Romy Opperman

This article contributes to recent work that has turned to Frantz Fanon for a socio-ecological approach to racism and colonization. Its intervention is to take up Fanon to critically reflect on the concept and use of “environmental racism,” one of the few approaches we have to hand to interrogate the place of race in discussions of the Anthropocene. It shows that a Fanonian approach to environmental racism integrates a socio-ecological perspective with decolonial political phenomenology. It uses this position as a foundation to rethink environmental racism, reframing the problem in terms of racist environments. Environmental racism can then be understood as a symptom of a more fundamental problem with modes of experiencing and organizing the world.