Presentation short abstract

Climate action without justice is white supremacy in green clothing. Drawing on Black experiences in the heart of empire (UK), we use antiblackness framing to interrogate practice that is addressing DRR for floods, creating collective futures that are liberatory, emancipatory and therefore equitable

Presentation long abstract

Current public discourses around climate action call for resilience, social value and inclusion, yet hardly ever mention race, racism, or colonialism. Framing the debates around "inclusion" in this way, this logic where whiteness defines the terms of climate participation replicates the logics of exclusion: of Britain’s undocumented migrants, working-class Black families displaced by flooding and more generally Black and racialised communities, both globally in the Global South and locally in the Global North, who are already living with the climate emergency in deadly, material ways. This is climate universalism in its most pernicious form, erasing structural difference under the guise of unity. As Christina Sharpe (2016) writes, Black people are not simply in the climate crisis, we are already living in the weather, exposed, abandoned, and made to endure in ways whiteness cannot imagine. Some climate movements and praxis omit this fundamental truth claiming to be post-ideological, but ideologies that refuse to name power end up reinforcing it. Climate majority projects that have no analysis of empire, no critique of racialised disposability, and no acknowledgement of global climate apartheid, are only able to offer a detour instead of a roadmap to justice, sadly one that leaves the most vulnerable out of the picture entirely. Climate action must start with the truth. Not just the truth about emissions, but the truth about who has been made killable in the name of growth. It is in the now we need to bring our challenge so imaginaries of just collective futures can emerge.