Over the years, it has been brought to my attention that my decision to offer financial discounts to BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) students has not always been well received or appreciated. It is a sign of the current sociopolitical climate that some individuals perceive and feel the need to call out actions of restorative justice as infractions against their identity, and it is the responsibility of white people to elucidate these issues and discuss them openly. This article is an attempt to succinctly explain the reasons why I choose to lower financial barriers and center issues like racism, colonialism, and oppression in my work. It is my hope that if you feel a sense of injustice when you see things like BIPOC discounts for classes or safe spaces that center them, that you will take the time to read this with an open mind and an open heart.
Often people are perplexed by my summarized response to “So, what do you do for work?” Describing yourself as an educator of herbalism and ecology centered around de-colonialism and antiracism, is generally either met with an avowal of solidarity or, “What does racism have to do with plants?” As an educator on ethnoecology, it comes as no surprise to me that for many people the notion of civic interaction within something like plant work is absent. So what does racism have to do with plants? An awful lot.
Let’s start at the beginning of the historical intersection of the diaspora of white Europeans, Indigenous people of the Americas, and Africans: the “Age of Discovery.” While Christopher Columbus certainly did not “discover” the Americas, his arrival there did set off a new era of globalization that would make the world nearly unrecognizable within a very short span of time. What led Columbus to that fateful day in October when he made shore on the island of Guanahani, now known as San Salvador? The spice trade.
I think we take for granted that spice trade is the trade of plants. It was the trade of plants that sparked the Columbian Exchange and the exploration of the Americas. Columbus wound up in the Caribbean because he was seeking a new trade route to China in an effort to give Spain, at that time the wealthiest country in the world, a competitive edge in trade with the east. Columbus’ failed hypothesis of a direct route through the Pacific from the European coast to Asia set off a chain of events that would immortalize him, for better or worse, as the catalyst that brought about the modern world.
The Columbian Exchange impacted and was impacted by a nearly inconceivable number of plants. The plants that most obviously illustrate the direct effects that colonization had on the Indigenous people of Africa and the Americas are those which still today dominate the global market: coffee, cotton, sugar, timber, and tobacco. The Trans-Antlantic Slave trade did not begin with enslaved people being transported from Africa to the Americas, but rather the opposite. The Spanish enslaved the Taíno people of the Caribbean and brought them to work the cane sugar plantations of the northwest African coast. By the 17th century, the current of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade reversed, as sugarcane plantations in the Caribbean began and tobacco plantations in the Mid-Atlantic booming. The plantation model that had made the sugarcane plantations of Barbados the most profitable in the world was imported to the Carolinas, and the in the soon-to-be United States of American, the stage for the lucrative venture of the exploitation of slave-labor and the crops they worked was set.
When most people think of southern plantations, they think of cotton. But tobacco was the leading export from the Americas until the invention of the cotton gin 1793 allowed for cotton to surpass it. Without the tobacco trade, Jamestown, the first settlement of North America, would have almost assuredly failed. Without enslaved people, the tobacco industry would have failed. Without Indigenous knowledge and sacred relationship with tobacco, early colonizers may never have discovered the value of the plant and exploited it. Tobacco was given as a gift from the Taíno people to Columbus (the Arawak tribe he would later enslave is oft referred to as a “extinct,” but the Taíno still exist today and are continuing to fight for their rights, recognition, and for continuity of their culture). Without tobacco, and the people who cultivated it, both before and after they were exploited and absorbed into the capitalist ventures of “Old Stock” colonial Americans, colonization of North America would have failed. There may be some irony this, but the generosity of Indigenous people, and of plants, is not a a show of weakness, and the exploitation of that generosity is not a show of strength. The greed and exploitation that serve as the foundation of colonialism temporarily shifts the balance of power, but that state of imbalance is not sustainable. We are living in through a systemic collapse, and in the end our lack of reciprocity and respect for our human and more-than-human kin, will be our downfall.
Plants underline the surface of every aspect of our lives. The fact is that plants feed us, provide us with shelter and medicine; they are the wellspring for all cultural, social, economic—and therefore political—movements. Our ignorance of this stems from our veiled awareness of ourselves as ecological beings. The subsequent loss of accountability bleeds all over the page of our modern societies. It has made us apathetic; it has made us forget where we came from. To see the world holistically means we cannot turn a blind eye.
Many other plants had similar impacts of varying degrees on colonization, the slave trade, the global economy, and many other establishments that shaped the the middle ages into the industrial era. If we narrow our sights more specifically onto herbalism, we can see a similar pattern of exploitation. The plants of the highest ethnobotanical value–the medicine plants, the food plants—are the ones that were most heavily intertwined with the original stewards of this land. As herbalists it is important for us to recognize that the plants and practices that inform modern western herbalism, and therefore sequentially modern western medicine, came largely from Indigenous culture–not only of the Indigenous people of North America, but also of the displaced African diaspora who were brought to this continent, and with them, seeds of plants and the generations of knowledge about those plants. Attribution to these people has been largely absent in the last few centuries of herbalism, with the exception of some generalized mentions of “Indian remedies” in various white-authored literature and other tokenizations. Furthermore, both groups were forbidden and severely punished for practicing their traditional medicine ways. This is very recent history–the American Indian Religious Freedom Act was not passed until 1978. Still today there are obstacles for racialized people to access and practice their cultural traditions. And still today European descended herbalists profit from these practices and contribute to the erasure of their origins by failing to attribute their Indigenous roots or by appropriating them in ways that violate the boundaries of respectful cultural exchange.
The answer to the question of what plants and racism have to do with each other could, and have, fill the pages of many books. And within this exploration is part of the answer to why historically oppressed groups deserve equitable access to education and resources about plants. An equally important part of the answer is privilege. The narrative I hear among non-racialized people is that it is not fair to provide discounts to BIPOC people because being racialized does necessarily not equate to financial struggle. What is important to understand is that privilege cannot be constrained to a binary: it exists on a spectrum. Privilege is not inherently about race, although race indubitably affects privilege. Many people today–the majority, I would argue–are oppressed. Many people of all cultural and ethnic backgrounds are struggling to make ends meet. We are all living with a failing medical system, navigating a volatile political climate, and processing our own individual traumas. And there are many different groups of marginalized people who deal with extraneous disparity within the system. But being a racialized person in a society of institutional racism is an additional barrier that cannot be sidestepped or toppled. It is a hardship that stays with a person in every setting and every walk of life, and it exists not only in individual prejudice and overt forms of discrimination, but within the structure of our society. The notion that chattel slavery is a thing of the past, and that people need to “let it go,” does not acknowledge the mechanisms of oppression which underline that practice. Those mechanisms still exist today, and by denying and ignoring them, we serve only to enforce them.
Every hardship you may face–as a woman, as a working class citizen, as a person who had a traumatic childhood, as someone with chronic illness or disability, the list goes on–is valid. The fact that someone else has an additional, significant hardship of being a racialized person does not take away from the hardship of anyone who doesn’t. It is equally valid. Inherent in transformative justice is acknowledgement of all forms of oppression, and all expressions that oppression manifests. White privilege is the absence of a specific hardship and therefore it is invisible to anyone who has it. White people can choose to intellectually understand how issues of race affect someone, but without the lived experience, we cannot understand it completely. We can, however, offer empathy, equity, and allyship.
Equity for all is my ultimate goal. Everyone deserves access to education about the human birthright of plant-work. By offering reduced financial barriers to racialized people, I can make a small but powerful difference in people’s lives. It is a form of reparation, a nod of gratitude for the vast contributions in the world of plants and medicine, and a sign of a safe and welcoming space. BIPOC, LGBTQ, neurodivergent, disabled, or some combination of these make up over half of our student body. Within our diversity there is a thread of like-mindedness around passion for justice, a craving for relationship, an embodied understanding of the process of healing, and an openness to growth and learning. I am grateful to these students, and I am grateful for the privilege, amongst plenty of my own hardship, to be able to offer something of value to them in a way that is more accessible. The commitment to create accessibility wherever I can grants me the opportunity to be a lifelong student of the people, as well.
Plant-work is community work. We are a community, living in a shared ecosystem. In order to change the narrative we must first recognize it for what it is. We have to cultivate spaces of respect, of mutuality, and sovereignty, and to do this we must cultivate ourselves. To care for others is to be a part of the resistance of oppression, and to do this benefits everyone.
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