The Fortune 500 as of 2018 had only three black CEOs, all male, and 24 women, and it’s not hard to imagine that this would be a different country if white men didn’t control most of it. A 2011 scholarly paper on climate change denial with the fun title “Cool Dudes” concludes, “We find that conservative white males are significantly more likely than are other Americans to endorse denialist views… and that these differences are even greater for those conservative white males who self-report understanding global warming very well.” White men are the most conservative sector of this society, and wealth and power makes them more so, overall. The climate-denial study then mentions “the atypically high levels of technological and environmental risk acceptance among white males,” which is a reminder that though man and not woman is supposed to be the measure of all things and whiteness our American norm, white men are in many ways outliers. Another scholarly paper notes, “non-White minorities in the United States expressing consistently higher levels of concern than Whites… Blacks and Latinos also typically express higher levels of support for national and international climate and energy policies than Whites.” So three decades that may have doomed the earth come down in no small part to who was in charge, which makes who’s in charge a matter of survival for humans, especially poor non-white ones and women and children, and for countless other species.

Rebecca Solnit, “Unconscious Bias is Running for President”

This piece is straight 🔥 . Read, as they say, the whole thing.