The garden with two soils

We often imagine racism as a hateful act committed by an ill-intentioned person. In 2000, in the American Journal of Public Health, public health researcher Camara Phyllis Jones proposed seeing it on three levels: institutionalized, personally mediated and internalized.

To explain it, she tells a fable. A gardener has two flower boxes. She sows the red seeds in rich, fertile soil, and the pink seeds in poor, rocky soil. The pink flowers grow less well; the gardener, who doesn't like their look, pulls them out before they even go to seed. And in the end, the pink flowers themselves refuse pink pollen: they prefer red.

The three levels are all there. The unequal soil is institutionalized racism: Jones describes it as having become the norm, sometimes written into law, often passed on as inherited disadvantage. The pulled-out flowers are racism between people. The refused pollen is internalized racism, when we come to believe what is said about us.

For Jones, the fable helps us think about where to intervene. We can comfort each pulled-out flower, and we must. But as long as we don't change the soil, the garden reproduces the same gaps. Ubuntu reminds us that the garden is one: when one part is impoverished, the whole garden blooms less.