Surfing the web recently and found some more clickbait. The Audubon Society will change its name because their namesake was, brace yourself, a racist, an enslaver and anti-abolitionist. I guess that would put him on a par with Ulysses S. Grant. https://www.washingtonian.com/2021/10/25/audubon-naturalist-society-will-change-its-name-citing-racist-namesake/ Well, winds up it isn’t the Audubon Society but the Audubon Naturalist Society. Whatever that is. Well, supposedly it is a “leading environmental organization”. In Washington DC. Do they even have any wildlife in Washington DC? Apparently more of a social justice organization than a conservation group despite that “leading” position. “As we began to dig into serving all people in the DC region, we also started to get a fair amount of publicity about who Audubon was—an enslaver of Black people, a published white supremacist. He just didn’t seem like a suitable namesake for us.” Are they “serving” people or environmentalism? Apparently, the birds and wildlife in that wild untamed frontier called Washington DC need a more diverse representation in those who support the environmentalism efforts there. “In the past decade, the nonprofit has updated its strategic plan to include a focus on inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility for the first time in over a century. The group also created two annual conferences to highlight environmentalists of color, Taking Nature Black and Naturally Latinos.” What this amounts to is virtue signaling without regards to the fact that, yes, wait for it, John James Audubon was a “person of color”.
Audubon
was one of history’s great naturalist and ornithologists, cataloging tens of
thousands of species of fowl and producing beautiful paintings showing the
birds’ amazing plumage for millions of naturalists and bird watchers who might
otherwise never see these creatures. He
also was the son of a Haitian Creole.
That would make Audubon as black as the 44th President of the United
States. But apparently, because he owned
a number of slaves 200 years ago, he is now condemned as an obvious
racist. Not one of the foremost scientists/naturalists
of his era. Simply a “confused
despicable racist birder”.
(https://www.audubon.org/magazine/spring-2021/what-do-we-do-about-john-james-audubon) I thought that was impossible but it opens
up the entire plausibility of all the black plantation slave owners and black
Confederate soldiers being actual racists against…themselves. Apparently, the actual Audubon Society felt
they needed to provide a soapbox for this “Black American ornithologist” to
write a 4641-word diatribe on his feelings about the cruel racist ornithologist
dead for 160 years. I wonder if the
“Black American ornithologist” cashed his check from the Audubon (The Racist)
Society for this post (and his other contributions to the Audubon (The Racist)
Society)? He and the Society apparently
believe his woke Critical Race Theory (CRT) opinion piece “belongs” on the
Audubon Society website. Yes, “The
litany of North American bird noticers/naturalists/conservationists have all
belonged to the same storied club—Wilson, Bartram, Grinnell, Roosevelt,
Pinchot, Thoreau, Muir, Darling, Leopold, Peterson, etcetera ad infinitum. It
is a pantheon that speaks to the white patriarchy that drives nature study in
the Western world. In my life as a
conservation professional, I’ve been steeped in this white history, told from a
white perspective. And I’ve seen firsthand how the organizations that grew from
this foundation are likewise predominantly white, with a homogenized point of
view. I was a board member of many, including the National Audubon Society
(but) resigned in 2020 because the essential work of diversity and inclusion
remained siloed from priorities like climate change, habitat conservation, and
community science...of connecting conservation and culture. Yes, environmentalism
and conservation are inarguably worthy causes. But without consideration for
human injustices, they are wildly unbalanced.”
I guess all these white men are condemned for their white supremacy
despite studying and not simply eating the birds. Of course, we already know Teddy Roosevelt
was a flaming racist particularly against the American indigenous Indians and
not deserving of credit for being “one of the most powerful voices in the
history of American conservation…(using) his (Presidential) authority to
establish 150 national forests, 51 federal bird reserves, four national game
preserves, five national parks and 18 national monuments on over 230 million
acres of public land.”
(https://www.doi.gov/blog/conservation-legacy-theodore-roosevelt)
“Audubon)
was really just good at “passing”—being a Black man of passable whiteness such
that he was able to travel around 1800s America without pause or fear (with) an
aquiline nose and sun-flushed face. Audubon was a master at marketing his own
image and by all accounts sought to distance himself from any ideas about his
background that would taint his privileged skin.” As that bile rises in your throat, don’t
forget that blacks can’t be called racist for categorizing whites (or
apparently mulattos) based on racial features.
Nor apparently for a superficial racial identification of the black
Audubon. So, this “Audubon columnist”
promotes George Washington Carver as a more worthy hero, former slave and
scientist himself. But, Carver had an
interracial affair and “travelled the south to promote racial harmony”
(https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/george-washington-carver) which
sounds like the makings of another racist.
This CRT garbage does about as much to promote “racial harmony” as the
Marxist BLM militant agenda and affirmative/preferential actions. If you can stomach reading all 4641 words,
this is a great example of how CRT can contaminate and attempts to indoctrinate
even in the sciences and mathematics. Oh
yes, “Critical Race Theory in Mathematics Education (Julius Davis, Christopher
C. Jett) brings together scholarship that uses critical race theory (CRT) to
provide a comprehensive understanding of race, racism, social justice, and
experiential knowledge of African Americans’ mathematics education.” How valuable to the betterment of our nation
that these group identity politics and (social) sciences can help identify and
slander a 19th-century oppressive ornithologist.
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