Whose fault is this?

Noted wife beater, crack head, and geologist George Floyd, moments before being shot dead at the face of the La Herradura Formation

In the never ending, ever expanding race for contemporary relevance, geologists have discovered that their fieldwork model is racist because it involves the employment of rock hammers. You think I’m kidding, don’t you? Ha!

Racism thrives in geoscience.. Geoscience organizations function alongside the same racist ideologies and practices shaping society. In North America, the historical legacy of racism—for example: the enslavement of Black people, forced migration of Indigenous peoples, the internment of Japanese Americans, and detainment of Latinx, immigrant children—is intertwined with our systems of power. The imbalance of power dictates who has access to resources like inherited wealth, clean water, adequate nutrition, healthcare, effective education, and who is policed, imprisoned, and killed….

[blahblahblah ….]

Access

Access implies that individuals can obtain the resources they need to safely pursue their science endeavors; regardless of location, instrumentation, site accessibility, and their identity. Historically, access has been limited to mostly able-bodied, white, cisgender, heterosexual men. As the geosciences strive to be more accessible, the community must recognize that BIPOC and other marginalized geoscientists are not always safe in geoscience spaces. For example, holding objects (e.g., a rock hammer) has been viewed as “suspicious” and, continues to be, used as a reason to call the police on Black people, which can lead to the death of Black individuals, entirely because of racial profiling and an unjustified fear of Black people

(I saw this story last week and, sighing, decided not to disturb readers with yet another example of our country’s free-fall into insanity, but FWIW’s Mining Correspondent brought this commentary by Taki to our attention, and I figured what the hell, the cat’s out of the bag.)