A few years ago, Mamaroneck, New York residents received a letter from the Westchester Land Trust commemorating a generous donation made to conserve a local watershed. The letter highlighted the watershed’s wildlife, its lush vegetation, and conservation value. But what the letter did not mention was the previous caretakers who had stewarded the land for almost 50 years. This inspired storyteller and cultural geographer Carolyn Finney, whose parents helped preserve the land, to write Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors.
Finney’s book, published in 2014, highlights stories of African Americans’ experiences in the natural environment. She unmasks how popular culture commonly excluded African Americans’ participation in environmental protection and environmental-related activities, creating the false impression that African Americans do not care about the environment.
Finney starts the book recounting her experiences growing up on a 12-acre estate of a wealthy Jewish family in Westchester County, where her father was hired as caretaker of the estate. It was this estate that the Westchester Land Trust acquired. For over 40 years, Finney’s parents tended to the estate. They knew the land better than the landowners. Despite this, Finney and her family were outsiders. “While I came to love what was ‘natural,’ I also discovered that for some folks it wasn’t ‘natural’ for my family or me to be there,” Finney recounts. “We were the only ‘colored’ family living in this area [up until the 1990’s].”
Over time, Finney began to notice how her experiences growing up related to how Americans talked about who belonged in the environmental movement more broadly. Finney looked through 10 years of Outside magazine issues and counted only 103 out of 4,602 pictures that showed African Americans. The few pictures of Black people usually featured Black men in sports and advertisements for athletic shoes, clothing, or automobiles. Meanwhile, white men and women were shown participating in various outdoor activities, such as kayaking. Finney noted that these pictures promoted a view of African Americans as only being able to engage in sports when it comes to outdoor activities.
Finney also shares the stories of Black environmental activists. One of those is John Francis, who walked across the United States from 1971 to 1933 to raise environmental awareness. Remarkably, for 17 of those years, he did not speak. When Francis sought to publish his story, the board of the National Geographic magazine declined because they thought he was, in his words, “a crazy Black person.” Eventually, Francis received an apology from a staff member from National Geographic for their behavior. Finney stresses that National Geographic rejected Francis not because he was crazy, but because he was Black and did not fit the norm of American environmentalism.
Finney’s analysis further explores representations of the American landscape and identity through film. She focuses on popular movies, such as Far and Away, that glorified land ownership. The film is based on the 1880’s and Irish immigrants’ desire to own land in the American West. Finney signals that the film overlooks how, in 1830, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, which legalized the violent displacement of thousands of Native Americans in the United States. Finney states that this enabled Euro-American settlers to own land, as seen in the film. Such films construct narratives “about the environment that is deemed at once authentic and universal and that denies the complexity of experiences that nondominant groups have encountered historically.” Finney contends that these narratives hindered engagement of marginalized groups in environmental activities.
According to Finney, these prominent images of “white wilderness” reflect the marginalization of African Americans in environmental organizations. In the early 1900s, the U.S. environmental movement was dominated by white and middle-class environmental organizations. Groups like the Sierra Club paid no attention to African Americans’ environmental concerns. Finney emphasizes that because of the exclusion of African Americans in the early environmental movement, very few African Americans participated in outdoor recreation. Finney points out how racist views of white environmentalists, including John Muir, co-founder of the Sierra Club, pervaded the U.S. environmental movement. In Muir’s Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf, he describes African Americans as “lazy” and “unable to pick cotton as well as a white man,” demonstrating his insensitivity toward African Americans.
Finney’s book notably raised awareness on African Americans’ relationship with the natural environment and pushed environmental organizations to think about how they are “building relationships across differences within the organization and [their] own lives.” Since 2014, several organizations have stepped up to increase the diversity of their membership and employees. For example, in July 2020, the Sierra Club released a public statement acknowledging the racist views of its early members and how it strives to undo the harm done. Recently, the Sierra Club elected their first Latino president, Ramón Cruz, and African American Ben Jealous as their new executive director.
Black Faces, White Spaces urges readers to understand the challenges African Americans faced with the pervasive exclusion of African Americans in the early U.S. environmental movement and how it has influenced present-day interactions with the natural environment. Finney’s book makes clear that African Americans’ environmental perspectives, just as every other group’s perspective of the environment, are legitimate and worthy of recognition too.