{"title":"\"Black people don't love nature\": white environmentalist imaginations of cause, calling, and capacity.","authors":"Matthew W Hughey","doi":"10.1007/s11186-022-09505-0","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>I examine how white British members of a London-area environmental group conceptualize race in relation to ecological disasters. Based on a five-year (2018-2022) ethnographic study, members employed racialized narratives and symbolic boundaries to construct who was the <i>cause</i> of disasters, who had the moral responsibility or <i>calling</i> to remediate disasters, and who possessed the adequate resources and <i>capacity</i> to fix disasters. Together, these narratives formed a <i>tripartite racial imaginary</i> which functioned to demarcate the symbolic boundaries of an ideal, white racial identity that was intimately crocheted with notions of authentic guilt and remorse, responsibility and liability, work ethics, competent knowledge, resource mobilization, moral commitment, and racial paternalism and superiority. Through the pursuit of this White racial ideal, members frequently conceptualized ecological disasters throughout the non-white world as the fault of specific actions by non-White people, identified unique racialized actors as the proper responsible parties for working on the remediation of ecological disasters, and also assigned particular White people from Westernized, industrial, democratic states as the only people in possession of the appropriate knowledge, resources, and character to clean-up and manage a healthy environment.</p>","PeriodicalId":48137,"journal":{"name":"Theory and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6000,"publicationDate":"2022-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9645750/pdf/","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Theory and Society","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-022-09505-0","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"SOCIOLOGY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
I examine how white British members of a London-area environmental group conceptualize race in relation to ecological disasters. Based on a five-year (2018-2022) ethnographic study, members employed racialized narratives and symbolic boundaries to construct who was the cause of disasters, who had the moral responsibility or calling to remediate disasters, and who possessed the adequate resources and capacity to fix disasters. Together, these narratives formed a tripartite racial imaginary which functioned to demarcate the symbolic boundaries of an ideal, white racial identity that was intimately crocheted with notions of authentic guilt and remorse, responsibility and liability, work ethics, competent knowledge, resource mobilization, moral commitment, and racial paternalism and superiority. Through the pursuit of this White racial ideal, members frequently conceptualized ecological disasters throughout the non-white world as the fault of specific actions by non-White people, identified unique racialized actors as the proper responsible parties for working on the remediation of ecological disasters, and also assigned particular White people from Westernized, industrial, democratic states as the only people in possession of the appropriate knowledge, resources, and character to clean-up and manage a healthy environment.
期刊介绍:
Theory and Society is a forum for the international community of scholars that publishes theoretically-informed analyses of social processes. It opens its pages to authors working at the frontiers of social analysis, regardless of discipline. Its subject matter ranges from prehistory to contemporary affairs, from treatments of single individuals and national societies to world culture, from discussions of theory to methodological critique, from First World to Third World - but always in the effort to bring together theory, criticism and concrete observation.