This weekend I read about an anti-abortion billboard campaign in Atlanta, Georgia that is stirring up controversy. The black and white billboards state: “Black children are an endangered species,” referring provocatively to the fact that abortion rates amongst African Americans are three times as that of white women, according to 2006 statistics from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
It was too much of a non-coincidence that I saw this today, considering the new insight I gained in conversation with a friend about ‘racial species’. So it is time to stir up some controversy of my own. Although I was not the first to publish references to a ‘race’ as a ‘species’, it is clear the cat is out the bag, so I am going to run with it.
In the Bahamas, debate is now hot over the invasive alien lionfish species, which is wreaking havoc on the natural marine environment. Previously, Casuarina trees were the main target of environmentalists, agitated over the loss of biodiversity as a result of the invasion from these non-native species.
My question is: what is the most pervasive invasive alien species on the African continent, and globally, where all indigenous people once lived abundantly?
Just to help the debate, I will borrow this definition from the Bahamas Reef Environment Educational Foundation (BREEF): “An invasive alien species is any organism that becomes established in a new environment, and then spreads in ways that is destructive to native ecosystems, human health, and ultimately human welfare.” Common words associated with invasive alien species are: competing, harming, causing damage, disrupting, and changing.
So, have you guessed yet? Think back to seventeenth century Africa. Fast forward 500 years. Still don’t know? Move to the front of the class if you guessed white people, which includes specifically Western/European ideals on everything from spirituality, community, justice, life and death, the environment, creation, and so much more. How much better off would the formerly enslaved and colonised world be if it treated white people like an invasive alien species, which by established definitions, they are? Just food for thought.