The Privilege to Prepare: Racial Privilege and Environmental Practice in American Prepping Culture

• In Event: 2251 - Section on Environmental Sociology Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 15. Everyday Environmentalism: Critical Perspectives 2

Abstract

This paper explores racialized narratives present in the discourse of preppers, a sub-culture of Americans who are preparing for emergencies, disasters, and the collapse of society due to concerns about environmental, social and economic risk. I situate prepping as a racial project, and argue that prepping serves to reinforce white dominance through a variety of color-blind racial narratives that serve obscure the power of relatively privileged Americans who, despite relative privilege, feel powerless in the face of risk society. Strategies used to evade the topic of race includes omission of race during discussions that are generally believed to be racialized (such as police violence), belief in the ultimate responsibility of the individual at all costs, religiously front-loaded racism, in which physiological (and thus fixed) categories are downplayed to emphasis cultural differences that can be considered a matter of choice, and narratives about a return to civil America, in which civility stands in for whiteness, masculinity, and other forms of social privilege.

Author

• Allison Ford, University of Oregon