality” eat its own children?
You can’t stop stupidity.
A burn out from climate activism? More people should do that! The problem with the activists is not that they are too white, they are too green.
It’s not that they are too white, or too green, it’s that apparently they have way to much free time.
There’s a word for it in the dictionary: farce.
In a similar vein.Can I recommend the Giles Coren piece in The Times of Saturday February 8th.So bloody hilarious.Will keep the “woke” awake at night.
OK I got “moderated” apparently for using the k* word. Mea Culpa! Resubmitting:
An article referenced by one of the previous posters showed a picture of a girl standing alone holding a CLIMATE JUSTICE sign. She said her reason was her sister and parents were (done in) by a typhoon.
Who knew typhoons intentionally targeted “people of color”?
(If you are upset that people in poverty tend to live in areas more vulnerable to natural weather disasters, that’s another subject, with vastly different causes and solutions other than the reduction of CO2).
Now it’s up there three times 😉
Environmentalism (of which climate catastrophism is a sub-species) begins with the axiomatic position that the Earth has too many brown babies. It is the last socially acceptable form of racism. No wonder there are so few PoCs involved in the climate change hysteria movement.