Gardening is Racist! By John Steele
Here is the latest thing to be slammed as “racist,” gardening. What I hope is that when the collapse comes, these academics have to be faced with scratching out an existence, but it will not be gardening, which will be too technical for them, and racist. Maybe searching for rusty tins of baked beans in the ruins would suit them.
“The British pastime of gardening is rooted in “racial injustice”, a professor who has been active in a BLM-style iconoclastic push in the National Trust has claimed.
In a book entitled the Green Unpleasant Land, the Professor of Post-Colonial Literature at the University of Leicester, Corinne Fowler, pronounced that the British “countryside is a terrain of inequalities”.
As a result of this, the left-wing professor declared that “it should not surprise us that it should be seen as a place of particular hostility to those who are seen as not to belong, principally black and Asian Britons,” the Daily Mail reported on Saturday.
Professor Fowler argued that because many British estates were financed in part from colonialism and slavery, “knowledge about gardens and plants, in particular botany, has had deep colonial resonances.”
“The scientific categorisation of plants has at times engaged in the same hierarchies of “race” that justified empire and slave and slavery,” she said adding that “inevitably, then, gardens are matters of class and privilege.”
In her book, the title of which is an inversion of British poet William Blake’s description of the British countryside as “green and pleasant land”, Fowler said that “Rural Britain” is “rarely peaceful”.
“The elderliness of the maids is incongruous with the many itinerant female East Europeans who, before Brexit, picked the fruit and vegetables that grace our tables,” she wrote.
Professor Fowler does admit in her book that she is guilty of benefitting from the British Empire, as her own family had connections to slavery on sugar plantations in the Caribbean.
“I make no claim to neutrality… Our relatives either profited from empire, or were impoverished by it,” she wrote.
There has never been a culture that has allowed its chattering class to slam its foundations, while being paid to do so. It makes me so angry I want to hit a gum tree, but that wold be plant abuse.
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