Just when I thought the SJW movement couldn’t get any whacked, someone comes along to prove that I’m wrong. Soooo wrong!

And you damn white men,you destroy everything!!! /s

THE RACIST LANGUAGE OF SPACE EXPLORATION

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Earning money in space is an exciting prospect for a far-right, pro-business, anti-regulation politician like Cruz, and he explicitly associated it with European countries having colonized the Americas. Starting in the late 1400s, Great Britain, Spain, and Portugal funded missions to the Americas in order to gather natural resources that would power up their economies. By stealing the land that made this resource extraction possible, colonizers used genocide, enslavement, biological weaponry, and warfare and that resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of indigenous people living in the “New World.” The concept of race, and therefore racism, was invented as a way of justifying their violence and legitimizing a hierarchy of race-divided labor.

Based off of what we know right now, the Moon and Mars are devoid of life, so this colonizing language is not actually putting other beings at risk. But, there is the risk that the same racist mythology used to justify violence and inequality on earth — such as the use of frontier, “cowboy” mythology to condone and promote the murder and displacement of indigenous people in the American West — will be used to justify missions to space. In a future where humans potentially do live on non-earth planets, that same racist mythology would carry through to who is allowed to exist on, and benefit from, extraterrestrial spaces.

On Earth, and in the United States specifically, the ideal of a merit-based society has been used to justify race-blind hiring policies that fail to account for, say, the implicit bias against black or Asian-sounding names, or the legacy of segregation, which continues to make children of color more vulnerable to attending underfunded schools. Narratives of “law and order” have also been used to justify racial profiling and harsher prison sentences for people of color than for white people who commit the same crimes. Not nearly enough work has been done here on Earth to ensure that these structural inequalities wouldn’t carry through.

“Those narratives do carry specific implications about how people living on other worlds might be structured,” Lucianne Walkowicz, the current Chair of Astrobiology at the Library of Congress, told The Outline. Walkowicz organized the Decolonizing Mars Conference that took place on June 27 as well as a public follow-up event planned for September, to discuss how colonial language is shaping our potential future in space. “Space is not just built for nothing, it’s built for people.”

When we think about humanity’s potential to exist on other planets, it’s important to consider who won’t have access to space, in part due to a total lack of concern over these issues by people who are able to access it. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos intends to make space a place for the rich to use for adventure leisure, and SpaceX/Tesla founder Elon Musk has proposed that a Martian “colony” can save a selection of humanity from the collapse of civilization in some World War III scenario. Granted, right now, these are just words from billionaires who want to excite the public about their business ventures. But they suggest that if the economically and socially vulnerable are priced out of a life-saving journey from Earth, it is a justifiable loss.

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In his speech, Kennedy continues that men like Bradford teach us that “man, in his quest for knowledge and progress, is determined and cannot be deterred.” However, if “man” is a stand-in for “white colonizers,” “knowledge and progress” unabashedly brushes over the lives of indigenous persons and people of color that were lost in their quest to “explore.” It’s a profusely sanitized version of reality.

https://theoutline.com/post/5809/the-racist-language-of-space-exploratio...

Yeah, it’s governments and corporations that are funding space travel. And of course it’s for nefarious reasons so I guess we should either end all space exploration OR start a gofundme and build our own space conveyance.

Poor Marty doesn’t know what he’s in for!!