This month, I became inducted into a club that never would have had me as a member; I became a fellow of the Linnean Society. The world’s oldest active biological society, founded in 1788 for the production of natural history by gentlemen in the metropole, for “armchair naturalists and collectors” as art historian Sria Chatterjee aptly describes them. It was established to exclude everything I represent as a Black woman. It is not lost on me that the taxonomy, invented by Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus and adopted in Europe, is an extension of race as a colonial sorting tool of empire, as Ann Laura Stoler puts it.42 The taxonomy of race attempted to order and enclose that which could not be bounded, Black life...
