My friend is a bird watcher and expressed that whenever he would go birding at Central Park he was intentional about keeping his binoculars visible bc he was aware what ppl would think of a Black man in the bushes. So yea, celebrating Mr. Cooper’s ‘innocence’ means nothing at all
There’s no way to squeeze Black people engaging with nature/environmental things into the economy of sympathy that white people have concoted around dogs, parks, and other facets of the nonhuman world. They dont see us human and their love for these things is based in colonialism
I am a Blaqenvironmentalist and have been profiled while on water/doing ‘nature’ work before. One time at the Botanical Garden a white woman tried to accuse me of stealing the flowers to put in my hair as a way to comment on my floral fashion choices. It happens to us alot.
There is no way that emphasizing our ‘green’ habits as Black folk can save us from the viciousness of those who want to see us in red (covered in blood). We are nothing but ‘nigg*rs’ to such folk and so our response should be one of Black Radical Ecology not sympathy olympics.
Black Radical Ecology would remark on the way ‘nature’ and nonhumans are weaponized to uphold a certain genre of being human (the white colonial one). From here we’d see that the way relations to the environment are structured is so racist that Black ppl cant participate therein
We cannot just be birders or water protectors or florists or even dog lovers to them because they are adamant about suppressing our ecogeny and imposing their own, and thus their material interests, onto us and the earth. So yeah they will criminalize us, to maintain their Hold.
White settlers are constitutionally summoned to deputize themselves in the name of colonial ecogeny, in helping the pigs keep capitalist property relations intact for their own benefit. Miss Kkkooper was doin her racist job and thas where the convo should stay, and nothing else.
She should be understood in the same light as the anti-immigrant forces touting xenophobia in the name of climate policy. Or even those pushing population control for green reasons. Thas where this snitching goes back to. Green Jim Crowism, to aid in green imperialism. Check that
Leave convos of his profession out of it because at the end of the day trying to recast him in the image of white ‘green’ humanism will not undo the perceptions which have reinforced and justified the types of violence that women KNEW she is supposed to enact. It does nothing
Black people deserve to live. And if highlighting a certain idea of ‘greenness’/‘environmentalism’ is supposed to be the register of deservingness... Then in a world where our ecogeny is always being criminalized and suppressed, we are accepting that we must always then die.
I am not with that. Cuz mainstream ecology ain’t even saving the planet, or dogs, rivers, flowers from Colonizers and real/imagined participation therein by Cooper or myself or my friend or anyone else damn sure ain’t saving us from Colonizers’ either. So who is it for?
What type of precedent would ‘he’s green so dont be antiblack’ imply in a moment in time when whether we are environmental or not, our place in and relations to this planet are being criminalized, targeted, erased, assailed, etc? Greening respectability is foolish nonsense
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