ABSTRACT
In 1881, Fredrick Douglass introduced the ‘colour line’ to describe racism accompanying the abolition of slavery in the USA. W.E.B. Du Bois later expanded this concept to analyse how global colonial histories and institutional practices sustain racial hierarchies. For Du Bois, the racialised ‘Other’ is continually positioned as a problem to be managed, forced to navigate life through ‘double consciousness’ – living under the constant gaze of a dominant culture. This chapter engages with these ideas for how we understand climate change and health in the context of the UK. It begins with exploring how Euro-North American ideas about bifurcation, substantivism, and exceptionalism create a particular episteme in which to (mis)understand the impact of climate change before considering examples of how environmental damage, justified by Western overdevelopment, offers an expression of global racist practices. The discriminatory policies and practices that constitute environmental racism have disproportionately burdened poor communities in the UK. This chapter concludes by exploring transformative potential and the extent a moral commitment to a better future can condition our interpretive and active engagement with the social world.
