Robyn Maynard: Black Life, Black Liberation and the Climate Crisis
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“This is the world that white supremacy and industrial capitalism built.”
On Monday, January 6, 2020, Robyn Maynard’s lecture Black Life, Black Liberation and the Climate Crisis argued the point above by insisting on an expansion of where we see anti-blackness and violence in the context of the climate crisis. The lecture opened with an African drum circle, two speakers who spoke about Dr. Agnes Calliste (the namesake of the lecture series), and a presentation of the StFX Black Leaders Awards. Once the lecture had ended, and interim President Kevin Wamsley took to the stage for a speech of his own, one of my friends leaned over and said “[Maynard] just called out a whole bunch of the people who sign his paychecks” which I think sums up her lecture quite nicely.
Maynard was quick to explain that the small victories gained against systemic racism, such as the banning of street checks in Halifax, are essential, but that we should not misunderstand these as change. Society is not in a “racism that was but now is not” situation, and we would do well to remember that. It is important to remember that racism is found in the majority of institutions, not just few and far between, and it is these multitudes of institutions that have allowed the suffering of black people and will allow them to be disposed of when the climate crisis becomes an apocalypse.
“Humankind” has brought the earth to this point: using capitalism and a reliance on racial discrimination to get here. We must not bracket anti-blackness and how we have gotten to where we are today. The devastation of resources is not a new phenomenon, either. Maynard mentions the British in Barbados in the 1600s, discussing the depletion of healthy land caused by white greed on slave-worked plantations. Unless there is a profit, everything is disposable, including human lives.
Years of colonialist attitudes, slavery and racism have positioned black people as the first to die in the climate crisis. For some, who the state deems disposable, the climate crisis is already here. It is the “taking away of tomorrow” that has happened to black people for hundreds of years. Take, for example, the cyanide pollution and sexual violence perpetrated against Tanzanians by the North Mara Gold Mine owned and operated by Barrick Gold, or the Shell oil spill that has devastated the Niger Delta in Nigeria.
In Robyn Maynard’s lecture, she argues that those positioned as the first to die as a result of the climate crisis are black people. We can see this in the sexual violence and cyanide pollution that the Tanzanians are suffering through at the hands of Canadian mining company Barrick Gold. Barrick Gold is the same company who on their website writes (under the sustainability section) that “[a]t Barrick, we partner with host governments and communities to transform their natural resources into sustainable benefits and mutual prosperity.” Thus, one can assume that according to their website, if you look up ‘mutual prosperity’ in the dictionary, you would find Barrick Gold as an example. Anyone who took science in elementary to middle school can tell you that the mining of non-renewable resources cannot be sustainable, likely since non-renewable resources are NOT renewable.
In a piece by the Qulliit Nunavut Status of Women Council, they write that “Qallunaats [non-Inuit people] are running the show here,” which speaks to Robyn Maynard’s argument on how “this is the world that white supremacy and industrial capitalism built.” In a situation as vast and wide-reaching as the climate crisis, it is of the utmost importance that we follow Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectional activism. We cannot allow white Western ethnocentrism to continue dominating all conversations; otherwise, humanity will lose the battle to save our planet from imminent destruction. It should come as no surprise that a country founded on assimilation and the blood of Indigenous people is unable to come together and fix the mistakes of our past to prevent them from happening in the future.
I believe the talk was both feminist and intersectional; however, Maynard’s seminar reminded me of Mulroney Hall and the corruption (eg, Barrick Gold, Wafic Said) that funded it. No matter how many speakers StFX invites to show the world how progressive and intersectional they are, nothing will erase the darkness of the way Mulroney Hall came to light. CBC investigative journalist Zach Dubinsky put it best, saying, “…a number of the power players bankrolling the Mulroney Institute of Government at St. Francis Xavier University have checkered resumés.” While the event and lecture series themselves are feminist and intersectional, I think it is vital that we address the un-feminist, un-intersectional aspects and that they are corrected. As Robyn Maynard said in her lecture, “there is no better time to imagine a radical restructuring of the world with racial freedom and liberation.
