Williams College Elites: Now Environmentalism Is Racist Too

WILLIAMSTOWN, MA - I was just scanning the Williams Magazine and I noticed the an article on the topic of environmental justice. Apparently, protecting the environment is now racist. (Isn't everything?) As you might expect, it is filled with an overwhelming amount of impossible to understand annoying politically correct babble. 

"Building a relationship between the Davis Center and the Zilkha Center allows our students to think about these terms as complementary," says Cecilia Del Cid, Assistant Director of the Davis Center, "to recognize that capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy have allowed corporations, colonialism, imperialism to continue to perpetrate many of these injustices."

In reality, of course, the U.S. leads the world in terms of protecting the environment and creating clean, safe, healthy places to live. However, if you think that white people would get credit for protecting the environment, then you don't know how wily and evil white people really are since they are actually harming minorities when they make efforts to protect the environment. For example, as I understand it, foolish racist white people thought they were making the world better by creating Central Park, but in reality they made the world worse by forcing blacks (and Irish) out of Central Park. 

One of the most bizarre comments comes from James Manigault-Bryant, the moderator, Associate Professor and Chair of Africana Studies. He focuses on how protection of the forest actually harms the interest of blacks and other minorities.

He ominously asserts: "What strikes me is how central the forest is physically, but symbolically as well. What draws people here is an opportunity to have the privilege of being removed, of being in the wilderness to come to a sense of themselves. What you’re challenging us to think about is: At what cost is Williams able to sustain that forest?" He adds, later on: 

The ways land is apportioned and protected for certain purposes has an effect on who comes and lives here. As the college continues to pursue this aim of diversity, particularly among faculty, this is central. Will people come here and stay? Can they imagine having a life here? It’s dependent upon the uses of land—the way you put it earlier... about protecting the forest and how that comes into tension with other perspectives.

Accordingly, he wants to see us develop "an alternative, more inclusive definition of “environment,” which is crucial to the conversation." As far as I can tell, James Manigault-Bryant is seeking to promote a new way of thinking about environmentalism that changes the word to mean that messing up the environment is okay as long as it benefits non-whites. Or something like that.