Fault lines Can rocks be racist?

Kathryn Yusoff's latest book sparked a culture war. In it, she suggests white supremacy informed the founding of geology. Both she and other experts argue those legacies persist today

- Miriam Frankel

It was at the London Library at St James's Square, surrounded by the shiny offices of geological extraction companies including BP and Rio Tinto, that Kathryn Yusoff discovered a deep link between geology and racism. It was 2017, and the professor of inhuman geography from Queen Mary University of London was doing research for a book about the history of geology. Little did she know that her niche, archival discoveries, which led to a 600-page tome on race and geoscience seven years later, would put her on the very fault line of a culture war.

The academic book, called Geologic Life, was published in 2024. It soon attracted the attention of the conservative higher education publication the College Fix, which said that Yusoff's writing "suggests even rocks have been corrupted in white supremacists' schemes". Aminor eruption followed, with articles in rightwing newspapers, featuring quotes such as "geology is no more racist than fish'n'chips". "The articles were grossly inaccurate and deliberately mischaracterised the book in inflammatory and abusive language," said Yusoff.

We tend to think of biology, and the theory of evolution in particular, as the scientific inspiration for debunked racist ideas, such as eugenics. But geology is older than biology.

"Charles Darwin actually studied geology, Yusoff explained. "Geology was the discipline in which race was historically made, as both a set of ideas and a material transformation of the Earth that was racialised." Geology was intimately linked to colonialism, developing rapidly from the 17th to the 19th centuries.

Yusoff said its rise was propelled by an earthquake in 1755 that practically destroyed the city of Lisbon, a centre of the slave trade. The event created a "geotrauma"-geological wounds, both literal and metaphorical, inflicted on the Earth for Europeans, she said. She argues the shock of the Lisbon earthquake started to generate enlightened thought.