Kamala Harris and the problem with racist trees

I was intrigued to learn that Kamala Harris, the Vice President of the US, is worried about racist trees. I have always held trees in the deepest suspicion: it is their long-abiding silences which worry me. As we know from Black Lives Matter, ‘Silence is violence’ — and trees, for literally aeons, have been conspicuously silent on the matter of white privilege and racism. To follow this logic, then, trees are inherently violent. Nasty, leafy bastards.

This certainly seems to be what Ms Harris thinks. During a visit to Nasa, instead of asking those space boys how to reverse park a shuttle, she instead became obsessed with keeping an eye on trees. Referring to a satellite she was being told about she said: ‘Can you measure trees — part of that data that you are referring to, [and it’s an issue of] EJ, environmental justice — that you can also track by race their averages in terms of the number of trees in the neighbourhoods where people live?’

In other words she had identified trees as being racist. Her point was that white people get to live in places where there are more trees than there are in predominantly black neighbourhoods. I fear that this is true and it seems likely to me that the trees, being racist, move out of certain areas when they see black folks moving in. They up their roots and skedaddle. It is the arboreal equivalent of white flight. Any good liberal would recognise that the only answer to this is Affirmative Deforestation (AD) and the ‘bussing’ of trees into areas where more black folks live. Either that or I suppose bus the black people into areas where there are lots of trees. I would prefer the former option because it would teach those racist trees a valuable lesson.