Thread by @IBJIYONGI

Some of you know about the Decolonising Science Reading List, which is a (slightly out of date) list of books & articles that I've read part or all of that challenge dominant narratives in and about STEM. It's relevant to the family separation discussion. medium.com/@chanda/decolo…

Part of the underlying logic of American immigration policy is that certain types of immigrants are good because of their level of education and their cultural context and other kinds of immigrants are bad. In the case of Central Americans, many of them are Indigenous.

Part of the logic of the specific internment/deterrence policy toward Central Americans is the idea that they are not bringing added value to US. First of all, fuck the idea that people are capital. Second of all, fuck the idea that Indigenous culture isn't inherently valuable.

Third of all, fuck the idea that undocumented people don't pay oodles in taxes in addition to helping to grow the economy, therefore providing added value to the US, because actually they do.

But I want to highlight the fundamental point that people with proximity to indigeneity are somehow a danger to American culture and society because of the believe that indigeneity is anti-modern and primitive. This logic applies to Africans as well as ppl of the Americas, btw.

The American establishment keeps insinuating that Central American immigrants are a cultural danger because they are culturally inferior. The reason I want to highlight this? A lot of "good liberals" believe this. You don't think you do, but you do.

Many folks believe that Africans, Indigenous Americans, &some Asians need to be "developed" so that they too can have "modern technology and science." I mention the Decolonising Science Reading List bc it contains what you need to disabuse yourself of these colonial notions.

A lot of folks believe that Europeans just happened to be "scientifically superior" when actually they were just more violent, expansionist, DISEASED, and in a position to collate technical and scientific information from around the world.

Ever read about the history of botanical gardens? They weren't just places for you to have your wedding and enjoy a neat book. They were where Europeans collected plants that they had taken from other places and studied them, often using help from indigenous knowledge.

So it's easy to yell at Trump and Republicans and people who openly support white supremacist policy but what kind of educational policies do you support? What do you know about the history of STEM? What does it teach you about indigenous cultures, including Black ones?

Does it teach you to talk about the Maya as culturally inferior, as the chair of Harvard Astro did in the pages of Nature a few years ago? Or to joke about them all being dead, as Neil de Grasse Tyson did a few years ago? Bc many of the people being interned, are in fact, Mayan.

Now is a good time to unpack your internalized colonial ideas about history, about whether Native Americans are frozen in time (it's a fucking ridiculous thought but over and over people seem to hold onto it), about whether Black people were savages until slavery civilized us

I know you're like, "I never thought Black people were savages or that slavery civilized you" but certainly many people think that Black people would have no STEM intellectual history if it weren't for Europeans, and basically that's the same idea.

Anyway, here's an example of a book that I haven't taken the time to add to the list but is highly relevant to our contemporary understanding of botany and pharmaceutical history amazon.com/Science-Coloni…

Returning to the Maya for a second: folks could probably learn a bunch from them about how the fuck to survive slavery, colonialism, fascism, civil wars with death squads, volcanoes, landslides etc. Because in the last 500 years, they have seen it all. And they are still here.

Speaking of surviving slavery, colonialism, fascism, civil wars, volcanoes, landslides, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, Happy Juneteenth, to all my Black people out there. We made it to 2018, despite them. #Juneteenth2018