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  • From: "Michael Burns" <burns@panix.com>
  • To: "permaculture" <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [permaculture] racism and Pc
  • Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2008 17:01:03 -0500 (EST)


> Very good. In a real world racism has no place. People cause problems, not
> races.
> Groups, governments, military and organizations cause problems, not races.

Exactly... are you really suggesting that racism is caused by races? You
really think that the oppression of blacks (for example) in North America is
caused by the racial identity of whites? Do you really think that if someone
point out racism in society that they are blaming all members of the race that
is in power? This argument may work on Faux news for some hothead commentator,
but please...

Some of this thread is disturbingly illiterate about racism. Racism is a power
relationship. It is structural and found in institutions such as "Groups,
governments, military and organizations." Just writing off this discussion as
"politics" is meaningless. Damn right, it is about the exercise of power
(politics.) I don't know how you can design beyond your own backyard without
confronting politics.

Visit the NYC gardens Mollison featured in his Global Gardner video and try
suggest (to my former neighbors) that race plays no role in the their
community garden. When guardia blancas in Chiapas threatened me while on a
project because I was helping the indios, racial politics impacted
permaculture. If I create a compost bin in the city of Elmira, NY I'm breaking
the law and confronting "politics." When a community activist in another
nearby town describes the permaculture as hobby for the affluent,
class--mediated by race--is impacting permaculture.

If anyone is making the case that racism is caused by race (or as one person
suggested that racism is selecting one plant or animal species over the other)
then they are ill-prepared to talk about racism.

Yes. People cause problems such as racism, but racism and oppression cannot
happen outside the context of society and its structures.

If we are designing along the ethics of permaculture, we cannot blind
ourselves to the structures in society that prevent some from digging their
bloody swales, building their pretty gardens, or more specifically having
enough power over their own lives to live/design sustainably.

If someone's personal limiting factors is that their race prevents them from
power or access to opportunities then racism is a design issue.

Like a previous poster to this thread, I don't usually jump into discussions
on this list but I've found the issue of racism to intersect permaculture
education on a regular basis in New York and the notion that the problem
itself is irrelevant to be repugnant.

> All white people on Earth did not do it simultaneously, incrementally.

OMG... No one has suggested this. Nobody who has ever studied racism could
ever conclude this. So why Lawrence would you paint the anti-racist argument
this way? And to limit the discussion of racism to just that which white
society has created is to cloud the issue and ignore the real origins of the
problem. I've never understood why some whites feel they have to apologize for
the past. I've also never understood why many refuse to understand the past,
how history has affected their life, or see how their own actions support
racism today. Why does a discussion of racism have to be seen a a defense of
oneself, or one's race? Why can't it be a discussion of society, power
relations, and in the context of permaculture how we design a world to meet
human needs?

This list may largely be a bunch of middle-class well educated ag types who
don't see on a daily basis how racism is related to growing food, capturing
energy, managing water and creating shelter. That is OK. But if you don't see
how it affects the endeavors of millions or billions of people who are
struggling to meet these needs, consider that your experience may be limited.
This doesn't make you a bad person. This plea to see the connections between
regenerative design and racist oppression is not about you. It is about those
who, caught in racist invisible structures, are denied the ability to control
their own destiny.

My lily white ass is off to my sweet little permaculture slice-of-heaven
filled with geese, chickens, family and today... a lot of snow. But my human
mind and heart is trying to find itself squarely in the the whole human
experience. This may annoy the f*ck out of some, but I am not content to fuel
racism by accepting assertions of its irrelevance to permaculture, a wonderful
system for the earth and its inhabitants.

-Michael


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Earn your permaculture design certificate.
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