When Banu Subramaniam thinks about whether plants should be renamed so as not to honour white supremacist colonialists – Cecil Rhodes, for example, is commemorated in the names of 126 plant species – she contrasts it with how, for so many years in our patriarchal system, women were expected to change theirs. “That wasn’t considered complicated… and yet those in power give any number of reasons why this is,” says the professor of women’s and gender studies at Wellesley College, outside Boston, Massachusetts.
The pressure on academics is always to publish, publish. But when there are more grievance studies professors than there are grievances that means pushing ever further into ludicrousness to find something to complain about.
That there’s something called Forsythia Rhodia and that name must be changed is, well, it’s actually a pretty trivial complaint, isn’t it? But the pressure to publish, the gig that must be found…..
Indeed!
’Colonialism and colonial logic remains “sedimented at every level”, argues Subramaniam, who also looks at what a more widespread and serious effort to “decolonise” might look like, even if such a project is never-ending.’
*wobbles head*, shits pavement.
Also the problem with packing the universities with third-worlders. And whenever one encounters a topic like this there’s usually someone with an unpronounceable name screaching at the back of it. (See Guardian) They’re grifters by nature. Best kept in the fields doing stoop labour & fed a bowl of rice every couple of days.
Wikipedia tells me there are 380,000+ plant species and yet the names of 126 species are a searing indictment of modern society? FFS.
“That there’s something called Forsythia Rhodia and that name must be changed ”
Has someone outed Brucie as a paedo or something?
“That there’s something called Forsythia Rhodia and that name must be changed ”
Indeedings, sahib. It should be called Forsythia Cowpissramawanamanagangrapedysentry.
Let them publish all they wish but please without the cultural appropriation of doing it in English.
Stick to Tamil, Ms சுப்பிரமணியம்
The more positive thing would be to discover your own species new to science (yes science not the entirety of homanidy). Was it a Bill Bryson or possibly QI factoid that there’s a high likelihood of beetles in your back garden that haven’t been described yet? So off you go and good luck, just remember under your proposed new convention, any new owners of that plot likely change it to dunnamin without having to do any of the grubbing about.
Just a thought. What was Rhodesia like before it was Rhodesia and did it get better after it was rebranded as Zimbabwe? If the answer is what I think it might be, what is the reasoning behind labelling Rhodes as a bad guy?
Stony – whites are not hated for their failures, but for their achievements.
It’s very embarrassing to the rest of the world.
Before Rhodes? Weren’t the Matabele murdering the Shona or was it vice versa?
Yes!! To the best of my knowledge PiP.
I understand that the Shona pollies still have trouble getting Matabele votes.
Before Rhodes? Weren’t the Matabele murdering the Shona or was it vice versa?
I think it was Matabele murdering Shona before Rhodes and then vice versa after.
This is mere child’s play compared to the black grievance industry in the US. Every paper published by the wokeist academic types has glaring and grievous copying, plagiarizing and lying because the material is so thin that only by endlessly regurgitating the same nonsense can these people get ahead in the academy (such as it is).
Oh noes! What can I call my rhododendrons now?
blackodendrons Chris???
(Bit late to the party but here goes.)
@Chris
Our local council has just spent a fortune grubbing up all the rhododendrons in the area because “they are a foreign species”.
Rhodos are an invasive foreign species and need to be controlled outside the garden. The fact that they were introduced in the 18th century (though it was the Victorians who really went big on them) doesn’t change that.
Strange how plants, insects and small furry mammals can be invasive species but when it comes to….well, never mind.