Culture Geology is racist, claims university professor - Queen Mary University lecturer links science to ‘white supremacy’ and and colonialism

Kathryn Yusoff is a professor of inhuman geography at Queen Mary University, London

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.

‘Geotrauma’​

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.

Critics last night slammed the decolonisation agenda as “anti-scientific” and said the “exploitation” of the land was almost as old as mankind itself, and not race-dependent.

Dr John Armstrong, a reader in financial mathematics at King’s College London, said: “The programme of decolonisation is politically contentious, anti-scientific, and consistently associated with calls to lower academic standards.

“Many university departments have resisted the pressure to dumb-down and politicise their courses, but university leaders and their equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) teams continue to demand that courses are decolonised.”

Chris McGovan, the chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, said: “Geology is no more racist than ‘fish ’n’ chips’! It is an entirely neutral term. Those seeking to decolonise the curriculum are, in fact, building their own sinister empire of thought-control and intolerance.

“Applied to exploitation it involves mining and this is almost as old as mankind and not race-dependent, as tourists are reminded when they visit our prehistoric flint mines such as Grime’s Graves, the English Heritage site in Norfolk.”

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[Otterly]

Inhuman geography??
Inhuman is not the word, surely. I know there’s human geography but the other type has to be armed something else. Inhuman doesn’t mean ‘the stuff that isn’t human geography.’
Non human geography?
Or just geography.

 

[Burning Bridge]

Inhuman geography??
Inhuman is not the word, surely. I know there’s human geography but the other type has to be armed something else. Inhuman doesn’t mean ‘the stuff that isn’t human geography.’
Non human geography?
Or just geography.

I like to think that maybe she's dug up the site of some eldritch abomination and uncovered inhuman geography and that's why she's such a nutter.

 

[Positron]

Gneiss article. Maybe I'm just jaded, and talc is cheap, but I think this woman just lost her marbles. I'm just sick of those tenured academics who take their position for granite aiming their discoarse at innocent miners. Maybe is time to wipe the slate clean at Queen Mary University, but we all know they are full of schist.

ROCKS.

We need to petrol academia as a matter of quartz. Failing to do so will open up agate to the new dark age, in which graduates will be completly unemployable save for the most pozzed of N-geodes.

If I were the alum of that college I ruby very mad.

 

[DootSkeleton]

This article can be summarized as "I like rocks but hate white people. How can I combine these two things?"

It's on Anna's Archive, so I'm going to download and skim "Geologic Life: Inhuman Intimacies and the Geophysics of Race". Trying to translate academic speak into plain English so you can find out the "logical" steps in the argument that lead to such insane conclusions is a fun and rewarding hobby

My degree is in geology so hit me up if you need any assistance

 

[KiwiFuzz2]

My degree is in geology so hit me up if you need any assistance

Racist.

And additional words calling you a racist.

Racist.

 

[AssignedEva]

This article can be summarized as "I like rocks but hate white people. How can I combine these two things?"

My degree is in geology so hit me up if you need any assistance

Thank you - but It's ok, I don't think there's any geology in this book. This is from a chapter on stratigraphy:

In terms of an episteme, the identification of strata was a way to locate minerals and metals of value and later fossil fuels, for the extraction (and, in the case of gold and silver mining, so you could mint your own currency and stabilize economies of value and property). At the same time as it was a locational device, stratigraphy was a geographic imaginary that constructed ideas of geologic epochs and thus participated in temporal world-building. The application of stratigraphy organized the material production and imagination of empire, underpinned by the geopolitical model of the United Kingdom, where coal was empire, sustaining its duration as a geophysical space-time entity: the empire “on which the sun never set” was maintained by the geological debt relation of buried sunshine (along with stolen persons and land).

Because of the close connections between “practical geology” in development of understandings of strata and the expansion of colonialism, and the subsequent theories of the formation of conjoined geologic and political worlds through the identification of minerals, metals, and fossils, the development of race was historically concurrent with these material empires as a geophysical condition of the state. As stratigraphy ordered the materiality of time through sequential strata, comparative anatomy ordered bodies of species through their differences, and both made the material possibility of empire. That is, geology is a differentiating machine in its first instance, simultaneously producing codes of temporal and racial difference. As stratigraphic thinking was applied to rocks it was simultaneously applied to race, around notions of racial difference and ideas of the “fixed” notion of racial hierarchies and strata. What is potent about these geosocial formations of race and earth is that they organize the “consolidation” of empire and of settler colonial societies (and the movement of geologists from Europe to North America). Becoming part of settler colonial geologics of settlement through combined geosocial structures, the stratigraphic imagination was both a material hermeneutics and a way of doing racial metaphysics via geophysics.

While geologic strata acted as geographical devices for unearthing, they also became theoretical models in geologic societies and popular geology to map and imagine modes of control in colonized lifeworlds. In the social and philosophical sciences, the concept of strata was deployed as a way to understand differentiated material forms of life as a psychic form of power. The social terrain of stratigraphic thought arranged a model of historicity and materiality that both explained the surface and present, and accounted for its emergence through accumulative historical forces (which presented colonialism as a fait accompli of nature rather than a contested geopolitical form). Thus, stratigraphy could accommodate changes from fixed to processual thought and more causal logics of arrival, while producing an account of social difference as temporally conditioned and yet determined by history.

The geologic conception of stratigraphy became a lexicon for thought that continues to underpin social theory today. Try thinking race, class, gender without the idea of “formations.” Or the structure of the psyche or the bourgeoisie without stratal relations. As a causal geo-logic that explains the depth-surface, past-present relation, it offered a model of social history for society and the subject as a unified plane of experience. Thus, the stratigraphic imagination naturalized subjugating racialized relations in its geo-logic wake as an inevitable outcome of historic formations, even as it sought to critically analyze their occurrence and disrupt their futurity. Through strata, what started as the desire for the fixity of genealogical life — as white supremacy — was rendered as a mode of geologic life that posited a hierarchical and stratified way of being human (as it simultaneously divided the earth in political formations through colonialism to accrue geopower). Underpinning the stratification of thought and political geology was the ground of the inhuman.

As colonialism was being theorized by paleontologists as a natural emergence of the social surface, and thus universal and white (so without the need to acknowledge the racial deficit it is built on), simultaneously, the enslaved were spatialized in the depths of strata (in racial undergrounds, in the “holds” of slave ships, in the seabeds of the triangular trade and the dungeons of the Gold Coast, in plantations, prisons, and mines). As Indigenous land was stolen, and Indigenous people subjected to cultural, viral, and gendered violence, their presence was literally being erased off the earth’s surface through an imagined stratal emplacement in the category of extinction (enacted through repetitive genocidal acts). At the same time as stratigraphy was being applied to the geophilosophical organization and extraction of colonial worlds, against Indigenous and enslaved persons, the accumulation of wealth in European centers and its burgeoning of institutions of science were further consolidating the construction of race in its geophilosophical imaginaries. While the inhuman world lent an “innocence ground” of stratal thought to philosophy, it did so with an entwined history of race and earth and its deadly carceral geophysical states.

As Western philosophical and capitalist imaginations were securely based in a stratal imagination, postcolonial philosophies were embracing the abyssal, the void, and the volcano as a way into, and out of, the brutal superficial dimensions of inhuman classification (Antillean thinkers such as Glissant, Fanon, Césaire, and Wynter). While postcolonial thought happened in the context and structures of the colonial imagination, anticolonial theory—Glissant’s, for example—pushed farther out into the seas of chaos and forms of being where these geophysics of sense started to dissolve and throw up their nonhistorical histories and disinherited ferment. As Wynter’s rogue Marxism underwent a Black metamorphosis. The geographies from which this thought emerges have multiple origins (sea, colonialism, island, plot, spirituals, hold) and thus it challenged the purity of elemental thought through the density and complexity of inhuman epistemologies.For the colonized, the underground and undergrounding (as a verb) became a way of crafting a geophysical being—a subterranean ontology of sorts that sought to disrupt stratal modes and imaginations of containment and violence. Fanon seeks the psychic underground, berating Freud for his forgetting of the sociogenic principle, saying that he mistakes the substituting phylogenetic theory for the ontogenetic perspective. This epistemic space is also geographic. Fanon echoes this in the beginning of Black Skin, White Masks (1986), referring to the concept of nonbeing as a sterile and arid region. The politics of strata then entailed a stratified order and a corresponding topology of resistant racial undergrounds, epistemic rifts, and thirsty places that sought its disruption. Methodologies of the rift challenged the stratigraphic method and the materialism it shaped.

Or in other (significantly shorter) words:

Stratigraphy started as a way of locating resources like coal seams. However the way it divided strata into different "epochs" changed how people thought about time, and created a narrative about eras. Also those resources were used to build empires. Consequently stratigraphy enabled Imperial empires to exploit both the natural world and the people they enslaved, while creating part of the empire's identity. Because of this link, the notion of there being specific "strata" also transferred onto the way people thought about race, so practical geology lead people to create belief systems around race to justify colonialism. In fact, the concepts of geological strata were used as a metaphor to help explain differences between peoples/societies, and the concept of epochs as fixed states shaped by historical forces encouraged the idea that Western societies were further along the route of advancement (and thus colonialism was a natural and ok thing to happen).

Thinking about geologic strata as discrete "layers" encourages us - even today - to think of things as being in layers when explaining how history and society work together. But that makes things like racism seem like a natural thing that just happens, because these original narratives that were used to reinforce white supremacy continues to divide people into different "levels", separating people from land in a way that makes exploitation of land and people seem ok. So while palaeontologists were saying that colonialism was natural and the universal emergence on the top level of time (with white people being the top strata), slaves were literally put "underground" in slave holds and mines. While paleontologists talked about "extinction" because of fossils they found in certain strata, they assigned Indigenous people the role of "extinct" and then worked to make them go extinct by genociding them. As geographic strata were used to colonially order the world like this, it also was used to find resources to strengthen the West and boost its scientific institutions that pedalled race science to justify more colonialism. Basically geology made racism worse, and racism made geology worse (?) and they sort of empowered each other like a perpetual motion machine.

Postcolonial thinkers rejected this top-down approach of strata, instead comparing things to volcanos where everything gets churned up. For example the Martinique poet Édouard Glissant suggested we shouldn't try to understand the entire world in a way that fits into Western modes of logic and that sometimes people should just get to exist in a way that doesn't make sense to outsiders, that isn't explainable or categorisable, and doesn't have any fixed definition (for example, the concept of a nation state or ethnic group should just be ignored). Jamaican philosopher Sylvia Wynter criticised Marx for trying to explain everything through class while ignoring race and colonialism. Martinique psychologist Frantz Fanon argued that people like Freud focused too much on individual cases without considering that colonialism creates trauma and modes of thinking on the colonised. So basically instead of thinking of society or history as a series of strata with modernity or white people on top and other people in older, more primitive strata, everything should be all mixed up because the real world doesn't fit neatly into epochs and geological strata - thinking it does is the result of geology being used to reinforce colonialism and racism, and racism and colonialism reinforcing geology. So postcolonialists deliberately go "underground" instead of striving to be on the "top strata" or "surface" to discard the idea of there being strata in the first place.

Something like that. She does the annoying thing that sociologists do where they treat the world and history like a novel and apply symbolic analysis to it. In another section talking about... rocks? I'm not entirely sure, but anyway she starts banging on about Nina Simone's "Sinnerman" and how the singer is asking a rock to hide him, and then some more about Édouard Glissant, and then something about Kant hating black people and it sort of ends on this diagram.

It is not a gneiss read.

 

[DootSkeleton]

I don't think there's any geology in this book. This is from a chapter on stratigraphy:

You're right. That's sociology and anthropology using hard science terms amidst an avalanche of jargon to confuse people into thinking what she's saying isn't complete made-up bullshit.
That level of navel-gazing pseudoscientific intellectualism is impossible to satirize. I'd say it reads like AI but I don't think that even AI could spew out that level of padding and jargon.

I looked for some reviews and I think this guy explains what's going on better than I can


Also, here's a review of her previous book, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Forerunners: Ideas First), published on November 2, 2018 that tells me she's grossly misusing labels, definitions, and terminology:

I think if you were to go through and replace the inappropriately used terms with appropriate ones then this wouldn't be news.

I also checked out her official professor page that @Asian tech support posted

In addition to the "Research" section that he posted, I decided to read the rest of the tabs and what she wrote and she also doesn't know how to use the term pedagogy:

Teaching​

My teaching builds on my ongoing pedagogical commitment of decolonizing geography, through a focus on the examination of unequal environments. Modules engage how pedagogic encounter is racial, social-economic and gendered in relation to normative understandings of ability and disability, and therefore insists that acknowledging students’ life experiences outside of the classroom is crucial to their participation, as well as extending those experiences through an approach of geographical expansiveness.

Current modules

GEG5142 Colonial Lives & Afterlives

GEG5156 Advanced Methods Geographical Practice (Theory)

New for 2024/5 *Race & Environment*

GEG7120 Geographical Thought & Practice

Dissertation


Previous modules

GEG4005 People and the Environment

GEG5227 The Anthropocene: Between natural and social sciences

GEG6141 New York: Nature in the City (Fieldtrip)

Public Engagement​

I have developed a body of work that is interdisciplinary and international in its conversations on the Anthropocene, geology, and race within the broader fields of humanities and social studies of planetary change. Within those interdisciplinary fields I speak in many cultural forums on colonial extraction and epistemic violence and creative strategies to dismantle and reimagine the earth at the level of language, and in the context of geographical imaginaries and social theory.

In my academic scholarship, artistic, and pedagogical engagements, I have sought to define a new field in geologic subjectivity and understanding of the connection between geology and race. My research foregrounds the need for the recognition of discipline shifting research and interdisciplinary engagement with the issues of environmental justice and race. I seek to create community and critical practice around historic and contemporary Black and Brown environmentalisms.

I have a long history in public engagement, mainly focused on the arts and interdisciplinary approaches to environmental change, racial climates, and extraction. I began my research career by organizing meetings between arts and sciences around climate change 20 years ago to make space for debates and communicate environmental knowledge in public. Since then, I have been involved with libraries, arts organisations, science organisations, film collaborations, school pedagogy and was Academic Lead on Re/Sisters: A Lens on Gender and Ecology, Barbican Major Exhibition, Oct 2023 —Jan 2024.

I genuinely want to ask her if she's seen the documentary "Empire of Dust" and what she thinks of China.

 

[Meriasek]

Inhuman geography??
Inhuman is not the word, surely. I know there’s human geography but the other type has to be armed something else. Inhuman doesn’t mean ‘the stuff that isn’t human geography.’
Non human geography?
Or just geography.

Well, the fagademics claimed "geography" as their name for their new bullshit critical study of "going somewhere and making shit up about the people and the land, preferable with 'authoethnographies' because that's easiest", so this idiot tries to distinguish herself by giving her bullshit field a new name despite doing the same as the other fagademics. I.e. taking something and making it about racism and colonialism. Specific words don't matter, only securing funding for her bullshit studies.
This person doesn't have an Early Life section on Wikipedia or anywhere, but I'm fairly sure I know what it'll say.

 

[jakkufurosuto]

huwyte supremacy's wen you look at rocks and shiet

 

[William Murderface]

Why don't they ever say "the West is racist and will always be racist, so we'll just leave and go to Asia/South America/Oceana/Mother Africa where the is no racism and the vile forces of white colonialism have been defeated"?

Oh right, they don't want to live under warlords and like clean water.