Dismantling Supremacy Culture:
Healing Ourselves and the Planet
Synopsis
Dismantling Supremacy Culture takes a framework used to discuss racism and applies it to the modern ecological crisis, particularly climate change. Building on Tema Okun's foundational work on white supremacy culture, the book shows how the climate crisis is deeply rooted in the shared beliefs, values, norms, and colonial legacies that have enabled the exploitation of women, people of color, and nature across time and geography. It shows how characteristics of hierarchy, greed, power hoarding, gatekeeping, individualism, perfectionism, urgency, right to comfort, denial and defensiveness, and fear operates at the personal, institutional, and ecological levels to produce systems of oppression. It is a work of deep accountability for the collective harms caused by systemic racism and ecological destruction while avoiding blame and at the same time pointing us towards hope and restititution. Drawing on personal experience, historical evidence, and interviews with environmental professionals and activists, it demonstrates how supremacy culture produced the climate crisis and hampers our efforts to address it. Moving beyond diagnosis, the book turns to Buddhism, Indigenous ecological thought, and racial equity principles as alternative frameworks to supremacy culture and strategies for healing. Its conclusion is that dismantling supremacy culture is not only how we confront racism and climate change, but how we heal ourselves in the process. Complete at approximately 65,000 words, Dismantling Supremacy Culture is moving and deeply researched work of nonfiction cultural criticism.
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Table of Contents
Introduction
About the Author
Clara Fang, Ph.D. is the founder of Green Tara Consulting and research scholar at Antioch University New England. She has worked in the fields of racial equity, climate policy advocacy, and sustainability management for over twenty-five years. She is the author of Centering Equity in Climate Resilience Planning & Action (2022) published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and To Change Everything We Need Everyone: Belonging, Equity, and Diversity in the Climate Movement (2023). Her poetry has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Painted Bride Quarerly, Poet Lore, Terrain, Adirondack Review, and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She holds a Ph.D. in environmental studies from Antioch University, a Master of Environmental Management from Yale University, an MFA in creative writing from University of Utah, and B.A. from Smith College. She was born in Shanghai, China and currently lives in Maryland near Washington DC.
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