Race and Environment

From the moment colonizers began arriving in the space now referred to as the Americas until the moments these words were written and read, coloniality and one its central mechanisms 'race' have shaped the ways that people think about the spaces in which they live. Western culture's belief in the division between nature and culture, between the human and non-human, is rooted in racialized beliefs that guided the settler project's goal of converting Indigenous and Black spaces and bodies into reflections of colonial aspirations. We will analyze the processes through which race and space are mutually-constructed, including the racialization of space labelled the 'environment'; and how organizing, research, and activism in relation to the environment can undermine the racial hierarchies that still manifest via the environment.