From the Telegraph:
The study of the Earth’s rocks and natural resources is racist and linked to “white supremacy”, according to a geography professor at a leading UK university.
Kathryn Yusoff, an academic at Queen Mary University of London, said the hard science subject of geology was “riven by systemic racism” and colonialism.
She also suggested palaeontology, the study of prehistoric life through fossils, was partly to blame for racism, labelling it “pale-ontology”.
In her book, Geologic Life, the professor argued the extraction of gold, iron, and other metals was racist. She wrote that geology began as a “colonial practice” that created hierarchies, promoted materialism, destroyed environments and led to climate change.
The theft of land, mining and other geological aspects of colonialism led “toward the white supremacy of the planet” and resulted in “geotrauma”, Prof Yusoff wrote. She also claimed “geology continues to function within a white supremacist praxis”.
Demands to decolonise courses, led by activist students and lecturers, have spread across UK universities, backed by official bodies such as the Quality Assurance Agency for higher education.
The agenda began in social sciences and humanities and is now being applied to hard science and maths subjects. It uses critical race theory to support the view that the knowledge studied in universities is male and white and has been used to attain and perpetuate Western global domination through racism and injustice.
Prof Yousoff’s book focused on geology from the 17th to the 19th century. She argued that non-white people have a closer relationship to the land than white people.
“Broadly, black, brown, and indigenous subjects… have an intimacy with the earth that is unknown to the structural position of whiteness,” she wrote.
Prof Yousoff described herself on the Queen Mary website as a professor of “inhuman geography”.
The study of rocks was also “racialised”, according to the academic.
“To tell a story of rocks is to account for a eugenic materialism in which white supremacy made surfaces built on racialised undergrounds…” she wrote.
When you look through a lens of Critical Race Theory, then I guess everything is about white supremacy.
From Amazon:
In Geologic Life, Kathryn Yusoff theorizes the processes by which race and racialization emerged geologically. Examining both the history of geology as a discipline and ongoing mineral and resource extraction, Yusoff locates forms of imperial geology embedded in Western and Enlightenment thought and highlights how it creates anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, and anti-Brown environmental and racial injustices. Throughout, she outlines how the disciplines of geology and geography—and their conventions: surveying, identifying, classifying, valuing, and extracting—established and perpetuated colonial practices that ordered the world and people along a racial axis. Examining the conceptualization of the inhuman as political, geophysical, and paleontological, Yusoff unearths an apartheid of materiality as distinct geospatial forms. This colonial practice of geology organized and underpinned racialized accounts of space and time in ways that materially made Anthropocene Earth. At the same time, Yusoff turns to Caribbean, Indigenous, and Black thought to chart a parallel geologic epistemology of the "earth-bound" that challenges what and who the humanities have chosen to overlook in its stories of the earth. By reconsidering the material epistemologies of the earth as an on-going geotrauma in colonial afterlives, Yusoff demonstrates that race is as much a geological formation as a biological one.
Or you could try her earlier A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None:
Tracing the color line of the Anthropocene, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None examines how the grammar of geology is foundational to establishing the extractive economies of subjective life and the earth under colonialism and slavery. Yusoff initiates a transdisciplinary conversation between feminist black theory, geography, and the earth sciences, addressing the politics of the Anthropocene within the context of race, materiality, deep time, and the afterlives of geology.
Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.
It's received an astonishing 183 ratings, mostly 5 star, from readers – "Dense and yet precise, a really important book on challenging the racial and colonial narrative of the Anthropocene" – dazzled by the depth of scholarship on display. Or, possibly, mates.
Mick Hartley 