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June 30, 2020 PAGE DESIGN BY MIKA HYMAN
Taking Responsibility: Fossil Fuels, Divestment, CONTINUED FROM PAGE 8
letter proposing two community meetings and a single air monitor. Now, ExxonMobil is working to expand the refinery into the largest in the United States. This expansion will only bolster the systemic oppression of Charlton-Pollard, like so many other predominantly Black neighborhoods around the country. On June 27th, Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber recognized the University’s place in this systemic oppression when he announced the Princeton Board of Trustees’s decision to finally remove Woodrow Wilson’s name from the residential college and School of Public and International Affairs, five years after the Black Justice League’s initial call for action and sustained activism. He noted that “Princeton is part of an America that has too
often disregarded, ignored, or excused racism, allowing the persistence of systems that discriminate against Black people.” While the removal of Wilson’s name is a meaningful first step, it does not change the reality that Princeton University, with its $26 billion endowment, continues to aid and abet the fossil fuel industry in perpetuating environmental racism. As President Eisgruber has asserted: “We all have a responsibility to stand up against racism, wherever and whenever we encounter it.” We all have a responsibility to stand up against ExxonMobil. We all have a responsibility to stand up against the fossil fuel industry and its active practices of environmental racism and racial injustice. In past weeks, we have seen a surge of protests over police brutality against Black Americans. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed severe systemic racial disparities
that bring greatest harm to Black and Brown communities. Amid discussions about race in the United States, conversations about environmental racism have intensified. President Eisgruber has called on the campus community to “as[k] how we can do our part to confront racism honestly and effectively,” and to “examine all aspects of this institution—from our scholarly work to our daily operations—with a critical eye and a bias toward action.” Any effective confrontation of racism must go deeper than day-to-day actions to address Princeton’s place at the root of the problem. As Dean Jill Dolan and Vice President Rochelle Calhoun have recognized, “only systemic and far-reaching structural change will finally eradicate racism and all of its tragic manifestations in our country.” They have urged “the University, through its teaching and research missions, [to]