(Un)Just transitions and Black dispossession: The disposability of Caribbean ‘refugees’ and the political economy of climate justice
| Published date | 01 May 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/02633957211041441 |
| Author | Keston K Perry |
| Date | 01 May 2023 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/02633957211041441
Politics
2023, Vol. 43(2) 169 –185
© The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/02633957211041441
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(Un)Just transitions and Black
dispossession: The disposability
of Caribbean ‘refugees’ and the
political economy of climate
justice
Keston K Perry
Williams College, USA
Abstract
Caribbean populations face increased displacement, dispossession and debt burdens due to shocks
related to climate change. As the major neighbouring power that is the most significant historical
contributor to global warming, the United States has persistently deflected from this responsibility.
Instead, its climate plans are weaponized to target potential climate refugees who constitute a
‘national security threat’ and are faced with risks of premature death. These policies also aim to
create green capitalist peripheries following racial capitalist logics. The paper contends that US
climate interventions and policies increase the likelihood of Black dispossession within Caribbean
societies. These policies commit to supporting so-called ‘left-behind’ white communities in need of
a ‘just transition’, while Caribbean racialized subjects are not as equally deserving. To explain this,
the paper examines major climate policies, in particular the recent Congressional Climate Action
Plan of the US House of Representatives and President Biden’s climate proposals. It juxtaposes
policy claims against political actions and racial capitalist historiography of the United States,
especially its past treatment of climate refugees from the Caribbean. This analysis shows the
persistent ways in which US climate policies advance organized abandonment and a neocolonial
relationship predicated on an unjust system of racial capitalism.
Keywords
Black dispossession, Caribbean plantation economy, climate justice, racial capitalism, United
States climate policy
Received: 6th January 2021; Revised version received: 15th July 2021; Accepted: 27th July 2021
‘Nevertheless, at the same time white labor, while it attempted no denial but even expressed
faint sympathy, saw in this fugitive slave and in the millions of slaves behind him, willing and
eager to work for less than current wage, competition for their own jobs’.
W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction
‘The Paris Climate Accord is simply the latest example of Washington entering into an agreement
that disadvantages the United States to the exclusive benefit of other countries, leaving American
Corresponding author:
Keston K Perry, Williams College, Williamstown, MA 01267-2600, USA.
Email: kkp1@williams.edu
1041441POL0010.1177/02633957211041441PoliticsPerry
research-article2021
Special Issue: Race & Climate Change
170 Politics 43(2)
workers – who I love – and taxpayers to absorb the cost in terms of lost jobs, lower wages,
shuttered factories, and vastly diminished economic production’.
Donald Trump (2017)
Introduction
In the aftermath of colonialism, Caribbean peoples have attempted to construct life, har-
ness livelihood and advance struggle in an ever harsh economic and political order that
devalues and dehumanizes them. Originally constituted as Black enforced and indentured
labour, Caribbean peoples are becoming increasingly displaced by climate breakdown.
They face extreme forms of precarity in terms of their political status and humanhood, as
their societies struggle to provide support and relief after disasters. Often through chari-
table appeals for funds to bring respite in international media and at the United Nations,
governments and citizens rely on generosity for basic shelter or food. Desperate, dis-
placed and disaster-torn communities are a recurring symbol of living in archipelagic and
environmentally sensitive region degraded through Western accumulation (see Girvan,
1991 for a discussion on the origins of the problem),1 and where hurricanes and tropical
storms are more frequent and ferocious. Weeks and even months of being disconnected
from public services, basic infrastructure, healthcare and education are traumatizing
events that threaten well-being for a long time after the event (Welcome, 2020). This is a
reality that is historical and contemporaneous. Entire island societies, such as Barbuda,
the Abaco and Grand Bahama Islands in 2017 and 2019, respectively, have been ravaged
by impacts of climate change (Baptiste and Devonish, 2019; Zegarra et al., 2020). These
acute yet recurring events result in newly displaced, surplus populations within increas-
ingly uneven socio-ecologies.
In 2020, as the world grappled with a global pandemic that placed the Caribbean
region in uncertain yet seemingly familiar terrain of economic disaster, the Atlantic
Hurricane season produced more than 30 tropical storms and hurricanes (Disaster
Philanthropy, 2020). Thirteen became hurricanes (top winds of 74 mph or greater), includ-
ing six major hurricanes (top winds of 111 mph or greater). Caribbean islands continued
to be battered by storms even as they attempted to weather the COVID-19 pandemic.
Cumulative costs were estimated at US$47 billion. Deaths totaled 430 people in the
Southern United States, Central America and the Caribbean altogether (Disaster
Philanthropy, 2020). Hurricane Isaias inflicted approximately $225 million in damages
across the Caribbean, including $47 million in damages to agriculture in Puerto Rico.
Hurricane Laura caused 35 deaths on the island of Hispaniola, 31 people died in Haiti and
4 were killed in the Dominican Republic on August 23, 2020. Infrastructural damages
were costed at approximately $100 million across the Caribbean mainly in the Dominican
Republic, Haiti, Cuba, Jamaica and the Cayman Islands (Disaster Philanthropy, 2020). It
is why Caribbean countries routinely rank among top countries in terms of human loss
and economic devastation (Eckstein et al., 2017).
In 2010, Norman Girvan (2017) referred to these accumulating disasters as ‘existential
threats’, which he claimed challenge the very viability of these societies. Concomitant to
socio-ecological viability is a concern about social displacement and premature death
which climate-induced disasters bring about.2 This article makes two interrelated argu-
ments. First, I argue that Black and racialized communities in the Global South, in par-
ticular the Caribbean region, are deemed undeserving of support by US powers in the
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