The House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis has just released their report on June 30, 2020.  It stems from House Resolution 6 on January 9, 2019, which authorized this study.

What is important to note now is that the words are strong and clear, that our human activities are causing climate chaos. Of course, this  was already presented way back to Congress in the 1980’s and 1990s! That this report is also trying to figure out how to “honor our responsibility to be good stewards of the planet for future generations” is excellent ground to stand on. This reminds me of some of the rhetorical language in founding the environmental protection agency, the EPA, and the leading environmental legislation concerning water, air, animal and land rights in the 1970s. There is no doubt–––it is good the report exists. It is a huge step forward, especially during an election year

 

 

Here is the report for a closer look:

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2020/6/30/21305891/aoc-climate-change-house-democrats-select-committee-report?fbclid=IwAR3wnDo84Xdz1QKViACF3TCVlwF-rQX-nDZPbsm91wff4gEAsjk1jfqZKMM

Yet, I have three very significant concerns. The words “Green New Deal” which is what launched this House resolution is not visible in the first few pages as it should be.  The massive Sunrise Movement’s protests in the halls of Congress in November 2018 initiated the launching of this work. The reference to youth is subsumed under a long list, and not called upon as the initiator of the demand for this report. It is almost as if they are avoiding the words. Why should they be? What are they afraid of?  The Green New Deal has a resounding call. It builds on the idea of a new kind of deal in society between the haves and the have-nots. The youth, both in the US and all around the world, have been demanding action from the elder generations and it is not a shame to admit to this. There are, also, no specific reference to the Green New Deal subsequently launched by Senator Markley and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the organizers in the February-March of 2019. 

Secondly, though there are references to racial, environmental, equitable and economic justice peppered throughout the document; but, it is more of a spice that is added to the bulk of the report rather than embedded within all the parts of the report. Much more work needs to be done to integrate the four issues of race, environmental, equity, and economics throughout the document, at each level of analysis. It cannot be an add-on.

It is a new kind of world we want to create and want to live in, not the old world with a few frostings.

This report reminds me that progressive notions of race, racial concerns, racial inequalities, and racial ideas need to be more integrated into the climate work. There is still an invisibility to these concerns that are highly visible and highly dangerous to those who experience the consequences of these ideas, whether in the context of poor drinking water, inadequate air quality, toxic waste dumping grounds near playgrounds, schools, and neighborhoods and so much more.

 Thirdly, it reminds me that, as unpopular as it may be to say so, that even caste exists in the United States in terms of privileges that are ingrained, generational, and unspoken. I have taught Hinduism nearly every year at a university for almost twenty-five years and every time I come to introduce the caste system, a kind of emotional and intellectual revulsion enters the body politic of the classroom, as if this concept is so foreign and repulsive; in other words, that the country which invented it should be banished from the so called “civilized” nations, that it was a savage, a barbaric idea. I agree with that evaluation, that it has been a horrific idea for India, for the world. Yet at the same time, there was a uniquely privileged sense in my students in the classroom that the US was far away from the caste system and never could be mixed up with such notions.

In my nearly fifty years of living in the United States, that is far from the case. The caste system and its scourge, “Untouchability”, can also exist in a culture that prides itself on its rhetoric of equality, even if it does not have a word explicitly to name the phenomenon. I have always encouraged my students to analyze whether a concept such as “caste” is here in the United States. If so, how would you define it and track it? How would you find it? How would you even see it?

There is a lawsuit that the State of California launched against the corporation, Cisco, just today: https://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/california-sues-cisco-bias-based-indian-caste-system-71563901. It involves discrimination claimed by a Dalit engineer against higher caste engineers, all from India. So caste is not bound to just India; it enters with the immigrants from India, on subtle, pernicious levels and not so subtle levels.

As importantly, Isabel Wilkerson, a Pulitzer Prize winning NYT journalist, has produced a remarkable essay on caste in the US and in India, a part of her longer forthcoming work, Caste, which is forthcoming. I have been waiting for this kind of deep thinking for a long, long time. Here is the beginning taste of this idea, that caste is as integral to racism in the United States, as any other sociological concept, and not just among Indians from India, but also among races and classes who have been in the United States from the very beginning of its launch.  

Here is her article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/magazine/isabel-wilkerson-caste.html

Here is the book cover of her new book:

            Now we need to continue the work of seeing what overlaps between the Venn diagrams of climate, race and caste in the US and in the world and how it is intimately related to the deep, historical and contemporary question of climate. This is the first of a four part series of my exploration of these questions.