The co-founders of the Black Lives Matter movement spoke at Cornell’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Lecture a week and a half ago, and part of their thesis was that the free market and global warm– er, climate change are, yep, racist.
Opal Tometti and Alicia Garza discussed the usual complaints that BLM-affiliated organizations have been protesting against on campuses — institutional and structural racism and white privilege — before invoking the trade and climate angle.
As The Cornell Review reports,
[a]fter commenting on the European migrant crisis, [Tometti] turned to the issue of free trade, calling trade deals between European and African countries forms of “anti-black racism” and “neo-colonialism” because according to her they have worsened African economies. In consequence, she stated that global capitalism is unsustainable. Climate change, also, is a form of “global anti-blackness” according to Tometti because six out of the 10 countries that ranked highest on the “climate change vulnerability index” are in Africa, according to a study she referenced.
Garza noted that “she wishes to retire” the phrase “black-on-black crime,” preferring to focus on “the violence of the state” as “not all violence is created equal.”
Cornell President Elizabeth Garrett said that the BLM and “affiliated activists will successfully ‘turn history around.’”
Interestingly, not unlike several media outlets, Garrett made a rather glaring error that eventually had to be corrected by Garza.
When speaking of the Trayvon Martin killing, she called the man who shot him, George Zimmerman, “a white man” (in contrast to Martin as “a black man”).
Zimmerman is half-white and half Hispanic, and identifies as the latter.
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