Washington Post: Birds are Racist
By Daniel Greenfield
Everything is racist.
First, they came for the dogs
What to do if your dog seems racist — Quartz
Can Dogs Be Racist? | Psychology Today
Can Dogs be Racist? The Colonial Legacies of Racialized Dogs in Kenya and Zambia
Ask Amy: I think their dog is racist
And then the cats
Is ‘The Cat in the Hat’ Racist? – Education Week
Now we find out that racism is for the birds
The Racist Legacy Many Birds Carry – Washington Post
This is more in the way of statue demolitions and galaxy renamings because some birds were named by or for people who were racists. Or accused of being racists. Or were white.
Even John James Audubon’s name is fraught in a nation embroiled in a racial reckoning. Long the most recognized figure in North American birding for his detailed drawings of the continent’s species, he was also an enslaver who mocked abolitionists working to free Black people. Some of his behavior is so shameful that the 116-year-old National Audubon Society — the country’s premier bird conservation group, with 500 local chapters — hasn’t ruled out changing its name. An oriole, warbler and shearwater all share it.
Wait till they find out what Mohammed did to slaves or what Marx thought of black people. But the rules are different for birds than for Marxism or Mohammedanism.
But now critical race theory gets embedded into a completely apolitical field with the usual results.
“Conservation has been driven by white patriarchy,” said J. Drew Lanham, a Black ornithologist and professor at Clemson University in South Carolina, “this whole idea of calling something a wilderness after you move people off it or exterminate them and that you get to take ownership.”
Most of America was not populated. It was and still is a wilderness.
I don’t know exactly how Mr. Lanham’s ancestors defined areas that no one lived in. Perhaps he can tell us.
In Honolulu, ornithologist Olivia Wang is equally harsh. She regards the honorifics that birds carry with disdain.
“They are a reminder that this field that I work in was primarily developed and shaped by people not like me, who probably would have viewed me as lesser,” said Wang, an Asian American graduate student at the University of Hawaii. “They are also a reminder of how Western ornithology, and natural exploration in general, was often tied to a colonialist mind-set of conquering and exploiting and claiming ownership of things.”
Perhaps Ms. Wang can enlighten us about the decolonization and inclusion strategies of the People’s Republic of China. That’s after graduating from UC Davis which is a quarter Asian.
Tsohsin Cheng, the father of Chinese ornithology, was suppressed during Mao’s Cultural Revolution for opposing his insane campaign to kill all the sparrows.
Perhaps we can discuss that event which occurred in the 20th century under a regime backed by American leftists?
“A whole lot of Native people, in thinking about birds, don’t open a book of science. Their book of science is in the knowledge possessed by people in generations before them, the elders,” said Shepard Krech III, a professor emeritus at Brown University and author of “Spirits of the Air.”
That was true of Europeans too. And then science emerged.
But I’m glad that the new “science” is doing away with objective classification systems and pretending that oral transmission and legends are superior to research and study.
Image Credit: © Viavaltours