White racists suffer, hurt inside, when ever they see an image like this. Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

UPDATED:

White racists suffer, hurt inside, when ever they see an image like this.
White racists suffer, hurt inside, when ever they see an image like this. Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

Insiders are saying that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Energy Secretary Rick Perry do not want the US to pull out of the 2015 Paris accord on climate change. Tillerson is the former CEO of ExxonMobil, and Perry is the former governor of oil-loving Texas. These men are not friends of the environment. And so, why do they want to be a part of the landmark agreement on global warming? And it’s not just them, but also several leading Republicans.

Also, most conservative Republicans want the US to stay in the agreement. And what this means is that only a very small section of American voters support Trump’s decision…

Before looking at this small group of Americans, it must be explained that the accord will not end the end to our kind of world (the Holocene Epoch—whose last few years has become the Anthropocene). It’s too late to reverse these processes with moderate agreements, adjustments, and pledges. As I said in the debate with the weatherperson and climate skeptic Cliff Mass, only a mobilization of humans and resources at the scale of World War II would have a chance at this late point. And because that is not going to happen any time soon, we can conclude nothing will stop our departure from the Holocene and arrival in the unknown.

But the Paris accord does create the foundation for the kind of institution that will eventually have the organizational memory, capacity, and coherence to facilitate human responses and adaptations to a crisis that has no borders. Whoever is at the center of this institution will be leading the future. The Paris accord is more geopolitical than anything else.

So why did Trump pull the US out of it? The New York Times says it’s because he is trying to protect and increase coal mining jobs in the Appalachia. The best way one can react to such an explanation is laughter. And the absence of any better reason becomes the hand that pulls back the curtain that barely conceals the truth: this is all about a black president and the effort to repair the existential wound his success inflicted on a sense of being that is rooted in whiteness. Tillerson does not suffer from this mental injury, and apparently neither does Perry. But Trump, Bannon, and the GOP’s base do. They are calling the Paris accord a corrupt something or other that has to do with Obama, and Obama is corrupt because he is black.

It is time for the mass media to stop refraining from stating what is obvious to anyone who is not white or completely trapped in their whiteness. We can’t continue to pretend that this and other decisions (reversing the US’s new position on Cuba, ending the nuclear agreement with Iran, and so on) have any logic that’s outside of American racism. With the exit from Paris, the US walks out on its future leadership role. The country’s democracy could not stop this from happening because it’s now dominated by white pride. The new capitals of the world (meaning, those that will provide institutional, cultural and technological know-how for life in a new and warmer epoch) will be Berlin and Beijing.

Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...