Brown Political Review Special Feature: Past
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Table of Contents
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Cover by Lucia Li 2 Editors’ Note by Hannah Severyns and Rachel Yan 3 Climate Apartheid—Connecting legacies of imperialism with the present climate crisis by Morgan McCordick 6 “A Museum for Everybody”—an interview with Dr. Porchia Moore by Hai Ning Ng 8 Reviving the Tree of Life—How land reform holds the key to Colombia’s future by Isabella Yepes
Editors’ Note We are surrounded by the past, often tangibly so. Walk through a park and find a bench engraved with a name and dedication. Identify the inspiration behind a statue in the middle of a city. Enter one of the United States’ 35,000 museums and explore a place dedicated to the history of anything from classic art to spies, sexuality, or simply, other museums. But while remembering, recording, and moving forward from the past are commonplace processes, they’re often complicated ones, too. Recently, museums have begun to publicly address their colonial legacies, and protestors have toppled dozens of statues bearing the names of racist oppressors. Worldwide, people are reckoning with the past. In this issue, each of our contributors recognizes that events of the past—specifically, legacies of colonialism and imperialism—have impacted our present both domestically and abroad. Morgan McCordick introduces readers to climate apart-
heid, a concept which acknowledges that the unequal effects of the ongoing climate crisis replicate exploitative sociopolitical relationships of the past. Isabella Yepes looks at colonial violence in Colombia across the past several centuries to understand how a peace agreement ratified within the last decade could be the key to preventing further conflict. And in an interview by Hai Ning Ng, Dr. Porcia Moore explains that museums, even beyond the artifacts that they display, “are rooted in community” and bound to the past. We are incredibly grateful to all of our BPR staff members who made this issue possible; we cannot thank you enough for your contributions this summer and always, and we’re proud to uphold the legacies of our amazing past members together.
– Hannah and Rachel
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Climate Apartheid
Connecting legacies of imperialism with the present climate crisis
by Morgan McCordick ’23, an English concentrator and a World Editor for BPR illustrations by Madison Tom ’23
There is little doubt that the manifold ecological disasters caused by climate change carry the potential to reshape the global political landscape. Some have opted to frame the coming natural disasters, geopolitical upheavals, and migratory waves under a singular heading: climate apartheid. This novel designation garnered some attention in 2019 when UN Special Rapporteur Philip Alston used it in a report outlining a bleak future in which, “the wealthy pay to escape overheating, hunger, and conflict while the rest of the world is left to suffer.” Despite the ominous prognostications that a “climate apartheid” implies, it is a conceptualization of the climate crisis that remains underdeveloped. In its broadest sense, climate apartheid encompasses the uneven distribution of the climate crisis’ material impacts across discrete populations, whether they be separated by wealth, sovereign borders, or race. Importantly, its manifestation not incidental, but is the logical outcome of the historical processes that produced the climate crisis. As Alston’s report to the UN suggests, climate apartheid can be understood to anticipate a future order, a reconfiguration of social relations that has yet to materialize. It is also,
however, a process presently unfolding, and whose emerging dimensions are inextricably linked to historical projects. To conceive of the ongoing climate crisis as apartheid is to acknowledge how climate change threatens to reproduce the past social and geopolitical relations that laid the foundations for our warming planet in the first place. As climate disasters increase in scale and frequency across the globe, one notable trend has emerged: the populations experiencing the worst of the climate crisis reside in countries that tend to bear the least responsibility for the onset of the very crisis. In her recent book, Militarized Global Apartheid, Catherine Bestemen notes that while the world’s 48 ‘least developed’ nations collectively account for less than one percent of the carbon emissions responsible for rising temperatures, their residents are five times more likely to die from a climate-related disaster than those in the rest of the world. The disparate impacts of climate change between the Global North and Global South— despite disproportionate contributions to the crisis—are no historical accident. Studying the postcolonial communities across the Caribbean and southwest Indian Ocean, archaeologists Kristina Douglass and Jago Cooper
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CLIMATE APARTHEID
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draw a clear connection between historical imperialist practices and presently unfolding ecological disasters. In the Caribbean, often a site of extreme weather events, “The adoption of European settlement patterns… as well as European household architecture and building materials have increased the relative vulnerability of [postcolonial] communities to hurricane-related flooding and wind shear.” And in Madagascar, decades of deforestation and resource extraction during the colonial period depleted soils, raising the country’s vulnerability to warmer temperatures. This year, Madagascar has experienced its worst drought in four decades, leaving one million people living under the threat of starvation. The present manifestations of climate apartheid are hardly limited to these two examples, but their incidence underscores an essential pattern: the relationships of exploitation, subjugation, and separation that characterized our colonial past are at risk of being replicated in the present. Even as climate disasters intensify at an alarming rate in the Global South, the former imperialist states of the Global North, more insulated from the effects of climate change, are fortifying their borders against vulnerable populations facing ever-proliferating possibilities for displacement. For instance, in the wake of the migration surge from the Middle East and North Africa in 2015, the European Union rapidly expanded its border enforcement agency, Frontex, whose budget rose from under 100 million Euros in 2014 to almost 400 million in 2020.
None of this is to say that climate apartheid is limited to imperialist legacies and interstate dynamics. To the contrary, it can equally present itself in patterns of domestic spatial organization, in which race often plays an undeniable role. American philosopher Nancy Tuana identifies such dynamics in the United States’ Southern coal industry. Its growth she writes, was wholly reliant on slave labor in the 19th century and later, after the Civil War, on the labor of the overwhelmingly Black prison population. Not only has burning coal, at times, accounted for almost half of global carbon emissions, but in the United States, communities of color are more likely to be located near an urban coal plant and suffer the debilitating health effects of air pollution. Black children, specifically, are twice as likely to die from an asthma attack than white children. Climate apartheid identifies the past with present, and it helps reframe how we relate the climate crisis to enduring forms of social inequality. Critiquing the media’s contemporary approach to the climate crisis, journalist Michelle García advocates in The Nation for “intertwined coverage of public health, climate change, racism, and poverty” that accounts for an apartheid reality. Preexisting social inequities invariably determine how the climate crisis unfolds, and any meaningful attempt to address the planet’s changing ecology must acknowledge and confront those historically rooted injustices that define the ongoing climate apartheid.
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INTERVIEW
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then do their own research to learn from others.
INTERVIEW WITH DR. PORCHIA MOORE
HN: How should museums present painful and traumatic histories like enslavement? Can we make museums safer spaces for visitors?
A MUSEUM FOR EVERYBODY interview by Hai Ning Ng ’23 illustration by Nadia Kossman-Newcomb ’22
Dr. Porchia Moore is an Assistant Professor of Museum Studies at the University of Florida. Her research investigates the function of race in the cultural heritage sector. She is also the Critical Race Futurist for The Incluseum, a Project Advisor for Museum as Site for Social Action (MASS Action), and the co-creator of the Visitors of Color project.
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racist, violent, and triggering. It was especially interesting to follow what happened with the executive director of the Newfields Art Museum in Indianapolis. They had a job listing for someone who could maintain the museum’s “core white audience.” How can someone believe that while saying they’re committed to equity and access?
HAI NING NG: How have museums perpet- HN: You mentioned in a 2014 article, “The Danger of the ‘D’ Word,” that the conuated racism and colonialism? How is cept of diversity in museums tends to that changing? be very narrow. Instead of diversity, what should we be aiming for? PORCHIA MOORE: Think about the origins of museums: They are racist, colonialist, imperialist institutions created to PM: One challenge is that everyone wants to have this simple formula telling show the bounty of our looting. We're them what to do. Museums, large or putting on display the very intensmall, are rooted in community, and tional rape and pillage of entire culevery community is different. You have tures—and we're proud of that. It has to figure out what equity, access, and been interesting to see this continued inclusion look like for the community movement of nations asking for their that your institution is rooted in. objects back, forcing museums to figI also ask people to think about ure out: What is the need for us to detheir information gaps. Then, they can colonize? What does it mean for us to pick media outlets to follow, so that repatriate? they can be exposed to all kinds of If you look at the last year, you see communities and understand these over a dozen open letters from mudifferent issues. In that way, they begin seum professionals calling out instito increase their cultural competency, tutions, stating these institutions are
PM: I think museums have to be well-informed spaces. Cultural heritage institutions have to train to be trauma-informed and healing-centered. I don't know if we can guarantee safety, but we can be intentional in presenting information and helping people navigate that information.
“Museums, large or small, are rooted in community, and every community is different.”
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Black church bulletin.” There's respectability politics built into that— we're going to target the “good Negroes” of the church community. No one ever says, “We'll advertise at the local community center or the housing project,” because of expectations on socioeconomic status and behavior, like who’s able to pay and who’s not. If museums are rooted in community, then they exist for everybody in that community, whether you're a homeless person or someone in a gated neighborhood. At the library, there are programs, events, and resources for everyone included. Museums have to figure out a way to do that same thing. HN: Where do you hope museums go from here?
As a Black woman, while I want this PM: Last year, the International Council information, it's also traumatizing and of Museums debated the definition triggering. Yes, my most recent collecof a museum. They said that museums tive history is that we were enslaved, should be polyphonic spaces—yes, we but even amongst that, there are so should have multiple voices repremany people whose names we don't sented, so more narratives can be told. know who made all these contribuThey said museums should help othtions. Where are the joy-filled stories, ers focus on planetary well-being and the stories about entrepreneurship, social justice. Us museum professionabout parenting, about love, about exals are already calling for and trying to plorers and inventors? We need more do these things. to complete the narrative. We need to I'm excited about the vision encapenrich the experience with more types sulated in that definition. We could of information, not just the traditionreflect on it to create the museums al wall text with a neutral, institutional we all deserve—museums centering tone. BIPOC folks, queer folks, all kinds of stories and narratives. I'm looking forHN: You’ve written about respectability ward to this new museum. politics in museum programming beThis interview has fore. Could you expand on that? PM: People stereotype. Museum professionals say, “We'll advertise in the
been edited for length and clarity.
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REVIVING THE TREE OF LIFE
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Reviving the Tree of Life How land reform holds the key to Colombia’s future
by Isabella Yepes ’23, an International Relations concentrator and a Staff Writer for BPR illustrations by Joseph Ni ’23
In 1503, Christopher Columbus wrote: “When I discovered the Indies, I said they were the greatest rich domain in the world.” Over five hundred years later, in 2021, anti-government protesters in Barranquilla,
civil war against the government in response to staggering inequality and Western imperialism. The conflict only ended in 2016 when the FARC and the Colombian government came to a long-awaited peace agreement.
Colombia toppled Columbus’s statue, dragging their country’s namesake through the streets. This event is just one of many upheavals against colonialism that have been commonplace throughout Colombia’s history, as countries like the United States have exploited the country’s “rich domain” for their own benefit. For much of the 20th century, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla group, waged a
Amid this newfound peace, Colombia has a unique opportunity to define its legacy outside of the United States’s southern-cast shadow. However, to truly break free from its history of colonization and violence—and prevent a relapse into conflict—Colombia must prioritize addressing the underlying issues that led to the original unrest and fully implement the land reform portions of the 2016 peace agreement. The imperial aims of the United States are largely responsible for Colombia’s conflict-fraught history. After Colombia gained independence in 1819, the white and mestizo colonial elite had almost complete control over the country’s rich natural resources as well as its economic and political systems. Seeking to exploit Colombia’s natural resources, the United States rubber-stamped the country’s highly unequal political and
“Such reform would not only strengthen rural peasant communities by officially affirming their ownership of the land, but it would also undermine the concentration of private land in the hands of the elite, a remnant of colonialism and US imperialism.”
economic arrangements. By aiding rightwing governments and paramilitary groups throughout the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, the United States repressed anti-imperialist movements that would threaten Colombia’s ruling class and, in turn, US economic interests. As a result, Colombia has remained a highly unequal society, so it's no wonder that a group like the FARC would form in 1964. It’s also unsurprising then, that despite
“And economic inequality—so entrenched that it would take ‘11 generations for descendants of a poor family to reach the average income’ according to the US Congress Human Rights Commission—has only worsened during the Covid-19 pandemic, which has shrunk Colombia’s economy by almost 7 percent.”
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the 2016 peace agreement, Colombia risks lapsing back into violence. Most recently, protesters took to the streets in April 2021 to press the government to craft a clear plan to address inequality. Though the protesters were ultimately successful in changing the tax code, civilians were met with brutal police repression, signaling that the government remains hostile to large-scale wealth redistri-
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bution efforts. Much has changed in Colombia in recent years, but the government and the upper class continue to hold tight to their economic privilege. And economic inequality—so entrenched that it would take “11 generations for descendants of a poor family to reach the average income” according to the US Congress Human Rights Commission—has only worsened during the Covid-19 pandem-
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ic, which has shrunk Colombia’s economy by almost 7 percent. While failure to act will create ripe conditions for renewed conflict, a solution that addresses the inequality of the past while moving Colombia into the future lies in the 2016 peace agreement between the government and the FARC. The agreement acknowledged that the issue of land ownership, especially the exclusion of the rural population from the land-owning class and the underdevelopment of rural communities, constituted an important cause of both the formation of the FARC and the civil war itself. Key is the absence of formal land titling, as rural Colombians have long been denied their rightful land due to their lack of official titles. But the reform process codified in the 2016 peace agreement between the government and the FARC would formally title around seven million hectares of land that, while technically belonging to rural peasants, have remained titleless. Such reform would not only strengthen rural peasant communities by officially affirming their ownership of the land, but it would also undermine the concentration of private land in the hands of the elite, a remnant of colonialism and US imperialism. This would then stem the flow of displaced peasants into the cities, where they have joined the largely homeless urban poor. Additionally, implementation of the suggested land reform would give former FARC combatants newfound confidence in the political process by reducing economic desperation, fostering a future in which they need not turn to arms. In his book “Century of the Wind,” acclaimed Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano detailed a history of Latin America, writing, “The tree of life knows that, whatev-
er happens, the warm music spinning around it will never stop. However much death may come, however much blood may flow, the music will dance men and women as long as the air breaths [sic] them and the land plows and loves them.” In Colombia, where land ownership has long been a privilege of the elite, this tree of life is out of reach for most. But with an established land reform agenda, peace between the government and guerrillas, and a population that remains stalwart in its opposition to inequality—as recent protests have shown—hope remains that Galeano’s tree of life will one day take root in this new era of Colombia.
“However, to truly break free from its history of colonization and violence—and prevent a relapse into conflict—Colombia must prioritize addressing the underlying issues that led to the original unrest and fully implement the land reform portions of the 2016 peace agreement.”
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