Week 12

For today, I read the article  Racial coastal formation: The environmental injustice of colorblind adaptation planning for sea level rise by Hardy et al. focuses on the way environmental racism has the potential to further perpetuate slow violence among residents and communities of coastal cities, as it has historically, due to colorblind adaptation planning for the rising sea level. (Hardy, 1) Colorblind adaptation planning is defined as “policies that benefit some populations while abandoning others.” (Hardy, 1)

Prior to this reading, I was familiar with colorblindness in a strictly racial context. In other words, people would avoid not addressing systemic injustices and the pervasive oppression people of color face by dismissing their race or “color” as a whole by claiming to “not see it.”  The idea of colorblindness in this context is problematic because it fails to address long standing oppression under the false claim of seeing every individual as an equal. In doing so, the oppression is perpetuated and integral factors of an individual’s identity, such as race, is negated or completely eclipsed. The same line of thinking I had prior is demonstrated in this article, as Hardy et al. state that color blindness can “dismiss its systemic causes and explain away racial inequality by attributing racial disparities to non racial causes.” (Hardy et al., 2)

Before, I had never associated colorblindness to rising sea level specifically. However, we have discussed at length in class how environmental racism impacts the survival, treatment, and displacement of people of color. Further, I did not know much about how racism and slave labor has historically been tethered to the formation of the Southeastern US coasts. (Hardy et al,, 3) Although I learned a lot from this article, the biggest takeaway, for me, was that “thinking about sea level rise as a social-ecological phenomenon- and not just as a physical or ecological problem- has the potential to shift the scientific discourse around planning for, coping with and adapting to the impending impacts expect to occur from major changes to the US’s socionatural coastlines and beyond.” (Hardy et al., 10) I feel like using this line of thinking can be applied to other environmental issues as well, such as pollution, global warming, etc.