Over the last couple of years I’ve spoken to many different audiences about my book, Climate Change is Racist: Race, Privilege and the Struggle for Climate Justice. Of the various difficult things that I tend to say in these presentations, the one that is most often misunderstood is the idea of structural racism.
Most of us in the UK are used to thinking of racism as prejudiced actions and opinions. That is only one layer of racism, and structural racism – or structural injustice of any kind – is different. It doesn’t depend on the ongoing actions of prejudiced people. It has become embedded in larger structures.
This is hard to explain, especially when people are on the defensive because they feel like they are being called racists. At the risk of sounding glib, let me try a thought experiment in a more neutral context. You can tell me if you think it’s rubbish, because I’m trying to find ways of explaining it better.
Imagine an entirely theoretical football match in which the referee makes the away team play with eight players. It’s the rules, he insists.
By half-time, the home team is five goals ahead and there are a lot of weary legs as the visitors trudge off the field. During the break there is some discussion and some protest. Phone calls are made. Rules are clarified. There’s a wait while another referee is located and driven across town in a taxi.
When the players come out to resume the match, the referee has been replaced. He was wrong, there’s no rule about away teams having fewer players after all. It will be 11 vs 11 for the second half, and we’re sorry for all the confusion.
“Wait, this isn’t fair,” says the away team. “They scored five goals with an unfair advantage, and the score should be reset.” The new referee will have none of this. He’s not seen any unfairness since he got here, and he’s not responsible for the actions of anyone else. Both teams are being treated equally and he can’t start handing out favours to anyone.
The game resumes, but the away team still lose. Their opponents built up their lead while they were at a disadvantage. They had to do more running and so they’re more tired. There was no way they could make up the lost ground.
In this story, the person who is acting unfairly is the first referee. They have not treated the teams equally, and have set out to deliberately disadvantage one team. They are prejudiced, and if that prejudice were based on race, we would call these actions racist.
The home team haven’t actively participated in this sabotage, but they haven’t challenged it either. They haven’t done anything wrong, but they are clearly the beneficiaries of the referee’s bias. This is closer to what is sometimes called privilege. Privilege does not imply wrong-doing. Inequality can be perpetuated by people innocently doing and saying nothing at all.
The second referee fails to spot that the problem doesn’t end with the corrupt official. They’re gone now, but the consequences of their actions remain. The game itself is now unfair. This is the key point with structural injustice: unless there are steps to redress the balance, the game itself remains unfair.
When I describe climate change as an example of structural racism, it’s not a matter of who or what is being called racist. It’s about how the game itself is unfair. It’s about how colonialism and empire have shaped the world in which climate change is now unfolding, leaving us with stark divides in who experiences the greatest harm.
When people misunderstand this, they feel blamed, but blame doesn’t get us very far with something as wide-ranging and multi-generational as climate change. There are still bad actors involved in climate change – particularly in fossil fuel industry and those that finance it – and we can’t ignore that. For the most part though, the decisions that set us on our energy-intensive pathway are in the past.
What can we do about it then? In my book I draw a distinction between retributive and restorative justice. Retributive justice looks for someone to blame and asks how they will be punished. Restorative justice, and the movement around it, asks how things can be made right.
In my football example, retributive justice would concern itself with fining the corrupt referee. We’d need a broader and more constructive vision of justice to really level the playing field.
Global inequalities are infinitely more complicated than my silly analogy, but maybe a dramatically simplified scenario can illuminate some important distinctions.
The Earthbound Report 
That’s exactly right! Am going to use this comparison.
Excellent metaphor–it captures the way that responsibility for these unequal structures is shared, as well as how everyone responsible has a plausible rationalization for not doing anything to change the system. As I tell my students every term, the problem with systemic racism is–it’s a system.
helpful!
Interesting story. Going back unfair the either way wouldn’t be right either.
the other way
Yes, and that’s an interesting point. There are three obvious ways to make things ‘fair’ in this scenario, and none of them are ideal.
1) You can make the home team play the second half with 8 players, which pushes the inequality onto someone else. 2) You can give the away team five free goals, which makes them look like freeloaders. 3) Or you can reset the score, which sees five goals taken away from the home team.
There are negatives to all three, and resolving inequality today has similar consequences. Some are going to feel like they’re losing out, even if they’re only losing an advantage that was never rightfully theirs.