Rethinking Du Bois’s “Colour Line”: Climate Change, Environmental Racism and Health in the United Kingdom

TY - CHAP

T1 - Rethinking Du Bois’s “Colour Line”

T2 - Climate Change, Environmental Racism and Health in the United Kingdom

AU - Atkin, Karl Michael

PY - 2025/8/21

Y1 - 2025/8/21

N2 - In 1881 Fredrick Douglass introduced the idea of the “colour line” to describe the racism accompanying the abolition of slavery in the USA. Repurposing this theme, by providing it with dialectical intent and connecting it to the history of colonisation and global practice, W.E.B. Du Bois proposed using the “colour-line” to explore how social relationships and institutional practices continually reinforce racism. According to Du Bois, attempts to realise subjectivities (and their transformative potential) occur alongside normative conditions that ascribe experience a marginal status, associated with a demonised (and dehumanised) ‘other’, which to become part of a collective polity, requires enlightened management, to prevent dis-order. In explaining this, Du Bois remarked that people of colour are endlessly asked “what is it like to be a problem?” This, in defining who they are, requires them to live life under the gaze of another, as a form of “double consciousness”. This chapter considers the implications of this “double consciousness” for how we understand climate change and health in the context of United Kingdom, including how environmental racism generates inequality and social injustice. It begins with exploring how Euro-North American ideas about bifurcation, substantivism and exceptionalism create a particular episteme, in which to (mis)understand the impact of climate change, before considering examples of how environmental damage, justified by – as Walter Rodney observes – Western overdevelopment, offers an expression of global racist practices. Environmental racism and climate change in health are complex, interconnected, system-level challenges. The discriminatory policies and practices that constitute environmental racism have disproportionately burdened poor communities in the United Kingdom. Consistent with Du Bois’s approach this chapter concludes by exploring transformative potential and the extent a moral commitment to change (and a better future) can condition our interpretive and active engagement with the social world.

AB - In 1881 Fredrick Douglass introduced the idea of the “colour line” to describe the racism accompanying the abolition of slavery in the USA. Repurposing this theme, by providing it with dialectical intent and connecting it to the history of colonisation and global practice, W.E.B. Du Bois proposed using the “colour-line” to explore how social relationships and institutional practices continually reinforce racism. According to Du Bois, attempts to realise subjectivities (and their transformative potential) occur alongside normative conditions that ascribe experience a marginal status, associated with a demonised (and dehumanised) ‘other’, which to become part of a collective polity, requires enlightened management, to prevent dis-order. In explaining this, Du Bois remarked that people of colour are endlessly asked “what is it like to be a problem?” This, in defining who they are, requires them to live life under the gaze of another, as a form of “double consciousness”. This chapter considers the implications of this “double consciousness” for how we understand climate change and health in the context of United Kingdom, including how environmental racism generates inequality and social injustice. It begins with exploring how Euro-North American ideas about bifurcation, substantivism and exceptionalism create a particular episteme, in which to (mis)understand the impact of climate change, before considering examples of how environmental damage, justified by – as Walter Rodney observes – Western overdevelopment, offers an expression of global racist practices. Environmental racism and climate change in health are complex, interconnected, system-level challenges. The discriminatory policies and practices that constitute environmental racism have disproportionately burdened poor communities in the United Kingdom. Consistent with Du Bois’s approach this chapter concludes by exploring transformative potential and the extent a moral commitment to change (and a better future) can condition our interpretive and active engagement with the social world.

KW - Environment and sustainability

KW - Global development

KW - health and social care

U2 - 10.4324/9781003473763-3

DO - 10.4324/9781003473763-3

M3 - Chapter

BT - Climate Change, Population Health and Island States

A2 - Jayawickrama, Janaka

A2 - Chakraborty, Arnab

A2 - Zhang, Yong-an

PB - Routledge Taylor & Francis Group

ER -