The Myth of Natural Phenomena

11 min readJul 8, 2021

A white man in a scientist coat and gloves holds up a sample of a plant. Text says “The myth of natural phenomenon: a critique of the way we’ve been conditioned to ignore background phenomenon”

Many, many years ago, when I was a very young activist, I tried to go to school for mechanical engineering. Both unfortunately and fortunately, life happened and I developed a complex illness that stopped my formal education. Now that I am finally healing, I am preparing to start studying African and Indigenous Quantum Physics with a focus on Time and perception, and it’s impact on our liberation efforts and intracommunal relationships in the fall. I am very excited.

In typical Aries fashion, I have started reading the work of Indigenous Physicists and Philosophers, starting with “EINSTEIN, SACRED SCIENCE, AND QUANTUM LEAPS, A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF WESTERN SCIENCE, NATIVE SCIENCE AND QUANTUM PHYSICS PARADIGM” by Elizabeth Ferguson. One of the most interesting things she touched on (even though she says western when I know she means white) is how white people created a very compartmentalized view of the world, and developed Newtonian science to not only support that view, but to make the goals and desires of whiteness the natural and expected course of human development. This is a deep simplification, but it explains some of the initial resistance to Quantum Physics, which more closely aligns with the global Indigenous way of relating to the world than the Newtonian scientific paradigm does. In honor of that and the fact that it is earth day, I want to tease out a theory I have been playing with since going to California to access healthcare.

Indigenous scientists understand that everything happens in a symbiotic relationship with everything else, while white/”western” scientists are of the belief that phenomena are uninfluenced by the world around them until and unless they are acted upon in a clear “cause and effect” relationship. This brings to mind the famous thought experiment of Schrodinger’s Cat, developed to highlight how Schrodinger felt people were misinterpreting quantum physics. This thought experiment was meant to disprove the idea of some physicists (who began to unknowingly align with global Indigenous Scientific paradigms) when they claimed that a particle collapsed from “quantum superposition” is influenced by being viewed by an observer. Later, the observer effect was validated, but at the time Schrodinger and many white scientists wanted to believe in a linear, cause and effect world that did not allow for the absurdity quantum physics necessitates.

A simple gif that details the famous cat experiment. The cat is placed in a box with radioactive material. The box dissolves into two boxes with a clock showing time passing above the boxes. In the first box, the cat dies, but in the other the cat is alive. The gif shows a 50/50 chance of either outcome happening. The boxes merge back into one, and a question mark appears before the box turns into one living and one dead cat.

I brought up the thought experiment because I was always interested how long the cat would theoretically be kept in the box, even though this experiment was never actually realized. In Schrodinger’s mind, he creates a system where the cat has a 50/50 chance of living or dying. In actuality, even if the box is never opened by an observer, over time the cat’s death becomes more and more likely as the initial radioactive material becomes more and more likely to decay. In his mind, he created an experiment devoid of outside influence, but in actuality he manipulated “background systems” to create a specific outcome, and theorized on the likelihood of when the designed outcome would come to be. We treat this thought experiment as if the cat dying or not dying is equally probable, but that’s not the case.

The cat was always meant to die, it was just a matter of when.

Many Quantum Physicists, as they get deeper into the science of Quantum Physics, start to try and wrap their minds around what the white paradigm dissolving science of quantum physics means about their reality. Surprise! Bitch me too. As many of you may know, I have been very, very sick for many years. I went to California so that a fellow scientist friend and I could find a solution within an indigenous healing modality that would save my life. Thankfully, we were successful, but we also experienced an uptick in white terrorism that made my recovery touch and go at best. As I began to theorize about why the system of whiteness had such an impact on my healing, I began to think more intentionally and critically about the specific ways the system of whiteness was at fault for my illness to begin with, and it’s impact at every critical turn in my recovery.

In my specific case, my health issues started due to a failed late term pregnancy that was unbeknownst to me, incredibly high risk. I worked an exploitative (minimum wage) job, at a company that decided not to give us healthcare. Thus, I never got medical care during my pregnancy, and had to go to the ER to get support when my pregnancy ended. Due to the racism of the medical professionals I saw, as well as the intentionally underfunded and understaffed ER, I never got an incredibly medically necessary guarantee that all of the pregnancy was removed from my body. Instead, I returned to my exploitative job, where I was not allowed medical or parental leave, and had to sideline my grief in order to ensure my basic needs were met. Later, after experiencing domestic violence and needing to move cross country with no savings, I joined a job placement program that exploited poor, youth of color as a source of cheap labor for tech companies. After being hired by one of those tech companies, I was fired (in a right to work state) due to my increasingly worsening health.

Left again with no income or healthcare, I DIY’d my care until I got married, and had good enough insurance to learn that the placenta left in me by the doctors several years ago was the cause of my health issues, and that those health issues were worsened when I was tear gassed protesting the Klan in Atlanta. Thankfully, the placenta dislodged at home, leaving me to deal with the concealed hemorrhage underneath it, which the white doctors I saw refused to do anything about. It wasn’t until I found a Black doctor and a Black Oncologist that I was able to make any real, quantifiable headway in my care. And it was only after I connected with my Black friend that I could create a plan to get me all the way back to health.

All of these incidents, lack of healthcare, lack of concerned doctors, lack of financial stability, a government that protects the Klan, and many others built upon each other and almost took my life. In fact, our research showed that even if the doctors had listened to me and provided medical care to me after my initial failed pregnancy, I likely still would have died on the table like many Black pregnant people before me from that concealed hemorrhage. To wrap my mind around the reality of my experience, I began to think more of Schrodinger’s hypothetical cat, plucked out of it’s natural environment and placed in a new environment that would kill them, eventually. They just aren’t sure when. The cat’s environment was only manipulated hypothetically, while Black people’s environments, and that of colonized people more broadly, are manipulated intentionally. Where the cat’s death is hypothetical, ours are designed to bring the most benefit to the state and whiteness in general.

When the exploitive company I worked for decided to hire predominately Black and Latino people for the jobs they paid low wages, denied healthcare to, and overworked, it made them a ton of money. They used that money to ensure the people who received jobs with benefits and a living wage were predominately white.
The ER I went to was owned by a white company, with predominantly white people on the board of directors and in finance. They chose to advocate against universal healthcare, benefits for their predominantly Black and POC nurses and CNAs, and found ways to keep their costs high and care low. They also hired predominately white doctors, and refused to do any substantial bias training for those doctors even as they were away from discrepancies in healthcare outcomes based on racial and ethnic lines.
African American pregnant people and our infants and newborns, dating back to Slavery, have had seriously poor health outcomes. Nowadays we all quote the stat that African American women are 3–4x more likely to die from pregnancy related health outcomes than white women, but why has there not been a nationwide shift in policy to reflect that? As many eco fascists and other white people have pushed for eugenics, one of the ways they have historically done this is through curbing “undesirable people”, such as African Americans and Indigenous Americans, ability to have children. People who want us to have less kids won’t care if we and our children die.

Each of these tragic moments where I was failed benefited someone, from the exploitative companies who benefit when employees are scared and desperate, to the state of Georgia that knows it can use a banned chemical warfare agent with known severe endocrine disruptive qualities to protect the Klan from angry Black people. If I had died, there technically would not have been a single smoking gun that killed me, only an interlocking system of “background phenomenon” that was probably going to kill me, even as it was uncertain when it would kill me. Just like the hypothetical Schrodinger’s cat. Even as it wasn’t specifically about killing me as an individual, it’s more about a system designed in such a way that over many centuries this “background phenomena” is making the death of Black people not only disproportionately more likely to happen, but also more beneficial to white people overall.

Initially, when I was theorizing about the concept of “background phenomena”, I was thinking about the ways that white people manipulate natural phenomena to align with their goals and desires for the world around us. While sitting overlooking the ocean one day, my friend told me that when white people first came to California, they cut down 95% of the redwoods. White people back then, as they still do now, would rather enforce their will than live in harmony with the world around them, and made a habit of terraforming everywhere they went. At the time, I could only think of how big of an impact the loss of a stabilizing force like the redwoods was on the weather, and how terrifying it must have been for Indigenous people globally to have their environments changed so drastically, before being introduced to white people’s global terror campaign through colonization. In Elizabeth Ferguson’s thesis, she described how Indigenous people in America saw themselves as part of Nature, whereas white/”western” people saw Nature as a thing that should be conquered. I can only imagine how impactful the ecological terrorism whites inflicted back then must have felt to Indigenous people globally, even as the terror white people inflict on the environment has kind of faded to the background now.

Nowadays, white people still cut down trees, they dump or emit toxins into predominantly Black and Indigenous communities, they leave us in homes with lead paint, and refuse to fix our water after they poison it. All of these things kill us, and harm the environment, and their solution is to browbeat us about individual plastic use or plan to blot out the sun. How does white terrorism become “background phenomena”? Most importantly, what would need to happen for us to collectively shake off the white paradigm of viewing these background phenomena as isolated, unrelated phenomena, instead of a widespread and well designed open air prison working to raise the probability of our deaths while ensuring that someone white is always there to profit?

As I came to term with the ways being teargassed to “protect” the Klan almost killed me, I thought about someone who actually did die after being tear gassed. Sarah Grossman was a white woman who protested after the murder of George Floyd, was tear gassed, and died 2 days later. Originally, people believed she was the most direct link between banned chemical agents like tear gas and death, but recently, her autopsy claims she died of “natural causes”. From AP:

According to the autopsy report provided by the Montgomery County coroner’s office, Grossman died of a coronary artery dissection due to a previously undiagnosed genetic condition known as Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a rare disorder that according to the Mayo Clinic affects connective tissue, primarily skin, joints, and blood vessel walls.

Ignoring the ways that a known endocrine disruptor and chemical agent banned from war may have triggered her fatality, who benefits when we continue to view things like Tear Gas as harmless? If we stopped seeing tear gas as harmless, would we begin to question why it is primarily used on disproportionately Black and Indigenous people, especially activists and prisoners? Or would we question why both parties, on the local, state, and federal level, are comfortable gassing the population, especially without knowing or caring what kinds of underlying conditions those people had (or were more likely to have) and the impact this killer chemical would have on them? Of the 4 activists I was gassed with in 2016 and still talk to, all 5 of us have serious health conditions now, and 1 of them died from those conditions. In my heart I know that being tear gassed directly caused or worsened our health issues, I just can’t prove it yet. Since that summer, tear gas has been used multiple times in Atlanta, let alone the rest of the country. How many other people can pinpoint being tear gassed as their introduction to serious disability?

As I become more aware of the background phenomena in my own life and in our systemic oppression, I become more and more critical of people who refuse to take the roll of “background phenomena” seriously. In spite of mountains and mountains of evidence that shouts how whiteness is an intentionally designed system, even as it appears passive, they refuse to release the shackles of the white/western paradigm and see the world clearly. And Black and Indigenous people continue to die because of it. Most of the time I am incredibly thankful I survived, but occasionally I wonder if it was worth it. To see so clearly the limits of the paradigm that was imposed on you, and built on a foundation that spans across centuries is not fun. Nevertheless, Black people and other people of color are not the only ones stuck in a paradigm. It is increasingly clear to me that our collective survival requires white people to begin to critically engage with the paradigm they were indoctrinated into and to actively do everything in their power to destroy that paradigm’s collective power over the world.

How has your understanding of science, religion, politics, and literally everything that exists been influenced by whiteness? What does it mean that innocuous things like a design practice can reflect the goals and values of white supremacy? In Elizabeth Ferguson’s thesis her introductory overview of Newtonian Science didn’t explicitly connect the development of Newtonian Science to the beginnings of colonialism, but it is easy to see how the paradigm of one influenced the other. My prayer is that as the contradictions inherent to capitalism and white supremacy become more clear, that people collectively, but especially white people, will refuse to silence their inquisitive minds and instead engage in simple critical thinking and metacognition. Lives literally depend on it.

The Myth of Natural Phenomena

Written by Jupiter Dior