Humanity's Last Stand

Foreword
by Cynthia McKinney

I was green, before I was a Green. I grew up playing in the creek across the street from my house; the woods through which I trekked to school whenever I missed the school bus were my biology class. Snakes and lizards and frogs and ticks populated my lab. And, so naturally, I would never approve of turning Mother Nature, herself, into a profit center. Afterall, it’s the air that we breathe, the water that we drink, and the earth that nourishes us. I have never accepted any reason whatsoever for any activities that pollute or contaminate the air, water, and soil that humankind and other animals need for life. For me, all life is important.

 And that’s what makes Professor Mark Schuller’s call to action so important. In Humanity’s Last Stand, Schuller asks us to think at an entirely different level (for most grassroots activists): he asks us to think at the anthropological level. In short, Humanity’s Last Stand is a call to arms to elevate our thinking to the species level or, he cautions, the species will face extinction. When I was first sworn into Congress, I was readily embraced by the Office of Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder who had been dubbed “America’s Congresswoman.” When her staffer came to give my staff an orientation on life on “The Hill,” one of her sayings always stuck with me, “The bankers always win.” And I would modify that a bit for this context and say, “In the end, Planet Earth will always win; Dr. Schuller reminds us that humankind may not. And therein lies the urgency of his message.

 At this very moment as I write , a mere few milliseconds (in geologic time) from the global climate change protest called Global Climate Strike, it is acknowledged that the Earth is experiencing momentous changes: decreased geomagnetic field,[i] magnetic pole shifts,[ii] discoveries of extinctions[iii] and emergences of species,[iv] and climate change. Add to these phenomena the impact of the sun on the climate of the Earth the science seems to carry us from theory to speculation.[v] Thus, it seems to me that while much more is known today about climate than, say, 100 years ago, there is much more now known, also, about what is not known. And I gather from the current climate debate that that’s a lot! 

 The reality of human degradation of the human habitat is unquestioned. What is questioned is the extent of anthropogenic climate change. On September 26, 2019, 500 scientists and professionals from Europe, Brazil, Canada, Australia, and other countries, sent a letter to the United Nations Secretary General stating that there is no climate emergency, writing: “Our advice to political leaders is that science should strive for a significantly better understanding of the climate system, while politics should focus on minimizing potential climate damage by prioritizing adaptation strategies based on proven and affordable technologies.” The title of their submission to the United Nations is, “There Is No Climate Emergency.”[vi] This comes after a November 29, 2012 letter to the United Nations from 125 climate scientists challenging a a statement made by then-United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon that “extreme weather caused by climate change is the new normal.” Ban Ki-Moon went even further later, stating that the science was clear and “We must reduce our dependence on carbon emissions.” The 2012 Open Letter was sent as a challenge to all of the Secretary General’s statements.[vii]

 While I don’t take a stand one way or the other on anthropogenic climate change; I have long opposed the unbridled despoliation and worse that has been done to our environment. And I do believe that humankind’s uneven distribution of access to Earth’s gifts is a large part of the problem. Also, straying away from Indigenous “ways of knowing” and living also contributes to this readiness to render our environment toxic to some people.

 The problem is that those who are largely responsible for human habitat despoliation are the ones who are not being asked to pay for their crimes against the rest of humanity and Planet Earth. I view as positive forward movement laws passed in some countries that accord a right to a clean environment to humans, and a right to not be polluted to Mother Earth.

 As I was reading Humanity’s Last Stand, several thoughts crossed my mind. But, foremost was the question I asked myself throughout: For whom has Dr. Schuller written this book? I believe this book is most effective for those who are newly awake to Earth’s climate issues and are wondering how we human beings and the planet came to be in this condition. Arguing for an “Anthropological Imagination,” Schuller believes that this particular outlook is the best way for human beings, divided systematically for the last 400 years, to overcome both their real and fabricated differences. Thus, an “Anthropological Imagination” begs humankind to look at itself through a species level lens. Dr. Schuller believes that such a lens, then, lifts all human struggles, especially justice struggles, to one common denominator—justice—that binds us all together. Because all “the good guys” want justice.

 While reading Dr. Schuller’s manuscript, I was reminded of the courage of Robert F. Kennedy, who ventured into deepest, darkest Capetown, apartheid South Africa and told the young people he addressed that he had traveled around the world from Congo, to Russia, to Peru, the U.S. who pleaded that the struggles—all detailed differently in the local—shared a common goal in the global. He issued a call to young people in South Africa to join that global struggle for justice and dignity and to “take the lead for a new order of things.” He reminded us that there is a role for even a single person: He said, “Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”[viii]

 Schuller asks nothing less of today’s generation than Bobby Kennedy did in 1966; however, two years later from giving that speech–almost to the hour–Bobby Kennedy would lie dead on a hotel ballroom floor after he had just won the prize of the California Presidential primary, on his way to the White House. Bobby Kennedy’s assassination was the first time I shed tears. At that very moment, both the best and the worst of U.S. leadership was manifested and indicates the challenges that “We, the people" have before us in achieving this “anthropological imagination.” Bobby Kennedy represented the absolute best example of leadership of that generation; those who conspired to kill him to protect their very powers that he was rallying us all of his generation to challenge, represent the absolute worst in the leadership of that day. In fact, the absolute worst leadership of that time chose to kill (“expose, disrupt, or otherwise neutralize” in the language of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s founding documents[ix]) the young leadership of that time in what became known as the COINTELPRO[x] program of the United States government. U.S. Intelligence activities at that time included assassination plots of foreign leaders as well as real assassinations of real dissenters to the common injustices of that time. I’ve seen and studied what the decade of the 1960s U.S. government COINTELPRO countertransformation repression did to the Black Power, anti-war “New Left,” Puerto Rican independence, and American Indian (AIM) movements.11 12[xi]

 Which leads me to today.

 We know what the problems are; and we know what the solutions are. Yet, the necessary ingredient—behavior change—is missing.

 The college fix,com reports on an effort to bridge the cultural gap on a U.S. college campus by hosting a discussion on “White Consciousness.” No matter how one might approach the topic (with enthusiasm or with skepticism), the results should be shocking: that is, on a campus of 30,000 students, fewer than ten students attended the workshop and of that number, two were journalists, two got extra credit from their professors for attending; the remaining five of the total nine present were from the Young Americans for Freedom campus chapter who showed up out of curiosity, according to the news story.[xii] And while we celebrate the nine who came for whatever reason, how are we going to accomplish building a movement on anthropological imagination with such numbers? Or better still, what kind of engagement do we need if we only have such small numbers?

 I have long wondered how to build a trans-partisan movement in the U.S. based on our shared values, grounded in our diversity. As I was reading Humanity’s Last Stand, I thought about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter From A Birmingham Jail,”[xiii]in which he laments the not-very-helpful role of so-called “White Moderates” during the Civil Rights Era. Yes, an anthropological imagination would have catapulted the Civil Rights Era, I believe, to the list of most successful U.S. movements in modern times. Thus, Dr. Schuller’s call in Humanity’s Last Stand to understand how White Supremacy works in real life and in academia. But, our conundrum again revolves around how to deprogram hundreds of years of programming. Donald Trump proclaimed that the U.S. “system is rigged.” And I maintain that the people have also been rigged in order to maintain a rigged system. Now, just understand that the global system (of apartheid) has also rigged outcomes so that a few people, approximately one billion around the world, are winners and the rest languish for generation after generation in a system not meant to benefit them. (For example, I currently teach in a part of Asia that was colonized by the U.K., and the students I teach have never had the opportunity to play with a doll that looks like them, reaffirming their looks!)

 So, how do we unrig ourselves?

 I have decided to dedicate my ruminations for this book to a very dear friend whom I have not seen in more than a decade. Her name is Tracy. And I believe she did exactly what Dr. Schuller recommends with his idea of us all adopting an “anthropological imagination.” I never will forget Tracy literally screaming and crying at me trying to get me to understand why she was so terrified.
 Tracy said, “I gave up my White privilege and I’m terrified of what that means for me.”

 First, some background: Tracy was way cool, counter culture, and way green—just like me— but even more so. She had converted her diesel Mercedes to run on normal old, used restaurant grease. So, she could go from restaurant to restaurant and collect their used cooking oil, filter it, and use that instead of gasoline in her car! I just thought Tracy was too cool to be true. But, for some reason, Whites seemed less comfortable around her than non- Whites. And one day, I found out why.

 Tracy understood that she had been “rigged” (to put it into today-speak) and that as a White person in the U.S., she enjoyed certain privileges that I could never understand or access. But, just like Tracy had decided to transform her car to become “solutionary,” she had also transformed herself. Not only did she recognize her White privilege, she acted in ways that acknowledged and shed her hidden privileges—whatever they might be. That also entailed speaking truth to the powers-that-be inside organizations—yes, even the so-called socially progressive ones—that didn’t want to hear what Tracy had to say. I am only just now understanding the profundity of what Tracy really meant on that last day that I saw her. She had created for herself—a world without White privilege—she was terrified, but she did it. She was building her bridge as she walked on it to a more perfect world and she didn’t know what dangers lurked just around the bend. But, what she did realize, is that she was alienating a lot of her White colleagues by exposing the contradictions in their own behaviors. In my opinion, Tracy is a pioneer and she forged a path that many others are now attempting to recreate.

 There are people who are doing the heavy lifting and the hard work against this particular type of rigging that has been ongoing since the dawn of capitalism and the “creation” of the “White” race. Anibal Quijano,[xiv] writing specifically about the American experience, called it the “coloniality” of power; he wrote that capitalism is the main global structure for control of labor. The life work of Dr. Jeffrey Perry[xv] has been to curate the work of Theodore Allen whose two-volume epic work, The Invention of the White Race, chronicles the creation of the “White” identity as a method of social control after Black and White laborers in colonial U.S. joined together in solidarity to press for employment/labor reform. Perry writes:
 
 On the back cover of the 1994 edition of Volume 1, subtitled Racial Oppression and Social Control, Allen boldly asserted ‘When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no 'white' people there; nor, according to the colonial records, would there be for another sixty years.’” . . . ‘White identity had to be carefully taught, and it would be only after the passage of some six crucial decades’ that the word ‘would appear as a synonym for European-American.’[xvi]
 
 Importantly, Dr. Perry focuses his work on the role of white supremacy as a retardant to progressive social change and, therefore views the struggle against White Supremacy as a key part of any effort to create progressive social change.

 My friend, Tracy, understood what Quijano, Perry, Allen, and Schuller were studying and writing about—some writing even in academic journals only. But, it was her lived experiences and her critical thinking that allowed her to arrive at the same conclusions as these most eminent thinkers. That means that transformation is possible. And that gives me hope.

 I’m wondering how many Tracys are out there, already having done some heavy lifting in their own lives in order to save humanity and this Earth as we know it. Writing this made me realize how much I miss Tracy and how I had neglected my friendship with her for too long. So, I searched and found an old e-mail address for her and clicked the send button. She responded almost immediately. She has relocated to the East Coast and is happily partnered up with a young man she’s known for most of her life! And she is happy.

 While Schuller grounds his call for an anthropological imagination within the current issues regarding climate change, he is smart enough to realize that no change at all will occur if we human beings are not able to act with compassion that “give[s] rise to the power to transform resentment into forgiveness, hatred into friendliness, and fear into respect and love for all things.”
 Now, that’s a reality that’s worth struggling and sacrificing for.   
 
Notes:

Contents
Foreword by Cynthia McKinney
Introduction: Careening Toward Extinction
1 Structuring Solidarity
2 Dismantling White Supremacy
3 Climate Justice Versus the Anthropocene
4 Humanity on the Move- Justice and Migration
5 Dismantling the Ivory Tower
Conclusion
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
Index