Subtle Racism in My Local Gardening Group. Not Shocking.

I removed myself from a large local gardening group yesterday. It was a nice group full of seemingly pleasant people and lots of gardening information and pictures, but then as usually happens, someone (a white person) posted some nonsense and things got really depressing. A member of the group made a post asking everyone to flood Facebook with photos of flowers in order to cover up all the current “negativity.”

Hmmm. I knew exactly what this was.

Keep in mind that I live in Long Island, NY, which is a part of NY that is about 75% white and 10% Black, so it would be an understatement to say that there is bias and covert/overt racism in this area. I sometimes wonder if the white people in these predominantly white gardening groups are even aware of their racial bias since it is so deeply ingrained.

So I responded asking, “what negativity are we trying to cover up with flowers?” The first response was hostile. A white woman responded with, “yours?”

I just wanted someone to say it.

I knew this post was really saying “hey everybody, I really hate hearing about all this Black Lives Matters stuff and protests and police being punished, so lets flood Facebook with pictures of flowers instead.” How do I know? Because the last several months have been filled with negativity as the pandemic hit and many people died or lost loved ones; every day there was speculation about the economy and people worried about losing their jobs permanently; there were looming food shortages; we suddenly found ourselves having to stand on long lines everywhere we went; we learned that children can, in fact, develop serious complications from Covid19; and so many other horrible things happened, and not ONCE did this person or anyone else in the group ever post a request to flood Facebook with flowers. It wasn’t until yesterday, after two solid weeks of protesting George Floyd’s murder along with BLM at every turn and a recent police brutality incident against an elderly man in Buffalo, that this person suddenly felt the need to escape the stress of all this “negativity.”

And then a string of flowers were posted.

I guess everyone else was feeling stressed by the “negativity” too. I had brief exchanges with other members who had “no idea” what I was talking about and one man told me to put away my bullhorn because people don’t care to discuss politics in their safe space. And yet, the original poster had brought the politics into the group by creating this post to begin with. It’s racism done in such a subtle way that white people know exactly what is meant by it but they pretend they don’t and then act offended at the insinuation that they may be racist.

And then the admin sent me a private message warning me that I wasn’t allowed to post long “political rants” in his group because it had nothing to do with gardening, and also people posting pictures of flowers was not racist. He told me that he didn’t blame me for not knowing the rules since he hadn’t posted them clearly. I told him not to worry because I was leaving the group anyway since I couldn’t tolerate this kind of thing. So I quit this group which I was fairly active in and which gave me and my gardening blog a good amount of exposure (over 5000 pairs of eyes!), and I was sad about that. But I was also happy about not having to tip toe around bullsh*t. I have seen this subtle racism/bias in other local groups unrelated to gardening, and anytime I have called it out, I have always been in the wrong according to the admins and other group members. The other day I watched a video by Sonya Renee Taylor where she talked about the importance of white people talking to other white people about white supremacy and the “sickness that is whiteness” instead of focusing only on Black people. I was really inspired by that and I think this is a great idea face to face, but online it’s another story since there are so many gatekeepers and censors, and people willing to look the other way while others do tiny things each day to keep racism alive. How do you get through this white wall present in so many online groups?

Later on, I searched for the post to show it to my husband, since we had been talking about it, and I noticed that my comments had been removed. The admin of the group had just posted his new rules and people praised him for keeping the group “safe.” He thanked them and commented that they probably didn’t know what provoked this sudden posting of the rules because he had “dealt with it promptly.” Thank God he saved them from having to read anything political, especially anything related to white supremacy and racism!

Gardening doesn’t exist in a vacuum, nothing does. If we are in a time of protest and upheaval, I’m not going to pretend that it’s not happening, especially if someone is trying to cover it up instead of addressing the issues. We need to do better, but sadly, most of the people in that and other local Long Island groups will probably never even try. They will just continue to signal to one another until the coast is clear and then they’ll be back to white supremacist business as usual. The future looks bleak and I don’t know how Black people deal with this every day.