Now That’s What I Call Racism!
cue the virtue signalers
(This post is better experienced on a computer than a mobile device.)
“Sectarianism, fed by fanaticism, is always castrating. Radicalization, nourished by a critical spirit, is always creative. Sectarianism mythicizes and thereby alienates; radicalization criticizes and thereby liberates. Radicalization involves increased commitment to the position one has chosen, and thus ever greater engagement in the effort to transform concrete, objective reality. Conversely, sectarianism, because it is mythicizing and irrational, turns reality into a false (and therefore unchangeable) “reality.” - Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of The Oppressed.
Do we need equity in the outdoors?
It’s just rocks and trees. Anyone can enjoy it
If they don’t enjoy it, maybe that’s on them?
-white people
“The outdoors can’t be racist” is a sectarian battle cry. It posits a myth of the “true” outdoors: a space free of agenda or oppression, in which pure rocks, unburdened by human politics, can be acted upon without consideration of equity or color - just good, old-fashioned climbing. It depicts a vast and great nature where white and Black can commune seamlessly, rendering those petty “equity” conflicts as the pointless distraction from what matters—that is, being free in the wilderness. This myth is admittedly a comforting one; it’s easier to imagine kindly old John Muir, bluebirds singing around him, taking in the vast cathedral of natural beauty that is every man’s right, transmitting essential wisdom on the willing for ages to come.
With such a vision in mind, it’s no wonder that there are so many defenders of this myth. When one constructs a house of knowledge upon the hoary bedrock of the ancestors, it looks pretty threatening when a black geologist comes around and tells you that the rock is rotting, weak, and full of voids that threaten to fracture and break. But this is the reality of the “true” outdoors, and the myth separates us from that reality. The rock is rotten, it always has been, and our bolts are not in tight.
Freire’s “castration” is not an analogy but a statement of fact. We are cut off from a vital source of essential growth when our worldview cannot admit new information. When we harden our beliefs, we become immune to all change but slow weathering. John Muir was a racist. A worldview that cannot admit this is sectarian, and reality is closed.
The outdoors, wilderness, freedom— all of these are constructs; they are not real, any more than race is real. Both are mediated by a divided society, but both have very real consequences. Being black in the outdoors is very real, indeed. To say a space “cannot” have racism implies that its entire condition, across time, has never been altered by race. But the outdoors, in America, has always been a racial conversation. Like redlining neighborhoods, the outdoors have been gentrified, divided, and brokered by race. The history is not in dispute.
But why does this matter? If you’re a ‘nice’ white person—one who voted for Biden and marched for Breonna, never owned a slave—then what the fuck are we talking about this for? Can’t you just goto the crag without all this talk about race messing up your achromic outdoors?
This is where Critical Race Theory (CRT) can help us out. (Did you audibly sigh when reading that term? Roll your eyes? If so — this next section is for you.) Originally a legal concept, CRT is actually fairly simple. “Critical” connotes emancipation from “traditional” theory. Traditional theories are an assemblage of epistemological constructs designed to support the majority power - in America’s case - white people. Critical theory identifies social problems, asks who creates those problems, and identifies the mechanism used to identify those problems. Critical race theory, then, adds a single modifier to this equation - the ubiquity of endemic racism.
Have you ever heard someone say: “I can’t go anywhere without hearing about race, I’m trying to have dinner, why are you yelling?” Critical Race Theory has the answers. The yelling is because everything - yes, everything - is mediated by race. Racism isn’t an infection of our society - it’s literally the brick used to build the buildings. The fact that Nice White Allies didn’t build them, would prefer that they had not been built that way, and try to avoid using them doesn’t change that that’s how the buildings were made, and that’s how whiteness gets shade.
You cannot separate modern use from historical context. Systemic racism doesn’t mean “this system is full of racists, and when we get rid of them all, Obama will be reinstated and Kumbaya will be sung from all corners.” It means the systems themselves are designed to do what they are currently doing—with or without us watching.
Schools are designed to be segregated, regardless of the law.
Higher Education is designed to keep black minds from thinking critically.
Critical Race Theory highlights the notion that there are two Americas and that the awakening to the cost of one at the expense of the other must be prevented at all costs. This is why “cue the virtue signalers” fascinates. Because in this conception, the virtues being signaled are unreal, they cannot be real. If those signals were real, base reality would become unmade. America is a collection of myths, a living testament to the enduring power of slavers triumphing over free people - like The Alamo, or Thermopylae.
To topple the towers of those myths would ruin an American landscape for the white cultural majority. The high walls and gilded blinders of dominance history would be torn to shreds. The vast continent of brown bodies that previously inhabited the “pure, wild” spaces would haunt every crag. The black bodies taken to impose a manifest destiny of dominance and exploitation on those spaces would linger, always, in the corner of our consciousness.
REFERENCES
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