What would abolitionism mean for climate justice? “Resilience” is proposed by experts as a solution to climate change vulnerability. But this prescription tends to focus on adaptation to future external threats, subtly validating embedded processes of racial capitalism that have historically dehumanized and endangered residents and their environments in the first place. This article focuses on majority Black areas said to be vulnerable to extreme weather events and targeted for expert-driven resilience enhancements in America’s capital city, Washington, DC. Drawing on key insights from Black radical, feminist, and antiracist humanist thought, we reimagine resilience through an abolitionist framework. Using archival analysis, oral histories, a neighborhood-level survey, and interviews conducted between 2015 and 2018, we argue that abolitionist climate justice entails a centering of DC’s historical environmental and housing-related racisms, the intersectional drivers of precarity and trauma experienced by residents beyond those narrowly associated with “climate”; and an ethics of care and healing practiced by those deemed most at risk to climate change.

Public discourse in the US has recently acknowledged the unequal raced and classed geographies of extreme weather events. In the aftermath of the 2017 hurricanes that tore through the Caribbean islands, Florida, and Texas, for instance, the media recognized the rootedness of disasters in histories of colonialism, racialization, and real estate capitalism (e.g. Buncombe 2017; Hobson and Bassi 2017; Misra 2017; Tharoor 2017). Yet, when the dust had settled, “resilience” once again defined the post-disaster landscape. In the wake of Hurricane Harvey, for example, conservative and liberal commentators alike lauded Houston’s social, physical, and spiritual resilience, identifying different avenues for channeling billions of dollars to rebuild the region (Solis 2017; Williamson 2017), while ignoring the longstanding exposure to oil refinery toxicity disproportionately borne by Black and Latinx residents.