The name of our site, Wilder Seeds, is a combination of two sources which we feel speak profoundly to issues of race, both historically and definitively now in America.
Our first source is The Lost Children of Wilder: The Epic Struggle to Change Foster Care, published in 2001 by Nina Bernstein. The Lost Children of Wilder offers the strongly detailed full history of a case (of 13-year old Shirley Wilder and her infant son Lamont) that reveals the racial, religious, and political fault lines in our child-welfare system, and lays bare the fundamental contradiction at the heart of our well-intended efforts to sever the destiny of needy children from the fate of their parents. Lamont's terrifying journey through the system produced a man with deep emotional wounds, a stifled yearning for family, and a son growing up in the system’s shadow. In recounting the failure of the promise of benevolence, The Lost Children of Wilder makes clear how welfare reform can also damage its intended beneficiaries.
Our second source is Octavia E. Butler's Wild Seed, published in 1980. The science fiction novel offers a myriad of compelling themes, including but certainly not limited to power struggles (light/dark and male/female); eugenics, control, and Afrocentrism/Afrofuturism. By creating an incredibly strong black female protagonist (the first of its kind in the world of science fiction), Butler broke new ground in a big way. Wild Seed remarkably and extremely realistically represents the hard compromises that real women must accept in order to live in a patriarchial, oppressive society. Wild Seed as a whole represents and comments very articulately on the history of plantation slavery in the United States. The book revises our sense of human history as directed by white supremacy.
We strongly believe that these two sources provide a solid foundation for both the name of our site, and for the ideas we wish to discuss. We're so glad you've chosen to join us!