University of Michigan (UMich) botanists previously published a document that states that it might be racist to label plants with their official Latin titles.
The warning comes in a 2022 “Strategic Plan” published by UMich’s Matthaei Botanical Gardens and Nichols Arboretum, The New York Times reported Wednesday.
Latin names are used for plants next to their common English names to help more specifically “describe a specific type of plant” and to “avert confusion caused by the often contradictory and multiple common names an individual [plant] may have.”
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UMich’s botanists’ “Strategic Plan,” however, asks: “[W]hen botanical gardens and arboreta display Latin [names], English ‘common name,’ and perhaps a brief scientific description, what other ways of knowing are not only missing but actively erased?”
The question links to an article about “potentially problematic” names in “public gardens,” which states that Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish biologist who invented the Latin plant classification system, had “laid the foundation for scientific racism.”
Linnaeus’s system “thrust upon the world a Eurocentric standard that purposefully lacked space for contributions from anyone outside the institutions dominated by European men,” and “glorif[ied] the colonizers observing plants at that time – many of whom abused their power and contributed to entire economies built on oppression and the pillaging of land,” the article asserts.
UMich’s document alleges that “botanical gardens and arboreta are deeply enmeshed within interlocking systems of domination” and use “linguistic and representational practices that are, generally, complicit in the continued erasure of non-dominant relationships to ‘nature.’”
The report’s section on “Equity, Justice + Biocultural Diversity” contains several goals, including “Catalyzing Equity and Justice through Biocultural Diversity and Polycentrism,” “Pursuing Social and Ecological Resilience for a Planet Under Threat,” and “Propelling Organizational Culture toward Equity, Efficiency, and Impact.”
The New York Times also reported on Wednesday about UMich’s spending almost $250 million on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives and programs in the last eight years, but noted that the school’s efforts have been counterproductive and created increased tensions on campus.
UMich also spent roughly $100,000 to host a “DEI Summit” which featured, among other things, almost $2,000 being spent on a mobile espresso cart. The Summit, which was titled “Truth Telling: The Kinship of Critical Race Theory and Hip-Hop,” featured “a roundtable discussion with hip-hop artists and critical race theory experts.”
Campus Reform has contacted the University of Michigan for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.
This article was written by Patrick McDonald and originally published at campusreform.org
