Redefining Discrimination: Dismantling Environmental Protections through the Logic of Reactionary Colorblindness

Abstract

The authors examine the unique role that racism plays in guiding and structuring anti-environmental ideas and behaviors. They focus on the influence of reactionary colorblindness, which is a legal strategy that promotes race-neutral individuality and activates white resentment in seeking to reverse policies for racial equality. The authors ask, In what ways do anti-environmental policies harness, replicate, and repurpose the logic of reactionary colorblindness? They conduct a qualitative content analysis of a sample of the second Trump administration’s executive orders (EOs). In these EOs, the authors find that the administration draws on reactionary colorblindness as a tool to redefine discrimination and undermine environmental protection in three main ways: (1) the EOs justify eliminating environmental justice initiatives by claiming they confer group-based racial advantages that are antithetical to colorblind individuality; (2) the EOs label diversity, equity, and inclusion, environmental justice, and climate change programs as “forced discrimination” to rationalize policy dismantling; and (3) the EOs adopt a stance of ignorance toward environmental and climate science, thereby rejecting the rationale underlying policies that promote environmental and climate justice. The authors extend debates in environmental sociology and the sociology of race and ethnicity by analyzing how colorblindness and the racism of omission work in service of anti-environmentalism.