black faces white spaces by carolyn finney

There’s a sort of protection there: if I tell a story about myself in that experience, no one can deny me that story. For me, if I’m even going to bring up that word ‘race,’ I find that underneath it all I want to remind us of our humanity (not to sound corny). Interview highlights, edited for clarity and recorded by Edge Effects editor Brian Hamilton, follow.ĭantrell Cotton: I t seems that in a lot of your own experiences, you saw similar push-back to what you’re pushing back on in the book when you hear folks say things like “Black folks don’t do environment.”Ĭarolyn Finney: When I talk about questions of race with people, its an emotional challenging conversation to have, and that’s putting it lightly-you can feel the discomfort in the room rise. Stream or download the conversation here. And yet, when she begins hunting for black figures with whom to populate the lily-white history of conservation and environmentalism, she finds more than she can count, begging the question of why they’ve been left out of these stories for so long.Įnvironmental studies scholar Dantrell Cotton sat down on December 8 with Finney at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to talk about the “repressive rules” of race and her resuscitated African American heroes in a conversation about the origins of her book and its implications for contemporary environmental politics and pedagogy.

She details how African American aversion to the “great outdoors” stems from “what those spaces represent in the eyes of a black person hobbled by repressive rules, cultural norms, racist propaganda, and the possibility of death” (117). Addressing the supposed mystery of why black Americans appear less drawn to wild places, Finney-an assistant professor of geography and environmental and sustainability studies at the University of Kentucky-both solves that “mystery” and turns her magnifying glass back to those who had been stumped. “When we consider landscapes like national parks, or other areas of ‘natural’ beauty, what you see is not always way you get,” writes Carolyn Finney in Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors (117).

Black faces white spaces by carolyn finney