Climate Emergency and Racial Justice

About the Instructor

Donna M Orange. Educated in philosophy, clinical psychology and psychoanalysis, Donna Orange teaches at NYU Postdoctoral Program and IPSS (Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity, New York). Recent books are Thinking for Clinicians (2010), The Suffering Stranger: Hermeneutics for Everyday Clinical Practice (2011), Nourishing the Inner Life of Clinicians and Humanitarians (2016) and Climate Crisis, Psychoanalysis, and Radical Ethics (2017), and Learning to Hear: Psychoanalysis, History, and Radical Ethics (2020).

Climate Emergency and Racial Justice

About this Course

Several years ago (Orange, 2017), I identified western, especially U.S. mindlessness about enslavement and colonialism as the most important factor underlying climate unconsciousness. Inability to confront this history makes us unable to feel the suffering our privileged lifestyles create and perpetuate. Recent history has brought these concerns center-stage. Now it has become clear that climate and racial injustice can only be addressed together. We will use Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste and Judith Butler’s The Power of Nonviolence to help us consider what radical ethics might demand of us now.

Course Objectives

• Identify three elements of a caste system.
• Explain the meaning of “ungrievable lives” as Butler uses this term.
• Identify two types of climate dissociation.
• Explain the meaning of radical ethics.