Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) declared on Sunday that the Green New Deal will reverse purported “colonial” attitudes associated with growing vegetables in community gardens.
“What I love too is growing plants that are culturally familiar to the community. It’s so important,” the 29-year-old freshman congresswoman said while filming herself strolling through a community garden in the Bronx.
“That’s really how you do it right,” the self-described Democratic- socialist continued in a follow-up video. That is such a core component of the Green New Deal is having all of these projects make sense in a cultural context, and it’s an area that we get the most pushback on because people say, ‘Why do you need to do that? That’s too hard.’”
Ocasio-Cortez then said that growing cauliflower in community gardens represents a “colonial approach,” turning off people of color from embracing environmentalism.
“But when you really think about it — when someone says that it’s ‘too hard’ to do a green space that grows Yucca instead of, I don’t know, cauliflower or something — what you’re doing is that you’re taking a colonial approach to environmentalism, and that is why a lot of communities of color get resistant to certain environmentalist movements because they come with the colonial lens on them,” she argued. – READ MORE