In last week’s post I argued for something I assumed to be self-evident truth: the importance of national parks. In fact, despite my title question, “Are National Parks Important?,” I never doubted the value of these preserved lands or those set aside as state and local parks. Most everyone recognizes and appreciates these places’ worth, their value, I presumed, if not their associated meanings. But is this true or an assumption borne of privilege? White, college-educated, National Park Service work experience privilege?
The question of white privilege in relation to national parks and the environmental movement isn’t new. Nor is it something that’s been resolved. One major criticism of mainstream environmentalism, of which the National Park Service was forerunner, is that the movement by and large consists of and caters to whites. Jennifer Oladipo, a black writer who not long ago volunteered at a Louisville, Kentucky, nature preserve wrote in Orion a few years back that she’d encountered very few like her at the preserve. Those few she met, she wrote, had been teachers or aides to people with disabilities. Had Ms. Oladipo volunteered in a national park, her experience would have been similar.
The National Park Service (NPS) acknowledged the disproportional representation of minorities in park visitation as early as the 1960s. Efforts to make parks inviting to all people thereafter accelerated, especially during the years Robert Stanton served as the agency’s first African American director (1997–2001). Many newer parks—Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site, Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site, and New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park among them—commemorate African American contributions to civil rights and American culture. Minorities’ stories are shared elsewhere, too; long-time Yosemite National Park ranger Shelton Johnson, for instance, routinely offers programs for visitors that tells the story of the Buffalo Soldiers who early in the last century, before the NPS’s 1916 creation, protected and preserved it and Sequoia National Park.
Such high profile and notable efforts—and I don’t even barely scratch the surface—haven’t reversed a visitation pattern that dates to 1872, when Congress created Yellowstone, the first national park. A New York Times article from November 2010 reported that affluent whites constitute the overwhelming number of park visitors, especially in western “wilderness parks” like Yosemite. The same article also revealed that eighty-three percent of the agency’s 25,000 employees are white.
Despite Black Americans’ active participation in protecting, preserving, and promoting parks and despite so many parks being devoted to telling their stories, why do so few blacks and other minorities visit national parks, especially western wilderness parks? Don’t they recognize in them the same meanings venerated by whites? A 2001 New Yorker essay, “Sowers and Reapers,” by the novelist and gardener Jamaica Kincaid claims they don’t. She writes not about national parks but about the preserved plantation gardens at Middleton Place in South Carolina.
For whites, she writes, this National Historic Landmark’s gardens signify peace and tranquility, a place for solemn reflection, values comparable to those many whites value in large western wilderness parks. But these gardens so revered by whites, she announces, signify something completely different for African Americans: oppression and inequality. They’re a reminder not of nature’s tranquility or a nation’s greatness, but instead of a country’s shame, of blacks’ enslavement and of whites’ denial of blacks’ basic human rights, dignity, and self-determination.
Kimberly K. Smith, a legal scholar and author of “African American Environmental Thought: Foundations” (2007) likewise challenges white privilege and white’s assumptions about place and nature. African Americas cared deeply and passionately about place and have done so since first brought to the Americas. Slavery and the legacies of slavery—forced labor in agricultural fields, racism, denial of landownership, lynchings in the wilderness—created for blacks a different relationship to the land and nature than experienced by whites. Where whites sensed peace and tranquility in wilderness, blacks felt persecution and fear. As a result, Smith discovered, black leaders and writers such as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Charles Chesnutt focused their attention not on preserving land for aesthetic reasons but on securing access to and ownership of local places and spaces. Their concerns, she writes, were civil rights and environmental health and justice. This may explain, at least in part, why all but a relative few African Americans are absent from the today’s mainstream environmental movement and from large natural parks.
The current NPS director, John Jarvis, told the New York Times that low visitation by African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and other nonwhites might jeopardize future support and funding for the parks. Today’s economic climate intensifies this concern and amplifies the importance of Kincaid’s and Smith’s calls for improved understanding of blacks’ attitudes toward nature and place, especially if such natural places are to exist in the future. What this means precisely, I don’t know.
But if parks are—or were—expressions of cultural “exceptionalism,” today’s dynamic social and cultural transformations will undoubtedly affect peoples’ conceptions of and attitudes toward these places and nature more generally. With nearly one in two Americans, minorities and whites alike, now classified as poor or low-income, the gap in environmental privilege may—and probably will—widen in tandem with income gaps. In terms of access to parks, white privilege might metamorphose into economic or, dare I say it, class privilege.
What might be some of the implications of this transformation on peoples’ thoughts and attitudes toward the land and the environment in general? Thinking optimistically, ecologically-informed concern for nature and place may shift increasingly from national to local levels, from scenic preservation to local conservation, access, and ownership. What we can learn from African American and other minorities’ relationships and attitudes toward nature, place, and parks may help all of us—I’m now among the poor—negotiate and dismantle the barriers sustained, largely unintentionally, by white privilege. Will art have a role in aiding and easing this transition?
Fred MacVaugh, Staff Blogger