Kianya Harrison – Public Reading Rooms

Trapped in the climate change horror movie as just 100 companies destroy the planet to line their pockets

Kianya Harrison — Wed, 13 Feb 2019 17:09:41 +0000

A handful of people have made themselves fabulously wealthy, and keeping the money flowing is more important to them than all of our lives.

There’s a so-called “Haunted House Problem” that plagues many horror movies. When it’s clear something is awry, why don’t the inhabitants of the spirit-riddled dwelling just leave? Why won’t they take heed of all the signs we see and are screaming at the screen to them about? Why are they blithely preparing pot roast? The films that work best are the ones where they know but can’t escape, because they’re in the wilderness, night has fallen, and the car won’t start, or they’re trapped on a spaceship with a captive alien with acid for blood that manages to get loose.

I feel a bit like I’m trapped on a spaceship, and I’ve become the prey of a rampaging alien that had no business being there in the first place. Someone else’s hubris cornered me here with something that’s trying to kill me.

Only 100 companies are responsible for 71% of the greenhouse emissions that are driving global climate change. 100. That isn’t a very large number. You’d think that with the climatic conditions required for our species to survive hanging in the balance, dealing with these 100 culprits would be the top priority of the governments they should answer to. That’s not the case though — their money funds too many political campaigns. Somehow, the responsibility to alleviate the effects of climate change has been shifted to us individuals. When 100 corporate entities account for 71% of the problem, admonishing us all to take public transportation more and use less hot water when we shower isn’t a sensible solution.

The way we live our lives, and, more importantly, the way we aspire to live our lives is going to have change drastically over a relatively short period of time. Scientists estimate that we have only until 2030 to limit the future rise in temperature by 1.5 degrees, after which point, it will be nearly impossible to stop climate change. 1.5. Another small number that dwarfs everything else. Superstorms, extended droughts, raging wildfires, catastrophic flooding. Conditions that seem apocalyptic are already becoming relatively common place. Things will get worse.

In 2016, when Hurricane Matthew strengthened to a Category 5 storm as it bore down towards Jamaica, I watched in horror and hoped with all my might that it would turn away from my island. It did. The storm moved east. I hoped it would split the difference between Jamaica and Haiti. It didn’t, and the already battered nation of Haiti took a direct hit. In 2017, when I saw Maria dwarf Puerto Rico as the storm devoured the island, I felt sick. Before the pictures and news began to circulate, I knew it had been utterly catastrophic, and I expected a bungling Katrina-reminiscent response. The cruelty of the neglect didn’t surprise me, but it disgusted me. That’s going to happen more often as these events multiply: the victims who have lost everything will be left to their own devices. The multitude, not the 100, is being asked to bear the cost of climate change.

We were warned. That’s what’s so infuriating about all this. Recalcitrant selfishness is why we’re here. A handful of people have made themselves fabulously wealthy, and keeping the money flowing is more important to them than all of our lives. They’re willing to destroy the entire planet to line their pockets. They knew. They knew what the consequences would be, and they did it anyway. For money.

I took a science policy class in graduate school, and I remember clearly the class where one of my classmates piped up to argue when the professor said the science on climate change was settled. A silent, cringing groan rippled through the class as we realized, “Oh, no. He’s one of them…” It’s nearly always the same kind of person: Usually a White guy. Conservative. Overestimates his intelligence by quite a wide margin. Arrogant. Uncreative. Thinks contrariness is a replacement for a personality. Believes being beholden to corporations as opposed to a representative government is freedom. These traits make them quite easy to dupe if you know how to massage their egos and appeal to their genteel White supremacy while you frame your evidence-free arguments. The fossil fuel industry has their number, and they’ve bought the propaganda hook, line, and sinker. The result: They’re arguing vociferously to create conditions that will lead to a mass extinction event to own the libs.

The corruption of the 100 reaches even further, though. Plenty of liberal politicians are taking their money too. As a result, it’s been virtually impossible to gather the political will required to tackle climate change in a genuinely meaningful manner. What is an international emergency has been debated and downplayed and denied so much that it’s no wonder that people who don’t pay too much attention to the news don’t understand what all the fuss is about.

Those of us who know what’s happening are trapped in this horror movie with housemates who are actively limiting our ability to fight the monster that is picking us off. We’re approaching the point of no return, and we have to answer the question: What are we prepared to do to survive?

Powerful, problematic, motives unclear: difficulty in defining Donald Glover’s ‘This is America’

Kianya Harrison — Sun, 13 May 2018 13:55:19 +0000

This is America isn’t a wake-up call, because nothing is. Not the killer cops, not the mass shootings of children by other children, not the incipient fascism in the White House. Nothing.

Source: Medium (see more by Kianya Harrison here)

I woke up on Sunday morning to see #ThisIsAmerica trending, and clicked through to find Childish Gambino’s new music video on YouTube. The first viewing reinforced my thoughts on Donald Glover (aka Childish Gambino): He’s carving out a unique place for himself in American popular culture — a place that’s difficult to define because it’s somewhere between commercial success and subversion. This is America is an indictment of a gun-crazed, violent society. It’s also a commentary on Black American entertainers’ role in perpetuating, glamorizing, and covering for the sins of their nation.

This is America is a musical — the song and the visuals can’t really be separated. Director Hiro Murai understands the language of cinema, and this short film is carefully crafted.

The action doesn’t really start until Glover takes a highly stylized pose that evokes (how deliberately, I don’t know) the posture seen in old Jim Crow posters and shoots a handcuffed, hooded prisoner in the back of the head. A boy takes the gun from him to dispose of it, and two others begin to drag away the body. Glover, the star of this show, represents himself as a murderer, as complicit — he is America. And, I suppose that’s his choice to make, but, most notably, This is America contains no White perpetrators. Even when the Charleston massacre is crudely re-enacted, it is Glover who pulls the trigger. Why? Why name it “This is America” without some clear representation of White supremacist violence? There are hints of police brutality sprinkled throughout the video, but never in the foreground. Why were these choices made?

Donald Glover has navigated Hollywood too well not to understand the White gaze. He knows how to make White America feel comfortable. And he knows just how far to push when poking at its failings. He also knows how to make Black people uncomfortable instead by highlighting Black trauma and the pathologies that plague Black communities.

But I don’t know that having a Black man pull the trigger in the video is that simple.

“This is America. Don’t catch me slipping, now,” Glover raps.

Don’t catch me slipping. There’s always a way to make Black people’s suffering seem like our own fault, no matter how targeted or deliberate the attacks against us are. If you get got, it’s because you and your people got caught slipping. There’s a reason headlines make it seem like cops’ bullets fire themselves. Even their guns get the benefit of the doubt; Black people shot full of holes don’t.

The narrative that Black America is solely responsible for all the violence it suffers is centuries-old and extremely resilient. This is where Kanye West’s statements about slavery being a choice find their roots. It’s more palatable to blame the victims than force the perpetrators to take a posture of forgiveness, and this upside-down world is what Black Americans have to negotiate without losing their minds. As he dances through the frame, Glover goes from grimacing to grinning in split seconds, from brutal violence to almost shucking and jiving. He skillfully navigates the madness and chaos unfolding behind him. At the end, he’s sweaty, wide-eyed, and running for his life.

This is America, where Blackness is pathologized and capitalism warps ghastly incentives even further. Black people in America have been selected to be the lowest rung, the exploited class upon which the nation’s wealth is built. It’s no accident that Black entertainment has become one of the primary vehicles for masking this reality. There’s a reason the gaudy exhibitions of “new Black money” are reliably programmed.

When the choir raises their voices to sing, “Grandma told me, ‘Get your money, Black man!’” I can’t tell if it’s a cry for reparations or a call to dive headfirst into the rapacious, winner-take-all capitalism of America’s streets and boardrooms. And while I’m not convinced that this uncertainty isn’t deliberate (a slippery way of not alienating anyone), that tension is at the heart of the truth Glover is telling. Survival demands that Black people participate in an immoral, capitalist system that brutalizes them, and justice demands the wealth built on the backs of our stolen ancestors be returned to us. We try to achieve both and end up accomplishing neither.

As Glover and his crew of teenage backup dancers nail the latest dance crazes, we watch them and not the surrounding bedlam — and that’s the point. We’ve been anaesthetized. This is America isn’t a wake-up call, because nothing is. Not the killer cops, not the mass shootings of children by other children, not the incipient fascism in the White House. Nothing. It’s just ever-devolving turmoil with seemingly no end in sight, and all we can do is watch the people singing, rapping and dancing in the foreground.

This is America.

By Kitanya Harrison. See more by her on Medium . She also writes speculative Sherlock Holmes novels under the pseudonym, Harrison Kitteridge | http://amzn.to/28Qfcy0