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…

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Guardian Weekly (Digital) - 1 Issue, 21 March 2025

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