Uncle Tom's Garden: Color, Culture, and Racialization in Garden Plants
In: Sociological inquiry: the quarterly journal of the International Sociology Honor Society, Band 92, Heft 2, S. 466-489
ISSN: 1475-682X
The structure of our racial hierarchy depends on the power of color, particularly skin color, to signify racial difference and justify stratification. Color is an important element of culture, capable of communicating multivocal meanings. Dark colors have sets of cultural meanings like evil, magic, and night, but they are also associated with skin color and race. This article seeks to understand how material objects act as vehicles for ideas about color and race, particularly Blackness, in the absence of bodies or images of people, by examining the phenomenon of named varieties of dark‐colored plants. My data included interviews with daylily breeders and an online database of over 90,000 named daylily varieties. Systematic analysis showed that dark plants were frequently, though not exclusively, given names referencing Blackness. White or light‐colored flowers did not receive racialized names. Findings demonstrate that color carries racial connotations even in areas of activity and cultural production that appear to have little or no connection with race, human bodies, or human identities. I suggest that color plays an important and underexamined role in the process of racialization and the perpetuation of White supremacy.