On the Racism of Gross Domestic Product
(and Why Degrowth Still Needs Black and Indigenous Ecology)
by Anthony T. Fiscella
Economics. Ecology. Racism. Separate and unrelated phenomena? Or intimately interconnected?
As with many areas of life, we can see overlaps and interrelationships in various ways and degrees. For example, the U.S. housing and loan institution practice of “redlining” districts to segregate African Americans in neighborhoods that today can have higher temperatures and fewer trees testifies to one way that racial prejudice combined with economic institutions leads to a particular ecological impact.
Nathan Hare formulated the concept of “black ecology” in 1970 to describe how “white ecologies” reflect certain wealthier, “whiter” living conditions and concerns in contrast to Black ghettoes, which reflected pressing ecological concerns of overcrowding, dilapidated housing, industrial pollutants, lead poisoning, vermin, and traffic-related issues more urgent to people living there than saving the whales or redwoods—far from their daily experienced reality.
Seventeen years later, the 1987 study Toxic Wastes in the United States showed how industries tended to choose to dump chemicals and toxic waste in low-income regions where African Americans happened to live. This followed similar treatment of Native Americans: in 1985, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals levied an influential ruling that stated: “Indian reservations may be considered as potential locations for hazardous waste disposal sites […] because they are often remote from heavily populated areas.” Hardly restricted to the United States, countries and industries from Italy to Japan use Africa and South East Asia as global dumping grounds for electronic and hazardous waste.
For a somewhat more complex interrelationship, picture the unequal arrest rates for African and European Americans in relation to addictive substances—despite comparable usage rates. Now, picture the ecological impact of underpriced disposable commodities subsidized by prison labor with wages less than 50 cents per hour. With a disproportionate amount of dark-skinned hands performing slave jobs in a country founded on enslavement, we see links between economics, racism, ecology, addiction, and incarceration tracing back to the start of the United States.
Think for a moment about the economic forces behind the fact that people of color in the United States breathe in more than 50% more pollution than they produce (and suffer higher rates of heart and lung diseases) whereas European Americans breathe in 17% less air pollution than they produce. This type of disparity, labeled “apartheid ecology” or “colorblind environmental racism” by scholars, seems to matter more than class: “Black households with incomes between $50,000 and $60,000 live in neighborhoods that are more polluted than neighborhoods in which poor white households with incomes below $10,000 live.”
Again, not just in the U.S., but globally.
Consider that 600 million people live off-grid in Africa. At the same time, consumers, mainly located outside of Africa, watched a single online video, “Despacito,” more than five billion times, releasing 250,000 tons of carbon emissions and consuming as much electricity as several African countries combined would use in an entire year (e.g., Central African Republic, Somalia, Chad, Guinea-Bissau, and Sierra Leone).
Digest that for a moment.
Think of everything one uses electricity for, from lights, sewing machines, and air conditioning to cell phone usage, skill saws, and refrigeration. Now imagine that you don’t get to use electricity for 90% of what you would want because many people want to watch a music video many times. Somehow, that desire took priority over your basic needs to make it through each day, to build, to repair, to communicate, to keep food from rotting. Why, you might wonder then, should your life and needs have such little value in today’s world, and how anyone could justify such an unfair allocation of limited resources? And how you ended up with so much toxic waste at your doorstep (if you could even afford a door).
How?
In one word: GDP.
(Or three: Gross Domestic Product.)
Governments use GDP to measure prosperity, but how does it do that? Essentially by assessing the amount of money that changes hands electronically or otherwise. In the GDP framework, any exchange registers as positive/good, and zero exchange of money registers as negative/bad.
Because GDP only “sees” the exchange of money regardless of purpose or consequence, these built-in limitations prevent the metric from distinguishing between a “healthy” and necessary exchange of funds (such as a farmer selling organic produce locally) and “harmful” or superfluous use of money (such as a corporation building a factory that pollutes a local habitat to manufacture an addictive substance with plastic packaging that creates health problems and pollutes the environment even more). GDP does not register a local, organic urban garden where neighbors share the produce at no cost. Nor can it “see” the positive impact of neighbors performing childcare services for friends or family without pay. It doesn’t even know how much help insect-eating bats give to farmers (until the bats start to go extinct). But a train wreck that injures 100 people, pollutes a river, damages several houses, and requires the involvement of rescue crews, mechanics, police, lawyers, doctors, and insurance companies registers as tremendously positive because it involves the exchange of vast sums of money.
How does GDP then translate into racism?
By implicitly equating prosperity with the exchange of money, GDP privileges the use of money by those who have it even when it causes ecological harm or upholds racial inequality (such as a toxic waste dumping ground), and it ignores the type of volunteer work done by activists and others to sustain and protect a community. Studies show that Native peoples protect forests twice as well as non-Natives, yet if their methods don’t generate profits, then GDP doesn’t value it. Subsequently, GDP functions as a colorblind racist tool that obscures the very structures of racism that organize it.
The rate of vegetarians in Africa and the Middle East surpasses that of Europe and the United States by more than 250%. Dick Gregory advocated a vegan lifestyle back in the early 1970s and promoted the idea of cultivating kelp to help solve hunger issues. Predominantly Black groups like Rastas and the MOVE Organization both pioneered degrowth lifestyles that also challenged the meat and drug addictions industrial complexes. Blacks and Natives have worked side-by-side toward a society based on values other than money and profits in places such as the Umoja squatted “village” in Miami, Florida, in 2006 and the ongoing Defend the Atlanta Forest alliance working to protect the Weelaunee forest of the Indigenous Mvskoke/Muscogee Creek from city plans to build “Cop City” (a $90 million new training center for police) in Georgia. But GDP neither registers nor values any of that.
We live in a series of global ecological train wrecks, and GDP helps provide the ideological fuel for these ongoing disasters. Various critics in the field of ecological economics, ecofeminism, degrowth, and elsewhere have rightly pointed out GDP’s destructiveness “precisely because growth does not differentiate between useful and destructive, essential and superfluous” (as Matthias Schmelzer and other degrowthers put it). Even the growth-fixated World Economic Forum has rightly called out GDP as sexist because it fails to measure women’s unpaid domestic labor. Yet it seems that no one, not even degrowthers, has called out GDP as racist even though the “blind” metrics of growth obscure, and therefore sanctions using ignorance, the disproportionate harm to people of color due to the ecological consequences of overconsumption.
Like racism, we need to replace GDP with sane, justifiable, and sustainable values. And we need it yesterday.
Economics. Ecology. Racism. Separate and unrelated phenomena? Or intimately interconnected?
As with many areas of life, we can see overlaps and interrelationships in various ways and degrees. For example, the U.S. housing and loan institution practice of “redlining” districts to segregate African Americans in neighborhoods that today can have higher temperatures and fewer trees testifies to one way that racial prejudice combined with economic institutions leads to a particular ecological impact.
Nathan Hare formulated the concept of “black ecology” in 1970 to describe how “white ecologies” reflect certain wealthier, “whiter” living conditions and concerns in contrast to Black ghettoes, which reflected pressing ecological concerns of overcrowding, dilapidated housing, industrial pollutants, lead poisoning, vermin, and traffic-related issues more urgent to people living there than saving the whales or redwoods—far from their daily experienced reality.
Seventeen years later, the 1987 study Toxic Wastes in the United States showed how industries tended to choose to dump chemicals and toxic waste in low-income regions where African Americans happened to live. This followed similar treatment of Native Americans: in 1985, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals levied an influential ruling that stated: “Indian reservations may be considered as potential locations for hazardous waste disposal sites […] because they are often remote from heavily populated areas.” Hardly restricted to the United States, countries and industries from Italy to Japan use Africa and South East Asia as global dumping grounds for electronic and hazardous waste.
For a somewhat more complex interrelationship, picture the unequal arrest rates for African and European Americans in relation to addictive substances—despite comparable usage rates. Now, picture the ecological impact of underpriced disposable commodities subsidized by prison labor with wages less than 50 cents per hour. With a disproportionate amount of dark-skinned hands performing slave jobs in a country founded on enslavement, we see links between economics, racism, ecology, addiction, and incarceration tracing back to the start of the United States.
Think for a moment about the economic forces behind the fact that people of color in the United States breathe in more than 50% more pollution than they produce (and suffer higher rates of heart and lung diseases) whereas European Americans breathe in 17% less air pollution than they produce. This type of disparity, labeled “apartheid ecology” or “colorblind environmental racism” by scholars, seems to matter more than class: “Black households with incomes between $50,000 and $60,000 live in neighborhoods that are more polluted than neighborhoods in which poor white households with incomes below $10,000 live.”
Again, not just in the U.S., but globally.
Consider that 600 million people live off-grid in Africa. At the same time, consumers, mainly located outside of Africa, watched a single online video, “Despacito,” more than five billion times, releasing 250,000 tons of carbon emissions and consuming as much electricity as several African countries combined would use in an entire year (e.g., Central African Republic, Somalia, Chad, Guinea-Bissau, and Sierra Leone).
Digest that for a moment.
Think of everything one uses electricity for, from lights, sewing machines, and air conditioning to cell phone usage, skill saws, and refrigeration. Now imagine that you don’t get to use electricity for 90% of what you would want because many people want to watch a music video many times. Somehow, that desire took priority over your basic needs to make it through each day, to build, to repair, to communicate, to keep food from rotting. Why, you might wonder then, should your life and needs have such little value in today’s world, and how anyone could justify such an unfair allocation of limited resources? And how you ended up with so much toxic waste at your doorstep (if you could even afford a door).
How?
In one word: GDP.
(Or three: Gross Domestic Product.)
Governments use GDP to measure prosperity, but how does it do that? Essentially by assessing the amount of money that changes hands electronically or otherwise. In the GDP framework, any exchange registers as positive/good, and zero exchange of money registers as negative/bad.
Because GDP only “sees” the exchange of money regardless of purpose or consequence, these built-in limitations prevent the metric from distinguishing between a “healthy” and necessary exchange of funds (such as a farmer selling organic produce locally) and “harmful” or superfluous use of money (such as a corporation building a factory that pollutes a local habitat to manufacture an addictive substance with plastic packaging that creates health problems and pollutes the environment even more). GDP does not register a local, organic urban garden where neighbors share the produce at no cost. Nor can it “see” the positive impact of neighbors performing childcare services for friends or family without pay. It doesn’t even know how much help insect-eating bats give to farmers (until the bats start to go extinct). But a train wreck that injures 100 people, pollutes a river, damages several houses, and requires the involvement of rescue crews, mechanics, police, lawyers, doctors, and insurance companies registers as tremendously positive because it involves the exchange of vast sums of money.
How does GDP then translate into racism?
By implicitly equating prosperity with the exchange of money, GDP privileges the use of money by those who have it even when it causes ecological harm or upholds racial inequality (such as a toxic waste dumping ground), and it ignores the type of volunteer work done by activists and others to sustain and protect a community. Studies show that Native peoples protect forests twice as well as non-Natives, yet if their methods don’t generate profits, then GDP doesn’t value it. Subsequently, GDP functions as a colorblind racist tool that obscures the very structures of racism that organize it.
The rate of vegetarians in Africa and the Middle East surpasses that of Europe and the United States by more than 250%. Dick Gregory advocated a vegan lifestyle back in the early 1970s and promoted the idea of cultivating kelp to help solve hunger issues. Predominantly Black groups like Rastas and the MOVE Organization both pioneered degrowth lifestyles that also challenged the meat and drug addictions industrial complexes. Blacks and Natives have worked side-by-side toward a society based on values other than money and profits in places such as the Umoja squatted “village” in Miami, Florida, in 2006 and the ongoing Defend the Atlanta Forest alliance working to protect the Weelaunee forest of the Indigenous Mvskoke/Muscogee Creek from city plans to build “Cop City” (a $90 million new training center for police) in Georgia. But GDP neither registers nor values any of that.
We live in a series of global ecological train wrecks, and GDP helps provide the ideological fuel for these ongoing disasters. Various critics in the field of ecological economics, ecofeminism, degrowth, and elsewhere have rightly pointed out GDP’s destructiveness “precisely because growth does not differentiate between useful and destructive, essential and superfluous” (as Matthias Schmelzer and other degrowthers put it). Even the growth-fixated World Economic Forum has rightly called out GDP as sexist because it fails to measure women’s unpaid domestic labor. Yet it seems that no one, not even degrowthers, has called out GDP as racist even though the “blind” metrics of growth obscure, and therefore sanctions using ignorance, the disproportionate harm to people of color due to the ecological consequences of overconsumption.
Like racism, we need to replace GDP with sane, justifiable, and sustainable values. And we need it yesterday.
