The Climate Anxiety Discussion Has a Whiteness Problem

Sarah Jaquette Ray has a particular interest in the intersection of environmental issues and social justice. In the late 2010s, as concern around the climate crisis finally began to swell, Ray turned her focus toward a relatively new phenomenon that had entered the discourse: climate anxiety. The people interested in her work shifted when she began to talk about climate anxiety. Why did it happen? She says it got a lot more white.

In March 2021, she wrote an opinion piece for Scientific American in which she expressed concern about what she dubbed the "unbearable whiteness" of the climate anxiety discussion. She said that if marginalized people were left out of the discussion, climate anxiety could manifest as fear or anger against them, and society would forgo the intersectional approach needed to take action against the climate crisis.

White emotions can take up all the oxygen in the room. The term climate anxiety seemed to mean a lot more to the white and wealthy than it did to the rest of the population. Climate justice writer Mary Annase Heglar has dubbed this "existential exceptionalism", when the privileged represent climate change as humanity's first existential crisis, effectively scrubbing away centuries of oppression that targeted the existence of people of color.

"Ray's work has been really important and provocative for getting the much needed critical questions opened up about who is being emphasized in the conversation about climate anxiety." While white people may make up the majority of voices in the conversation, climate anxiety is a phenomenon that does not discriminate by race, class, or geography.

The study surveyed 10,000 young people between the ages of 16 and 25 in diverse settings around the world. More than 45% of the participants said their feelings about the climate crisis negatively impacted their ability to function on a daily basis. When researchers looked at countries where climate disasters have already become more intense, such as Nigeria, the Philippines, and India, they found that the proportion reporting distress was higher. It shows how climate anxiety can lead to injustice in people's lives.

Some groups have dominated the conversation due to their language. The reality is that the term "climate anxiety" may be different for a white middle class European than it is for a poor farmer in Lagos. Amish notions of what anxiety is, their background, and what words are available to them explain why someone would say they are experiencing anxiety. According to Ray, climate anxiety is very privileged. We don't have language for all the emotions.