{"id":4740,"date":"2021-09-07T17:02:44","date_gmt":"2021-09-07T21:02:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/magazine.alumni.ncsu.edu\/?p=759"},"modified":"2024-02-01T16:29:06","modified_gmt":"2024-02-01T21:29:06","slug":"black-bird-fly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/magazine.ncsu.edu\/2021\/black-bird-fly\/","title":{"rendered":"Black Bird, Fly"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In May 2020, urban ecologist and avid birder Deja Perkins \u201920 MS was working to finish her master\u2019s degree in the College of Natural Resources, when she was confronted with the moment that would be the impetus for #BlackBirdersWeek, a vibrant social media movement that began last summer and celebrated Black naturalists and their place in the outdoors. The moment came via video on her phone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Some of Perkins\u2019 Black STEM colleagues dropped a video in their GroupMe chat. And with a click, they watched a scene from Central Park in Manhattan. Perkins watched as a white woman handling her cocker spaniel walked toward a man filming her with his cellphone camera and asked him to stop recording. (It would come out later that the woman\u2019s dog had been unleashed and a birder\u2009\u2014\u2009the one filming the incident\u2009\u2014\u2009had asked her to put the dog back on the leash, which Central Park requires.) The white woman was Amy Cooper, and the birder was Christian Cooper, a Black man. Perkins continued to watch as the woman said she was going to call the police and \u201ctell them there\u2019s an African-American man threatening my life.\u201d The man told her to go ahead and call the police, which she did. \u201cThere is an African-American man\u2009\u2014\u2009I\u2019m in Central Park\u2009\u2014\u2009and he\u2019s recording me and threatening myself and my dog,\u201d the woman told the dispatcher.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAs I watched it, I was like, \u2018Is she serious?\u2019\u201d says Perkins. \u201c. . . Our public lands are supposed to be public lands for all of us to enjoy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No More Rare Birds<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

For Perkins, 25, and other Black naturalists around the country, the video illustrated the racism built into the notion that Black people rarely engage with or don\u2019t belong in nature, that the outdoors is a white world. In his memoir The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man\u2019s Love Affair with Nature<\/em>, one of Perkins\u2019 go-to reads, Black birder and conservationist J. Drew Lanham writes, \u201cI am as much a scientist as I am a black man; my skin defines me no more than my heart does. But somehow my color often casts my love affair with nature in shadow. Being who and what I am doesn\u2019t fit the common calculus. I am the rare bird, the oddity: appreciated by some for my different perspective and discounted by others as an unnecessary nuisance, an unusually colored fish out of water.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Myron Floyd is the dean of NC State\u2019s College of Natural Resources and researches environmental justice and how race and ethnicity are involved in leisure activity choices. He says one reason that Black people are perceived, wrongly, as a rarity in the outdoors is because of a persistent American myth. \u201cOne strong idea is the rugged idealist. A man. Usually white and you\u2019ll go out and conquer nature. It\u2019s an ideal,\u201d says Floyd. He says that Black people who engage with nature have been overlooked in the past. Now, he says, \u201cthere\u2019s a new narrative.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n