Entrepreneurial Appetite
Entrepreneurial Appetite is a series of events dedicated to building community, promoting intellectualism, and supporting Black businesses. This podcast will feature edited versions of Entrepreneurial Appetite’s Black book discussions, including live conversations between a virtual audience, authors, and Black entrepreneurs. In this community, we do not limit what it means to be an intellectual or entrepreneur. We recognize that the sisters and brothers who own and work in beauty salons or barbershops are intellectuals just as much as sisters and brothers who teach and research at universities. This podcast is unique because, as part of this community, you have the opportunity to participate in our monthly book discussion, suggest the book to be discussed, or even lead the conversation between the author and our community of intellectuals and entrepreneurs. For more information about participating in our monthly discussions, please follow Entrepreneurial_ Appetite on Instagram and Twitter. Please consider supporting the show as one of our Founding 55 patrons. For five dollars a month, you can access our live monthly conversations. See the link below:https://www.patreon.com/EA_BookClub
Entrepreneurial Appetite
Being Black in Nature: A Conversation with Dr. Carolyn Finney and Alex Bailey (Replay)
What does it mean to reconnect with nature when you've always been connected? Dr. Carolyn Finney, author of "Black Faces, White Spaces," joins Alex Bailey of Black Outside Inc. for a transformative conversation about reclaiming Black presence in outdoor spaces.
Dr. Finney shares her powerful personal journey growing up on a 12-acre estate where her parents worked as caretakers for nearly 50 years. When a conservation easement was placed on the property with no acknowledgment of her family's decades of stewardship, this erasure became the catalyst for her groundbreaking research. "I don't have to cancel anybody out to make space for myself," Dr. Finney explains, challenging us to reimagine environmental relationships beyond traditional narratives.
Alex Bailey describes Black Outside Inc.'s mission to create culturally relevant outdoor experiences for Black youth through programs like Camp Founder Girls and the Charles Raunchy Bloom Project. Together, they explore how outdoor spaces can become sites of joy, liberation, and healing when approached through culturally affirming frameworks that honor the full spectrum of Black experiences.
The conversation delves into profound territory: the false dichotomy between environmental urgency and diversity work, the importance of rest and dreaming in creating new futures, and how to connect Black youth to environmental careers by honoring their existing knowledge. Dr. Finney also shares details about her upcoming HBO documentary "Hidden in Plain Sight," which transforms a story of loss into one of collective accountability for Black environmental histories.
This episode isn't just about diversifying outdoor spaces—it's about fundamentally reimagining who belongs in nature and whose stories count. Whether you're an outdoor enthusiast, educator, or anyone interested in creating more inclusive environmental movements, this conversation will transform how you think about our relationship with the natural world. Subscribe now and join us in expanding beyond the sandbox to play on the entire beach of possibility.
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Langston Clark:I'm Langston Clark, founder and organizer of Entrepreneurial Appetite, a series of events dedicated to building community, promoting intellectualism and supporting Black businesses. Welcome to another throwback episode of Entrepreneurial Appetite. Today you're going to hear a conversation between Dr Carolyn Fing, author of Black Faces, White Spaces, Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors, and Alex Bailey, founder of Black Outside Inc. So it is my honor to introduce a good friend of mine who is an activist, an outdoor philanthropist, an all-around good guy who likes to create opportunities for Black children to reconnect with the outdoors. He is a wealth of knowledge about the history of Black people in the outdoors. He's a wealth of knowledge about contemporary issues facing Black people in the outdoors and, as I said, he's an advocate for our children who claim our place in nature and the outdoor world. So, without further ado, Alex Bailey.
Alex Bailey:Hey, thank y'all so much for coming. Those nouns though that you use, brother Langston, it's like activist, outdoor philanthropist. I was like, oh, thank y'all so much. I feel like you definitely set the bar high and you know, I do believe that finding spaces for our youth in the outdoors and cultivating spaces of joy and happiness and just liberation and freedom for our youth is just so important. So I do want to give a quick shout out to Langston. He actually came to me with this idea about doing a book club with Dr Finney literally a year ago when we first started Black Outside, and here it is come to fruition. Obviously, there was a pandemic in between that so, which is why we're just now doing this virtually, but this is such a great opportunity. So I want to thank everyone that's coming in from different parts of the country. I know we have family, friends, other outdoor folks and so we appreciate y'all making space and time this evening to be with us.
Alex Bailey:So, really quickly, in case you don't know, I got to do my quick plug about Black Outside and then I'm going to introduce Dr Finney, just so y'all know, black Outside Inc is reconnecting. Our mission is to reconnect black youth to the outdoors, so we do that through culturally relevant programming. We have a phenomenal, phenomenal set of programs that we offer, including the first historically black summer camp for girls, camp Founder Girls. Shout out to them, they started in 1924. So we revived that program. And we also have an amazing year round program for outdoor healing justice for youth of incarcerated families or caregivers, called the Charles Raunchy Bloom Project. So I want to shout out their founder and director, cameron Thompson, alongside our executive director and cam director, angelica Holmes they're actually behind me in the screen, you just can't see them. So they're just doing their dance. So, yes, we're all honored just to share our work and you know, I share all that with y'all as we start to say, when I first, like, wrote down the idea of Black Outside, I don't like to think of myself as like I found a new organization, like, like it was a community of all of us.
Alex Bailey:It was a community of people. It was before us and it was after us. First time I ever wrote down Black Outside Inc on my paper, the first thing I did after that is I went to Amazon. I was like I just got to do some more reading, some deep discussion on this topic of engaging like Black folks in the outdoors, and Dr Caroline Finney's book was the first thing that popped up. And what's funny is I ordered it on my Kindle and y'all, I literally read it within my two flights back home and I was just so inspired and on fire with just some of the ideas and the way I'm a history person, I love it so, like just the way she was able to narrate the black experience in the outdoors. So all that to say, I just want to name this to you, dr Finney Thank you for inspiring us, for taking the lead, opening the trail for us pun intended there for organizations like ours and many others across the country. You really did set the groundwork for the work that we do, so we appreciate you.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:I appreciate you back and I got all to say.
Alex Bailey:Yes, absolutely Absolutely. So. The name of her book really quickly in case you don't know, but obviously it was all over the promotional flies at this point is Black Faces, white-led outdoor education. We have a couple of links and I have a couple of questions about Afrofuturism and then just talking about your hopes and desires for where our movement to really diversify the outdoors and make it a more inclusive space.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:We're not going to talk about much, we're just going to.
Alex Bailey:Yeah, this was like something. Yeah absolutely Well, hey, I mean I've kind of given like a brief background but my full-blown introduction. Obviously, this is Dr Caroline Finney you heard her author of this amazing, amazing book. She's also a professor at Middlebury College currently.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:So let me fine-tune that, because I actually I left academia a few years ago because of the work that I do and who I am doing that work. So I'm actually in a part-time residency at Middlebury College in the Franklin. There we go, which is very different on purpose. It's something I do two days a week to do this work, but I needed to be myself and remain whole, so I have to be outside of that institution in order to do it. 70% of the time, what I do is what you see me doing here I'm talking with people consulting with people advising with people, writing about people, consulting with people advising with people writing about people writing about us and hanging on.
Alex Bailey:That's what I'm doing yeah, we love it, we love it. Our executive director in the background said period Doing the face. Yeah, yeah, you know you got a Black audience here, so we're really busy and everything.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:Taking advantage of that situation.
Alex Bailey:Thank you, yeah, yes, yes, I like it here. Yes, that's great. Well, let's go ahead and jump in. You know, I know you've been asked a bunch, dr Finney, like why did you start your book or what led to you writing your book, which is a great question. So I'm going to ask it a little different, but feel free to touch on that broader question. So you chose the title Black Faces, white Spaces, and what first captivated me when I read it was obviously the title was, you know, intentional. But then I saw this word reimagine, and that's been a popular word in the last year, given everything in our world. Right, reimagine. Why, when you were like crafting the title for this book, why did you use that word reimagine?
Dr. Carolyn Finney:no-transcript. The original title was black faces, white spaces African-Americans in the great outdoors. I wrote this was first a dissertation. For me it was research a dissertation. But let me back up. I'm going to come to the answer. But this is how I roll.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:So, a little bit. What I talk about in the book is, you know, I tell everybody I'm so grateful that I get to do this as work, and this is personal. It's personal, it's political, it's intimate to me. It means something. It's not simply something out of my intellect or it's not something I do simply professionally. It actually I live in this skin in this country at this time and so it has meaning for me.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:When I returned to school after a year absence because I was an actor for a lot of years and I did a lot of backpacking in Africa and Asia and I made a decision to go back to school in my mid thirties and finished my undergrad and got a master's and borrowed more money and then went for a PhD. When I hit the PhD that was like 2000. I was 40. I was turning 40 because I was older. When I had gone back, I tell people that I had been thinking a lot about environment and thinking about gender issues and it was what was going on at home for my family at the time that actually really brought it home to me that I really wanted to focus on race and, more particularly, I wanted to look at the broader experience, the broader, diverse experience of African-Americans. Let me say it like that because I grew up on an estate about 30 minutes outside of New York City, in Westchester County, but we didn't own the estate. My parents grew up poor high school education in the South, in Virginia. When my dad came back from fighting the Korean War, my parents, like a lot of Black people in the South, migrated North. He got to New York, had a couple of job offers he could be a janitor in Syracuse, new York but the job he took was 30 minutes outside New York City. This 12-acre estate was owned by a very wealthy Jewish family and they needed a full-time caretaker for that estate. They needed a chauffeur, a caretaker, a gardener. My mom was a sometime housekeeper, so my parents took that job, even though my mother the housekeeping thing fell off because both my mother's mother and my father's mother had been maids for white families. Let me be very particular, and so that's not something my mother wanted to continue, but initially, when they took that job, she did a little bit of that as well.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:And this 12 acre state is stunning, right? So there's a pool, there's a small pond with fish, there's vegetable gardens, fruit trees, flower gardens. It's stunning. I could put up pictures and show everybody how stunning it really is. Very wealthy neighborhood. We were the only family of color until the 1990s, so they moved in there. In the late 50s till the 1990s Japanese American one moved in and then she moved out.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:So there's a lot of things I usually say in that, but I don't want to take up all the space to say about my own challenges, mine and my brother's, of having a sense of what it meant to be us in the neighborhood. I mean, I remember my first job was a paper route at 13. So here I was going around, you know, delivering papers. Harry Winston had property down the street Schaefer. Schaefer Beer was next door. I mean, we're talking about that kind of money. So and he and I was also a Girl Scout, so I was knocking on the doors with my Girl Scout cookie situation, you know.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:And when I got as a teenager I even was asked to do some babysitting for these wealthy families and their little kids. But an early incident when I was nine, getting stopped by a policeman on my way home from school, wondering where I was going and asking me if I worked, where I was going. And I'm like, dude, I'm nine years old, I'm coming home from school. What's happening right now? Right, all those things kind of infused in me in a very particular way. Who can be in these beautiful outdoor settings? Who is natural to be in these beautiful outdoor settings and what does that mean?
Dr. Carolyn Finney:But the piece where it got really personal, right when I was in school, that I started to study this as a piece of research, was that the original owners, which were a man and a woman the man died many years early, I'm just trying not to use their name the matriarch of the family, the Jewish woman who owned by the 90s, got very sick and she knew that she wasn't going to live long. What's going to happen to my parents on this property Now? She thought about trying to keep them on this land. They've been caring for the land at that point for 40 years. But that land, that property, was worth over $3 million. The property taxes alone were over $125,000 a year and even, I have to say, she considered trying to make it work, but her grown children weren't having it. There were a lot of complications about the property and the estate. At the end she had a house built for my parents in Leesburg, virginia, because at this point, me and my brothers are out in the world. My youngest brother had settled and married and kids. I never settled in, so there was that. So they have this house on a half an acre of land. The original owner dies. The new owner comes on. It was a wealthy white dude.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:My parents stay on until 2003 because there always have to be people caring for this land full time. Finally they find he finds a family from the Dominican Republic. They leave, they move to 2003. I'm working on my you know, my PhD.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:I watch my father get really depressed because he talks about missing the land. I'm not even dealing with the fact I can never go home again, right, because that's been my home. But it's easier for me to think about my parents, right? And at that point they received a copy of a letter from one of their old neighbors and the letter was from the Westchester Land Trust. Now there are land trusts all over this country and one of their jobs as stewards is that they would protect, take care of. Jobs as stewards is that they would protect, take care of, assess a piece of land and I will say they get to say that it has value or not, and in this case, a conservation easement was placed on this estate, which means in perpetuity, nothing can be changed. That's how I simply understand it. It also means the owners don't have to pay taxes, but I learned that later.
Alex Bailey:OK now.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:Protect it. I'm just saying Right. So when that letter went around to all the old neighbors, one of the old neighbors sent the letter to my parents, which I now have. It was a two page letter, beautiful pictures of the estate, talking about all the environmental values of the estate. Where it sits in the watershed wildlife on the property here's why it needs to be protected. At the end of the letter the land trust thanks the new owner for his conservation mindedness. He'd been on the land maybe five years. There's no mention of my parents, who cared for that land for nearly 50 years.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:So that is the moment when it got so personal. It's like we all just got erased. My parents just got erased. Like what just happened there. Wait, whose labor counts? What's happening right now?
Dr. Carolyn Finney:And, combined with me continually hearing the myth that black people don't fill in the blanks, all the things we supposedly don't do in relationship to the environment, including all the recreational activities, but also we don't care about the environment, though the Black Caucus is, at least at one point, was the largest pro-environment voting bloc in the country, right, all the myths are happening. I'm getting revved up now. All the myths are there, getting on my last nerve, right, and I'm thinking that's not right, like whose ownership counts. There were some deeper questions. I started thinking about all the people in the history of the country not even just Black people, right, a lot of other people too, who just get erased from that. And so that was the impetus for me to do this as a dissertation, and my advisor, who was a white woman, was like please do this, because nobody's doing this. Which scared me, because the other thing was you know, when you're a student you got, the first place you go is the library, because you guys say, well, confine the library.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:Well, let me tell you this in 2003, I'm going to the library to see what I can find about black people in the environment on the library shelves, and I found a whole lot of not much meaning. There was some stuff in there on environmental justice which is incredibly important and valuable, but what I always say to people is black people aren't just about the bad things that happen to them in the environment, because I'm seeing large sections of nature, writing environmental science stories, narratives. I'm seeing a ton of stuff where the black, where where the black people at, which is what I was asking where am I at? Like that was also what I was asking where am I at in here? So that was really the impetus.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:And the black faces, white space is part of the title in part and honestly, I was talking to a white friend of mine who was also school, named Tom Roberts, and I was telling him about what we should call this and I think I said black faces and he went white spaces and I was like, yeah, black faces, white spaces and we were kind of laughing. I said, said no, that's actually it.
Alex Bailey:Oh, my God.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:You know, when I think about parks, when I think about and I'm thinking environmentally like I could go beyond the environment and have that same conversation but I was thinking, you know, parks, places, spaces, outdoors, estates, whatever it is, and I think about whiteness not as a bad thing. Think about whiteness not as a bad thing, but whiteness as baldwin says, about power and that it's centered.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:So it means that everything in this country is referenced through that lens and that's what I was trying to get at. The black space, white space, the second part of the title reimagine the relationship of the african-americans to the great outdoors. It got changed to that for a technical reason. My publisher, you know, when I had Black Faces, white Spaces, african Americans and the Great Outdoors, he thought you know, you have to say a little bit what you're doing with this. You have to say it in the title. I thought it was too wordy, but now I actually understand and that's what we agreed on. Was the reimagining. Because he kept coming at me and I'm like no, that's not what I'm trying to say, no, that's not what I'm trying to say. Reimagining, that's what I'm trying to say. That's not even the whole thing. I wanted it to be generous and spacious. As an idea, black faces, white spaces is already provocative and I'm okay with provocative. But I'm not just inviting in black people, because generally we don't have to read about a lot of this, because we already know, because we've been living it. I'm just saying I was opening it up knowing that I want this to be a conversation, particularly for a lot of white people who are in positions of power, making decisions, everything from environmental legislation to running parks and environmental nonprofits deciding what curriculum goes in schools. Who do we talk about, what stories have value and, in some cases, just being able to see it right, because sometimes you know when you haven't had to see a thing, because you always at the center. You know, and I always like to say, privilege has a privilege about seeing itself. You also need to be trained and taught and poked and prodded and sometimes kicked a look at the thing in a very different way. So, reimagining, I like that because it also didn't assume and I say this with all my heart and love that as Black people, broad and diverse and expansive as we are, it didn't mean that we didn't have any work to do too.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:One of the things that came up for me when you have been wounded as a people you know I was just reading something earlier, corny like thinking about love and the way my father is a wounded individual. He now has early stage dementia. He's 88, 89. I didn't get along with him for a good part of my life because this man was an angry man. He was angry at America, he was angry at white people. He was just angry, angry, angry. And the way he took that out, the way he thought he could have control, was by telling me and the family what to do all the time. And you already get a sense of me. Don't try to tell me what to do. I'll actually do for you, but don't try to tell me what to do. But it was, we were up against this and he had very narrow ideas of how he thought I needed to show up in the world in order to be okay.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:And the thing that I understand is this man had a rough life. You know, had a job at 12 years old taking care of his family. His father was an alcoholic. Two lost, two met my brother and sister, one through suicide, one through car accident. I mean he like a lot of Black people. He suffered a lot. The little bit of land his family had. They lost that. You know.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:There's a story in there, as there is, I think, for everyone. And to expect that he knew what love is and how to be loved, when he was never shown love, how are you a veteran for your country? You went out and were ready to lay down your life, even if you didn't know better, but you went anyway and you were killing people in the name of a country that couldn't even see you as human. So, as an adult, what I can recognize is how deep that wound is, and that wound varies for a lot of us. Right, I still got Negro on my birth certificate. What's up with that? I'm just saying there's so many places in there of the woundedness so that I know that collectively, that healing, that sense of love, a sense of worth, the sense of value A lot of us have it more I was going to say in spades what? But a lot of us have it and a. A lot of us struggle around what that is, because even though we have it on one sense, you suddenly get yourself in a white space and you're not always getting that kind of affirmation back about who you are.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:This last year has been interesting. We have a conversation about that because it's the year of the black people Right now, but earlier today I was working on a columnist for this Earth, but earlier today I was working on a. So I'm a columnist for this Earth Island Journal. So I was working on a column and I had to finish it. I called flipping the script and I was kind of talking about, you know, the ideas of race and difference and the environment and ways within which you know are the stereotypes and bias and everything we bring to the table, and the editor you know near the end. And the editor you know near the end.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:I was just trying to say that you know, a lot of times when I talk to predominantly white groups about the environment and climate change and sometimes they say you know, yeah, but you know it's so urgent that we take care of the environment, do you? Is really diversity and I'm like, really I have so many things to say about that, not the least of which is like, for a lot of black and brown people, it's been urgent for the last 450 years. All you got is ask any indigenous person. It was urgent the minute that knucklehead lost his way, christopher Columbus, and decided what this place was and what was going to happen. Right, 1619. Right, right, you know. Right, it's been urgent.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:Both the things are urgent, but also the idea that we think we can do one without attending to the other. Do you think that you would actually address the environmental challenges and climate challenges in the way they need to be addressed without addressing the relationship you have with the other people out there in the world? Absolutely not, because all you're perpetuating for me is the same power dynamic, the same idea, the kind of egocentric idea that there's one way to do it and there's only one set of people who can do it, and actually you got to have everybody on a board. And oh, by the way, some of us have been this resilient and doing this sort of thing our entire lives. We don't have to have letters after our name to show that we had the experience and the background and the know-how in terms of how we should show up right now. So the re-imagining for me gives it some spaciousness. It's like we can all re-imagine For us too.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:I don't want to be solely defined by my pain my friend and you probably I think you know her Teresa Baker Baker.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:The other day on Instagram I saw she put up a thing saying you know something about for journalists to stop, every time they want to talk to a black person about the environment, wanting us to talk about our trauma, because for many of us, I'm not saying trauma doesn't exist.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:If you black in the United States, united States I'm saying we are also for me it's about joy, like my love of if I want to be in the outdoors or go on a hike or go on a walk or just sit under a tree, you know and enjoy myself because it makes me feel good. I'm not sitting there thinking about my trauma 24 seven. So there's also even that dynamic of the expectation. And when I'm generous which I really try to be, because I do believe that I don't have to oppress anyone in order to make my point heard and because I want to meet people where they are and because I do this as my work, when I'm talking to somebody, especially white, I was like how do I expect them to do anything any differently when they've never had to do that before?
Alex Bailey:Yeah, oh, yeah, oh yeah, that's right.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:All right, and understanding that I told the group earlier today, just because people are woke don't mean they have changed any of their practice. You can be awake, which is a step Eyes open. That helps when you try to cross the street, but how do you change the way you do things? Are you still jaywalking, you know? I mean, like, what are you doing, like you know? I just think it's also about how do you get them to change the practice, and that's the thing that's much harder, because it means you got to give up something, you got to let go something and you don't get a chance to invite diversity to the table and you think you don't have to change. Maybe you invite difference. Not only might you have to throw out the damn table, which is what I say anyway.
Langston Clark:Yeah.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:But you invite difference means you're inviting change, which means you got to change.
Alex Bailey:Well, you know, wow, no, I know I opened the door. I'm just saying I feel like you know, we got a few amens in the chat. I was getting ready to come up all over the building. We are standing, all over the building. We're standing. Okay, the door listen, the doors of the trails are open. We're ready to receive. Yeah, that was amazing. There's so many connecting points. So, yeah, you, I was yeah again. I was trying to take notes and smile on the Zoom call, but I was like, oh my gosh, that was so, so great. There were so many touch points. Blakeson, I saw you hop back on. I didn't know if you had any kind of major things, but if not, I want to jump into a few things that she's talked about.
Langston Clark:I want to just piggyback off on a point that she's making, and this is a selfish question, because it's something that I sometimes wrestle with. There's like a percentage of me that's. It might be like 25 to 50 percent, might be seven.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:I don't think you got a number there.
Langston Clark:Twenty five, and so I wrestle with a lot of times. When you're in a space or spaces where black folk aren't represented in mass, it sucks to be the only one. And so the diversity pieces. I understand the need for me to be in certain spaces and other folks to be in certain spaces, and that diversity expands the richness of the genius in any space. But at the same time, there are some times I just want to be in a space where there's a lot of Black folk, and so I'm wondering how you negotiate that. There are times where you want to do the diversity work because it's important and everyone benefits from that, but there are also times where you want to be at home with your community, no matter where you are. So how do you negotiate that?
Dr. Carolyn Finney:Oh, langston, that's good. Y'all got too many good questions. That's a good question, because sometimes I don't negotiate that that well. So I want to be really clear that 70% of the way that I make my living and I've been trying to build this public platform, particularly the last seven years or so, but this was a plan ever since I went back to school is to have these conversations in a variety of forms. I only have them when I get invited, because people got to take responsibility and be accountable, for you invited me to a room especially predominantly white groups because I'm going to say something. I'm going to say some things now and you need to. You invited me in to do that Now. That means that I rely in part on making my living through this, but also and which means that in the last year it has exploded beyond everything I can say it's everything from academic institutions, government agencies, outdoor retailing businesses, museums, botanical gardens, community groups, faith-based institutions, book reading groups, podcasts, interview writing for it is so broad and you still have the majority of that are predominantly white in the environmental sector. But that's in part because in the environmental sector it's still predominantly white in terms of a lot of the primary land trust and environmental organizations and government agencies.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:More and more I start to get invited by predominantly black. I always say yes, like as soon as I say black, I went yes, yes, because there's a way within which I feel both conversations are important. So when I'm having a better day, I will say to you that when I I've often been the only one in a room and in a space for a really long time and that's exhausting. And I remember that for a lot of my ancestors they didn't even have that choice. And I remember, for my parents, my high school education. My mother has dealt with depression her own life, her whole life. This was a woman as an artist, in terms of what she would make and things she would do, but that she had three kids, and you know that's not the choices she had.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:I really take ownership of my agency and when I find myself tilting over into this, oh poor me, which I know is not what you're saying. So now I'm speaking to your black national self is the steeliness that I have and the resilience, and what is it that I'm learning? And you know what the funny thing is? I can get up and leave and I can learn how to say no, and I can do that with respect, as sweet hunting the rock says, you know, I thank you and a smile will get you far. I know how to do that and I know how to do that with steeliness and upright uprightness. I do not have to no, no, that's really great. You know, I'm so glad you're my man. I just can't do it today. But, thank you, maybe at another time. You know, really, you know it gets better.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:In the last two weeks I've had a couple of black and brown. It's been. A couple of those things have come up and it's like now I actually I don't have to explain in the same way this. That's what I think the freedom is. I don't have to explain it in the same way because I know the nuance is understood, because it's lived, it's diverse, but it's lived by the audience that I'm talking to, whereas I know, you know, and I've been working with a lot of really well-meaning, thoughtful, good-hearted white folks who are just, they're there, they're listening, I can see their faces, I can tell, you know, and I can tell, like the work that they have to do when you have been at the center of the world, of a world, no matter how hard you worked, and you know this is for me. That's that's why I said for me it's never about how hard people worked, of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, it's not. It's never been about that. It's understanding that the space which you've been working so hard, right, sees you way differently than when I'm in that space working just as hard. And there's a million reasons for that, historical and otherwise. Right, you can draw a straight line pretty much from anything like George Floyd's murder. You can go right back. Right, that's fugitive slave laws. You can go right back, you can just draw it straight back. We got so many instances. Woo, you don't have to actually look that hard, you just have to look. And then you don't have to. You don't have to actually look that hard, you just have to look and then you have to consider.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:So I want to say this because I have to say it my God, the best thing I've seen all year is the Haitian director Raoul Peck's Exterminate All the Brutes, the four part series on HBO. It came out a couple of weeks ago and he called out America. The title of the second episode is who the F is? Columbus. He pulled out everything Slavery, indigenous land, baha'u'llah. Yes, you know.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:So I often tell groups, you know white groups, and I've been saying that lately. It's not that we don't know I mean, of course there's always more to know but you can't tell me you don't really know, right? The thing is it's going to cost you something. It's already cost a lot of other people something, in some cases their lives. We're all talking right now and people are dying right now.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:Right, and on the other end of the continuum, the rest of us are ducking and weaving, strategizing, getting exhausted, doing the exercise, spitting around. All the things are happening because we're trying to make sure what am I? Am I a black nationalist? The other time I got to be to be. This time I need to be in the room because I'm the only one, but this time I can't be in the room because I'm really exhausted. But now I'm talking that that's what we're doing 24 7. There's a reason we be tired, right, there's a reason, and I feel really called to this time because, again and this is something Teresa Baker, which I'm saying her name, again we're talking about this she said it's like the ancestors didn't even have this option, which doesn't mean I don't have a right to step back when I'm tired.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:I think the conversation about self-care, the conversation about how we can support each other, the conversation about recognition, is really a powerful one. You know, I've I've been dealing with my own form of depression the last few weeks because I live alone in Vermont and I've been doing this 24 seven for the last year and I finally hit the wall about your biggest part of the chat. I like being in person with people doing this. It's tiring but it's. I get energy. This is what I've been doing trying to get the energy. You know I'm generating it and talking about something that can be re-traumatizing when I do it, because I tell personal story along with history, because I'm about, I want to connect to what's real about it, but I'm also this makes me so excited I can just I'm saying Carolyn Finney unfiltered- yeah, yeah, that's so good, gosh.
Alex Bailey:I mean there's so many connecting points, I think you know, on a personal level for me and just my even career journey, quote unquote. But then, like even just the movement for Black Outside, right, you know you talked about just a couple of points I want to hone in on as we talk about this. But you talked about that word like reimagine is making space for one of something that probably hasn't been acknowledged as much, Right, and then also making space for things that haven't maybe existed before. And I think about us. We use the word reconnect as our mission statement and we're very big about that because we don't believe we're like the first person to ever connect you to nature. They've been in nature for a while, but there's that repeat that we want to make space for, of acknowledging our past and making space for the future.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:So that's like, yeah, that just was a name that really touched me when you said that. There was something, when you just said about the reconnect, that I really wanted to respond to. First of all, I think we've always made a mistake in this country in general that when we talk about people's relationship to the environment humans and environment we talk about it as though it's separate, as though we're not already part of nature, as though we're not already part of nature. So how we understand reconnection sometimes is as though it's all externalized, as something we have to do to get it, that it's always in here, we've always got it. So that's why it's like a remembering. It's like you don't have to buy it. You don't have to wait for somebody else to tell you yes, there have to. There's ways within which to express it and show up in it, but you've always had it. Are you breathing? You would need to hear, and so there's a claiming of that as your own right, something that, if I'm lucky, I can take a trip and go to the mountains and do a thing for three days in the mountains, but I can also just go out and take a walk and I'm in it. It's something always available to me and all that other stuff is stuff that we have to work on, like you're saying, like making ourselves visible to everybody else. We have always been there.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:Where do you think black people get? We've always been there and there's a thousand stories of it. Do you? Do you know a society called the american geographical society and they've been around since the early 1800s, like when robin perry went to? Is it the north pole? And see, the south pole? I mean, you know, they give out medals and all this stuff, and they contacted me lately because they're thinking about me for something. I was just like, oh, that's really, really nice. But I started looking up at all their medals. Now, matthew henson y y'all know who he is. No, you don't, but Matthew Henson, I believe it was Robert E Perry, he was the black man that also was first North Pole, matt, thank you, but they gave him a medal in 2009. He did this back and, like, I don't know how many years it's been. What I'm saying is I'm glad they did that. I'm not critiquing them.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:Awareness is just a funny thing. Like we've got a lot of people who look like us who have showed up. Sylvia Stark was this black woman. I believe she was from the Midwest. Back in the late 1800s she went out to California and then she eventually went up to Canada to homestead. Salt Spring Island is this little island off the coast of Vancouver, british Columbia. You can take a ferry over. It's really easy, which I don't done. It's now like 10 000 people and now it's predominantly white. But when sylvia stark got over there she's one of the first women ever to hulkstead and she has all her descendants there, some of which I've met. They have salt spring, has their own money. When I first went there this was maybe like 10 years ago they showed me the beautiful five dollar bill with sylvia stark's image on there a black. Wow Right, I mean. And that's why I was like there's we, we got. We have so many stories like that? Of course we do. Why wouldn't any group of people, but why wouldn't we have them either?
Langston Clark:Right Into America. You know what I mean. Like we got our own money Right. That's amazing to me Even thinking about. Is it connections of what's going on with currency now, with digital coin and bitcoin and all of that stuff, our economic power that we have and how that's tied to nature and the land and all of those things? Yeah, yeah that was deep.
Alex Bailey:Yeah, I mean, I was just gonna say too, I think you're like touching my heart for sure with, like you know, you said even in that, in that last piece, how, how we've always been there, we've been there, we've been there right, and you know, I even think about and my auntie's on this chat, she can verify that what I'm about to tell you. There's three things about to tell you. You know my connecting point what you said about my father, so true, with my grandfather. Grandfather went all the way to world war ii, fought in the pacific as a navy frogman, one of the first black units, came back, didn't even have a gi bill and had to build his own house and, like you talk about the connection point to property, that was his former land ownership, right, but at the second time my grandfather taught you know, our whole family so much with, like, his relationship to nature, like the idea this is a quick side, tangent, but the idea for me, like that black people didn't swim was like, actually not a normalized concept for me, because my grandfather grew up swimming. He talked about swimming all the time he was in the Navy, told me stories. So I didn't understand until I got to high school until I was like I think I was watching Dave Chappelle or something where I was like just running joke about black people not swimming and I was like, oh okay, I guess it's a thing I didn't realize that most of our family, for the most part, knows how to swim. It's part of our yeah, it's part of our, our history and like and someone even talked about with like environmental, like justice and saving the earth and some of y'all black folks can affirm this too on the chat my grandmother literally washed foil.
Alex Bailey:Like she did not play about a lot rears and stuff. Like she washed foil. She was watching paper plates. I think about how much stewardship she actually has. She wasn't like I'm just gonna go just dump stuff because I want to dump it for trash. She was very intentional about using things. How many times are their stories elevated right for communities of color, right? How many times are like it's told that we are? These land stewards are just not centering again the experience, especially of like middle class, what environmentalism looks like, when it may look different based upon class lines.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:And this is always the more. This is always the thing that I'm a little more tentative about saying in a predominantly Black audience. But I think you know, I believe in our collective truth, the truth that we want to agree on what that is, and that's OK. But one of the things I said in the book was I was referencing a book written by two Black psychologists in the 60s Black Rage who talked about you know the politics of the 60s, and now it was black as beautiful black power. We were claiming that for ourselves but also asked the question so are you black enough if you study French cinema and how he says, maybe they were saying, maybe we've shrunk our ledge a little bit. And I have to be honest with you. I've had experience when I tell black people, yeah, I'm backpacking in Nepal, nepal, black people don't go to Nepal, right, you know. And understanding the multilayered set of means behind that, right, that that you know. But also, especially when I was younger one, was I going to lose my membership?
Dr. Carolyn Finney:Mm, hmm you know, you know, you know I'm saying right, right, really, because does that mean I'm not black enough? Because I'm doing these, I like these other things too. Do I have to whip out my eldritch cleaver or my malcolm x, like at the same time? Because I'm diverse, I'm within and freedom for me, the ultimate my ancestors and other people fought and died for, means my freedom to choose Freedom, right To really be free, means that I have the agency and the sense of confidence and who I am and the right to make a choice for myself. Knowing it never diminishes my blackness or anything about me. It only expands who I can be as a human being at the end of the day. And it needs to be true for me and it needs to be true for everybody. Right, it needs to be true. So there's also that place of again. For me it's a woundedness. I mean, you know I got bullied in elementary school right up through high school, but you know who? I got bullied by the black girls that elementary school, right up through high school. But you know who? I got bullied by the black girls that's who bullied me. I know exactly who they are and they bullied me on the regular and they were a small group. It was a predominantly big white. You know high school and because they lived in the working class section of town and I didn't, but they knew I was like my parents are like basically the chauffeur I mean, my parents work there they would call me the N-word on a regular basis in high school. It was a small group of them and it wasn't until I was a senior in high school, because I would avoid it. It stressed me out and of course I got along with a whole lot of people, but I'm going to get along with whoever's going to be my friend, who I can treat me. And they were not treating me. But it wasn't until I was a senior. I walked by my locker and then they all shouted hey, and you know, and I turned around and I said who the f are you calling? They were like I just lost it. After that they were like hey, carolyn, how's it go? And I'm going. Is that all I had to do? Like I had to? Just, you know all that time I just had to because you know I have that in me, right, right, it's not who I want to be on a regular, but I kind of learned a lesson there too, and I had time to think about, you know, their own position in a community. And I, you know what do you do? Like I was doing things that they might not have considered or maybe they couldn't or they didn't know how to see and understand and accept, and none of us have the language to articulate this. This was the 70s, right? So you know, we were coming, we're coming, black Power.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:I was the one with the afro, by the way, who you know. In fourth grade, when I realized my hair couldn't be straight, I told my mother, who was straightening her hair, I said, cut it all off. And she was, like, are you sure? I was like Angela Davis, cut it off. And by high school, I have to say, by the time I was a senior, my parents were, like, are you going to get rid of that afro? You have that afro now for, like why you grew up, actually, my afro, that was the most radical, purest thing I've ever done, because in fourth grade it wasn't coming from anything well thought out. I just thought, well then, let me just go with it and wear the thing that I got, because you know I want the other thing, so I can do this.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:These are dreadlocks, by the way, me too, that, but I I don't know. Yeah, air conversation, whatever, stop, because then I was like, then I went, yeah, then I tried, but anyway, yeah, so there is also something within our own collective, broad, diasporic community I don't know if it's you know, the question of belonging for me as someone who's adopted, you know it's what drives everything I do. I'm wanting to belong, I'm wanting to connect, I'm wanting to feel seen and so, and the question of race and all, and gender and all that is layered on top of it, so it infuses me in a very particular way in my conversations, but I want to belong. Some of the most painful moments, some of them, have been inflicted on me by other black people when I was younger and not knowing how to respond to it because I didn't understand it.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:You know I either. I'm like you know me and Mary and Mitch are getting ready to take each other out on the playground, and I remember that because I just couldn't take it no more. So I slapped her back, but I got in trouble and then the next thing, I know my parents are like we're going to send you to Catholic school around the corner we weren't Catholic but to sing vetoes around the corner because your teacher said your grades are falling but it was never like well. I'm trying to survive because I was doing well, but then that was a bad thing for me to be doing. So I'm trying to hang with the girls and now you're telling me I mean, you know it's complicated and I imagine it's complicated today for younger people it is complicated.
Langston Clark:I want to ask a quick question to Alex, based upon what Dr Shinney is saying, because identity is in a lot of ways rooted in the experiences that you have. Right, work with children, black Outside, camp, founder Boroughs, all of these nonprofits that you have are focused on reconnecting Black children with nature, and so how do you sort of build in experiences that build these affirming Black identities in the outdoors, so that children nowadays don't experience what Dr Finney had to experience back in her day when she was young? Because I'm thinking like even now, like I had an intern that was working with me and I was like yo, we got the black outside conversation, dr Finney, here they go outside, I'm not talking about to the playground, they go outside, like in the outdoors. She's like that's cool, I'm not doing it, you know. So I want to hear from you how you make those experiences affirming experiences, and then maybe, dr Finney, you could talk about how, as Black adults, how do we get more of these affirming experiences for our Black identities in the office?
Alex Bailey:Yeah, wow, you passed me the mic. I feel a little pressured. But no, that's a great question, langston. I think it kind of definitely ties a lot to Dr Finney and that question of imagination and making space and also acknowledging some of our past. Right, our team does an amazing job like really thinking intentionally about like each experience that we provide and not that every experience is perfect. So we had one last month that was not the most ideal backpack trip, but all that to say, like you know, we're we're really trying to be intentional about that idea of cultural relevancy right To me, you know why I don't think, when we had our like kind of preview call for this and mentioned this.
Alex Bailey:But you know, I worked at a predominantly white summer camp and that's what really sparked this connection of oh yeah, of course nature is like a good place to be, but wait a second and this has like tremendous impact on youth. When I think about my summer camp experience, I had a blast at that camp, it was really great. But I knew that if I dropped off you know 20 to 25, you know black youth there they would have fun Right of the 25, you know black youth there they would have fun, right, but I know the curriculum. It wasn't relevant right To what they're experiencing. And just this idea of this idea of like what programming really connects with me. I think so much. I say this I said this on a summer camp session call once.
Alex Bailey:I said hey, have you ever thought about all summer camps? Do this whole big thing? They always have some big story, right. A lot of times it's cultural appropriation of indigenous folks, right, some big story that they're telling and retelling, or even just a fictional thing part of their camp. And I asked this you know this white camp that is trying to become more diverse. I said do you have any stories at all that feature black folks as characters? Yeah, right, like any at all.
Alex Bailey:And you don't know how much of a difference that makes for so many of our youth to see themselves, even if it is in an imaginative way, in the outdoors, even if it is just in a theater play during summer camp, even if it is just like. You know, we, uh, one of our summer campers came with this idea about how, like black bears are black, like are really black, right, and like just that imagination that she sparked at age 11, right, and so it was so powerful to for us, like we think about our I mean really trying to almost remap and trying to reimagine, right, making space for this idea that that you can see yourself here. This is not just a white thing, not just a white thing at all. Like. This is a human thing that we're all connected to.
Alex Bailey:You've been in the outdoors for centuries and centuries our people have, so that's like what we think about, a lot with programming and even just like everything to the T from you know, especially our summer camp, like all of our chants are mostly from historically black colleges, right, and so it's just like little things like that that we try to tweak.
Alex Bailey:And then, on top of that, you know, our Bloom Project does a great job really tying the environmental justice piece to, like the lived experiences of our youth. It's very community centered. So in a way, they analyze it is like by, you know, analyzing lyrics from Tupac and hip hop artists and then thinking about their outdoor experience of, like, actually gardening right after listening to that, right, it's like building those bridges. So you know, and I think about your work, dr Fee, I would pass it to you. It's just like you had such a good chapter about representation and I always think about that so much because it's like for some of our youth, they literally have not like they've seen like themselves doing this, like informally Right, but not in, like it's not blown up on media, it's not in stores. They're not seeing themselves represented.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:So two things I wanted to say. One when I'm working with students in particular, I will no matter what their background is. I have them all write an environmental autobiography for three pages, four pages. I said everyone's got one. It's your story, you know, whatever story you want to tell, where you, if you went to camp, where you grew up, your mom, your grandmother's garden, doesn't matter what it is I said you can't, it'll be the easiest thing you get. But I'm asking them to do it for a couple of reasons. One, for them to be really clear about where it is they stand, that they do have a relationship to nature that initially got constructed by whatever their childhood experience. It doesn't matter if you're in a city or suburb or rural area. It actually nature's everywhere, it's just. But you, you had that first experience. It also shaped your bias, and bias is not good or bad, it's just bias, it's a perspective, it's a subjective view. So I'm asking you to take time with it.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:When I was doing Black Bases, White Bases, both as a book and as a dissertation, and I interviewed Black people, one of the things that a number of them said to me, especially the older Black people, and I would say so when I say environment, what does it mean to you? Older black people, and I would say so, when I say environment, what does it mean to you, they would say, well, nobody's ever asked me that before, and it was always really moving to me, right, Because sometimes it would be kind of they feel kind of intimidated, Like, oh, I don't have a story. And I'm like, what do you mean? Are you breathing? And I'd say, of course you have it, Right. But I understood because, right, Nobody's ever asked you that before. Remember, I talked about not seeing our stories on the library shelves. Nobody's ever asked you that before. But that doesn't mean you don't have one. And so my thing was now I want to listen to everybody, like I said. So I turned it into this thing where it's like you've got a story, but I want you to start to own your story about what it is. So, again, it's, it's it's internal, it's not always external. We're working on all that other stuff to change right, but meanwhile you can be just clear about what that is.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:The other example that I wanted to give was so some of you may have remembered in the early 2000s, Alice Randall, who's a Black author, she's Black writer. She's now down at Vanderbilt in Tennessee In 2003,. She wrote a book. So remember the book Margaret Mitchell. They she wrote a book. So remember the book Margaret Mitchell.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:They made a big movie, Gone with the Wind. Remember Gone with the Wind and the book Gone with the Wind, right? So Gone with the Wind was about the South, it was about reconstruction, it was about civil war, all through the lens of this white woman, Scarlett O'Hara, and her privileged self right and all the ways within which slavery and Black people were used as this kind of backdrop to her larger experience. Right, Well, there were so many things for me problematic about the story. So Alice Randall, the Black author, decided well, what if that story was told from a Black woman's perspective? And so she wrote a book called the Wind Done Gone. And the Wind Done Gone was about Scarlett O'Hara's mulatto half sister, Sainara.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:I bought that book and ate that up like for breakfast. I was like what? And it blew my mind because what she was doing was saying imagine the story told a different perspective, from a black perspective. What changed? It's not about resistance to the original story, it's not about even saying whether or not that story is bad or good. Why waste your time? But it's about imagining on a prism of human experience. What if you imagine it from someone else's experience? How would it change? So I took that idea and I thought well, everybody's always talking about John Muir and I lived out in California for eight years and you can't talk about conservation or the environment without hearing John Muir right Everywhere. The conservationist back in the late 1800s, he's partly responsible for the national parks. He was the one that Roosevelt wanted to talk to and also, if you read some of John Muir's works, he was racist.
Alex Bailey:And I'm very racist Very.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:He was, but he wasn't only racist. That's the thing is the complexity of who. He was deeply committed to nature. He had some really interesting ideas. He, you know, he was deeply committed to that, those ideas, and for me it was that's what made it interesting, you know. And when I met last summer when the articles were coming out in the Washington Post that John Muir is racist Sierra Club says John Muir is racist I'm like some of us have been saying that for a really long time, but okay, but when his great great grandson, robert Hanna, said would you do have a conversation with me, a podcast?
Dr. Carolyn Finney:Because he was deeply distressed by it all and he also didn't want to respond to the mainstream media say, yes, we're so angry because he says, yeah, no, there's some truth, there's truth in there and I want to, let's have a podcast. And one of the very first things I said to Robert Hedden in the podcast was he was introducing me to his audience, which was predominantly white, you know, and saying you know, I invited Carolyn Dr Finney on the show today because, you know, the media has been trying to get me and my family's attention. My phone's been buzzing off the hook like something happened to a member of my family and I cut in and I said that's because something did happen to a member of your family. That's for me. What I always want to remember is that it is connected maybe not directly to me, but it isn't. So I said I'm going to take one of John Muir's works and imagine if a Black woman wrote it and I took his.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:The title is A Thousand Mile Walk Through the Gulf in 1867. And that's when he spent a year walking through Southern states, made it all the way to Cuba. He was looking at impact of war on the landscape. I put out quotes, I was reading it for people showing his quotes where he makes lovely observations about nature and then racist things he says about Black people. I lifted it verbatim. I said you know, hold them next to each other, because that's the reality of our world. It's not one or the other, it's actually. It's interrelated all the time. Right. And then I said what if a black woman wrote the book? So now, instead of A Thousand Mile Walk Through the Gulf in 1867, it's going to be called A Thousand Mile Walk Was Rough in 1867. And her name is Sojourner Washington Douglas.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:And then what I did was I pulled out quotes that I made up. I pulled out quotes that I made up and I said things like she escaped. She was born on this plantation in Louisiana and she escaped. She had to use the back roads because she was too dark to pass as white when she made her escape. But then I pulled out real quotes about lynchings that were taking place for real, that actually were happening, to make the point of her ducking and weaving through a hostile landscape. At the same time, europe was, you know, saying racist things about black people and enjoying the sunset. You know to understand that we are all of those things that make up this country, not one or the other.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:And for me, at the end of the day, I don't have to cancel John Murad. I actually don't want to. I don't need to cancel anybody out to make space for myself. That's the beauty. I don't got to do it like it's been done, and so that's also the reimagining. But he becomes relevant on my terms. It's the relationship of it, it's the idea that there's a lot of things he put out there that have influenced me in unintentional, positive ways. I think about commitment. I also think about his privilege and being a white man on a particular text, all of it. I can call all of it out. He's a whole human being. The other thing that I learned is that he changed and that, my friends, is the powerful moment. That's where I want to be.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:My father tried to get me to read the autobiography of Malcolm X as a kid, and you know you all have to miss this sometimes when your parent tries to get you to do something. That's why you're not going to do it. So I just didn't do it. I was like stop talking to me about Malcolm. So I read the autobiography of Malcolm X when I was like 32 and I was living in Nepal. So I'm in some village in Nepal. I'm like it's time I'm going to read the autobiography. I mean, I knew Malcolm X was, but I read the thing that blew my mind and I wish I had to quote my heart, but I don't. And I wish I had the quote by heart, but I don't. I'd have to pull it up.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:About Malcolm X was so much I'd heard about him, was the anger he felt, the hatred he felt, all of that, all of that, the pain he experienced. But at the end, right before that man's life was taken, he actually makes a quote that I'm for human beings, I am for all human beings and I'm going to do whatever I can. Holy, I was like that is that journey. He just did a three. Like he came hard, just went like the Grinch, three times too big, you know, like he hit a place that if he had survived I can't imagine how powerful he would have been. Because that is actually the place of change Full circle, held himself, held it out, the possibility and the potential, and he lost nothing of himself in the process. I don't believe he forgot his rage.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:Betty Reed Soskin, who's the oldest park ranger in this country, the African-American woman who's been honored by President Obama and all the other she's 98 now. Betty Reed, rosie, the River and National Park. When I talked to her she said you know that, yeah, she stood on a river of rage for a long time and she had to learn how to make that adjustment. It doesn't mean I tell people I have no problem getting angry, but anger is not where I want to live. I use it to fuel the way that I think and come at something. As a friend of mine said, I can get steely when I need to, but I'm coming from a place of love in the most expansive, strongest sense of the word. I really kick ass in order to get there.
Langston Clark:So, dr Sunny, I want to do a slight pivot, but still, we're going to do some things you were saying and then, after I ask this question, we're going to open it up to people in the chat to type their questions. You talked a lot about black women writers writing these fiction. One of the most popular, probably the best fiction writer science fiction writers of all time is Octavia Butler. She fits into this category of Afrofuturism, but not all of her stories are about Black people in our space, right, and so I'm wondering if this I don't want to call it a buzzword, but I think it's a budding like cultural phenomenon within our community how do we connect this idea of Black people in the future, black people in a time that has yet to exist? How do we make that connection with Black people being in the outdoors? Because it's not Wakanda, it's not like. It doesn't have to be like crazy technology transforming robots and all of that stuff. It could just be us in nature the way that we naturally are supposed to be.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:That's a great question. You're giving me some pause. So, as a person who just loves science fiction generally, especially film, I'm just, you know, I love the idea of the possible, you know, and I think some of the best science fiction roots itself in some strong science, in order to explore what might become possible out there. So when I think about your question, you know, I don't think it's technology is one way we can go, but I think it's about transcendence. And when I think about being in the outdoors and nature, what do we transcend? So, you know, when I think about time travel, when I think about, you know, a lot of the elements of science fiction that we talk about. Transcending, you know how we move through time is one. You know, the idea that we can mind read, the idea that we can telekinesis, we can control things with our mind. I actually think those are a form of transcendence. And so, collectively, as Black people, what are the things, if we got to choose, that we'd like to transcend? And then what does that look like? You know, and I don't think there's any one answer. I just think that's. There's a multiplicity of worlds, there's a multiplicity of answers and the way that we can be what, who and what can we be? How are we intentional about that transcendence, transcendence when I think about that in terms of science fiction, I think about you.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:There's also risk. You know, when we think about you're trying something that's not known. You're either going into something that's not known or trying something that's not known. And you know, there's so many of those moments when I'm watching them in the movies, like do you remember the movie Stargate? Because that was just on again and I and I started watching it. Stargate, right, which is this I? They found this thing that they can walk into and be into this other place. But in all those moments, really, we don't linger there. But how does somebody make that? They just walk through all Stargate, like you don't even know where they're going to be, like there's no option to get in touch, like what's happening right now? They're just doing the thing. When I think of transcendence, what are we letting go of in order to transcend who we are, in order to be the thing we can't see? Yet that's it. I don't think it's about knowing what that is, because that takes out all the fun of creation.
Langston Clark:The interesting thing about Stargate, though not to cut you off is that I had to jump in about Stargate?
Dr. Carolyn Finney:Go ahead.
Langston Clark:That Stargate was a great movie of my childhood. Yeah, okay, see, you know those. I think it was like these Egyptologist science digging in the dirt and the ground in Egypt. Wait, they had to be in nature to do that. Yeah, that's not. That requires you to be in a natural environment. Yeah, self-imagining ourselves in things that we can't even imagine or fathom. Yet it requires us to be in nature, because you never know what you're going to find out there. Yes, next, like to me, like when you said that, like that's the transcendent thing.
Alex Bailey:So, yeah, me and nature is a part of us, maybe transcending, yes, yeah, that's deep, that's so deep and you know, I do just want to make space really quickly just to acknowledge like it just makes you think a lot about. So I've personally been reflecting, obviously, on the idea of rest in the last year, you know, and stillness and pause, obviously, given what's happening in our world. And you know, there's one post I follow in that ministry I have some of y'all follow it. I think I had a system that had Nas, right, and they had a post I think it was recently where they just talked about this idea of like you know, you have to cultivate rest in order to, you know, cultivate this, ask each other like, how are you, how have you been resting lately? Like, right, because we have, we're, you know, I feel like what you talked about, that idea of transcendence for black led outdoor education programs, because I've never seen I've seen like predominantly black camps, right, but I've never seen one that owns a you know thousand acres and has a summer camp that's full of black kids all year round and things like that.
Alex Bailey:There's definitely maybe some in pockets, but they're not black led and founded, right, and the black folks don't own the land as far as I know, right, I say all that to say we're trying to imagine or transcend into something that hasn't we haven't had access to, at least in this time of our lives. And so, yeah, I just that really spoke to me, as you know someone who helps lead. You know someone who helps lead, you know, and found a black led outdoor education group and I mean I just want to shout out there's definitely some black educators, you know, in the chat right now Nicole Gris, sierra, like a lot of others. I just want to acknowledge black women who are doing this imagination too, and now, like that is just so important.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:So I just and let me say too because I just saw that, nicole, when she said the daydreaming and last night I was in a conversation, a public conversation with Caitlin Sullivan Tutris, who's both a black and Lakota artist. She's 75. I've known her for 40 years and one of the things we were talking about the importance of having time to dream and vision and that understanding that is an active part of the creative process, right, it's an active part of the rest. That, alex, I think that you're pointing to that it is not a it is not a doing nothing moment, like nothing's happening, but that in order to give that space for something to come forward, in order to create space for us to be rested and be aware, right, that we have to actually make space for the vision before deciding what it is we're trying to do, even right, that you know, because sometimes we kind of hop to that right away and to allow space for something to emerge there. Yeah, I'm with you.
Alex Bailey:Yes, I've seen in the chat Sabbath rest like that concept. But yes, that's really good.
Langston Clark:So I asked a question from the LinkedIn chat that we had going on, and it's from Brian Fertig, who I think works in the environmental space, and he's asking a question about bridging the gap and connecting Black folk, I think, like organizationally, to careers in environmentalism and careers in the outdoors. How do you create the space for that within what I think would be predominantly white-dominated organizations? So let me reframe that, because most of our audience is Black. Speaking to, maybe, a Black college student who's a freshman in college and doesn't know anything about environmentalism or the outdoor field or whatever that is, I'm not all that knowledgeable. How do you begin to have those conversations with them so that they can sort of begin to have these?
Dr. Carolyn Finney:transcendent experiences? That's a great question and you know I had to start answering that from my own experience of being, you know, in a position of as a faculty member and when people, when students, come through my either my class or they see me, that sometimes you know there's been some surprise to see me sitting in the environmental center. You know black and brown be like, you know, which is a good thing, and I was like come on in. And one of the things that I do is I dispel any notion that there's one way to do it. First of all and I'm just saying and those who know me know that this is true I'm all about what I'm wearing. I may not be living in the city, but I dress like I am. I don't look like I'm about ready to go on a hike. If it's time to go on a hike, I can get ready to do it. You know I got my fleece, but that's not how I roll, and so part of what I wanted to spell is that there's any one way to look and be number one. Number two I tend to talk about the fact that you know I'm, I'm my heart's in the arts, that's where I started, that's where that's, and I'd taken that with me the entire time, and the backpacking was part of that in school. And there's a whole lot of different things that I like. You can be complex because we are complex. That's what you're bringing to bear. Where do you like to show up? And often the discovery comes in all the different ways you can engage environment and nature. You can do it through recreation, you can do it through science and knowledge, you can do it through writing, you can do it through visual arts, you can do it through technology. You can I mean everything, you can do it through anything, and so my interest is in finding out who they are and, again, finding out what interests you, Because I've had students, black and brown and white, all say like I didn't know you could put those two things together, like you could put this with this, and I'm like, yes, you can, you know.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:So it's getting them to see that the field is wide open, meaning a common thing I say all the field is wide open, meaning a common saying that I a common thing I say all the time is I don't want to play in somebody's sandbox, I want to play on the beach and I remain that, say that the beach has so much more to offer, why would I want to go to anybody's sandbox? Half the time it can't see me anyway. So I say to them you know, you know, it's asking questions about themselves, like, so I don't have to be direct and be like so what is it about nature? I'm all about backdoor strategy and gets this.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:So what are you like? Like, what do you when you came to school? What are you here doing? What you know? What makes you happy? What's the thing that you get excited about? Tell me something. And sometimes I have to talk to them a little while and I'll say well, you know what that makes me think of. Have you thought of and I always I'm bringing in science fiction movies and they can't believe I know that. Or this piece of music, and I'm like yes, you know what you got at your disposal, everything. So what you're actually building is the ability to see that, to be rigorous about the choices you make. What is the intention you have in the work that you're doing? How can you be more connected and remain wholly yourself, but even more fully as you were before? You connect to them by reminding them who they are. That's how you do it.
Alex Bailey:That's deep.
Alex Bailey:I mean, it makes me think a lot, even for our organization, right, like we definitely have some amazing folks of color volunteer with those fat experience backpacking things like that.
Alex Bailey:But the backbone of a lot of some of our programs are, like you know, first thing we ask like do you care about you know, youth, do you care about our black youth?
Alex Bailey:Do you care deeply, especially for a kid that looks like you, that maybe hasn't experienced these things?
Alex Bailey:Right, and it's so one of my favorite experiences also, just like taking folks who haven't done some of the experiences, like we get to do with kids backpacking camping by our volunteers for the first time, with the kids, and those are some of our most powerful experiences that we have, where they're like experiencing this alongside it and they're not in it for, like, oh, I just wanted to really want them to go to this state park, right, it's like like they're in it because it's like, man, I care about this young kid, the young Jamaica, right, that's learning to fish for the first time. Sure, I'll do it, I'll learn alongside him. And, yeah, I love what you said like kind of that approach of and they think about that as an idea tied to transcendence right Langston, and kind of like the idea there of this black outdoor space space. I love that it's a beach and the connecting and entry points aren't just one way through, you know, visiting a state park or one potential career.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:Remember, you know, in the book when I talk about Brenda Palms Barber, the Black woman in Chicago who started that art. The company called Sweet Beginnings that makes honey and honey related products, and part of the reason she started that right, love me some, brenda Palms Barber was because there were a lot of previously incarcerated black men and women, young men and women who come out of jail and couldn't get a job. So she worked with the community to come up with these ideas and they did came up with all these ideas. In the end she got this idea for making urban honey and honey related products.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:But one of the things that she told me she says when she would interview one of these young men and women this is something I have often said in talks, but I use it as an example she would say, hi, so you're looking for a job. And these young men and women say yes, and she goes, and so you were in jail. And they'd say, yeah, they weren't feeling so proud about that. And she said, well, what were you in jail for? And she said usually they'd say for selling drugs. And then she would do a dramatic pause and, well, were you good at it? And they'd kind of go until I got caught. She said, well, what were you good at? And they would say things like well, I understood the quality of my product, I understood the value of my customer base. And she would just say, well, that's fantastic, and we're going to transfer that knowledge over here. And what was so beautiful about that was they weren't empty vessels that needed to be told and filled up.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:They actually already were whole.
Alex Bailey:Yeah.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:Doesn't mean there wasn't new things for them to learn, but there was a recognition like, oh, you got that. That's instant confidence. You just gave instant. That was instant confidence. Like they had to learn the life cycle of the bee Everybody in the company did.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:Two years after I interviewed and met her, she invited me out to talk to a group of about 100 people in the community. But there was also one of these young black men. He got up to say a few words and when he got up there he was in a suit and he looked kind of uncomfortable and he had his head down and the first thing he said was I never knew green could be so good to me. I mean, I broke down in tears that we all cry because he was suddenly part of it. If she had come to him and be like we're a green business and what we're looking to do is promote young black people who've just come out of jail, she would never do that.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:I'm making to make a point to being dramatic, but she recognized, like it was a cool, who is this person, who are you? Because it's also about relationship, it's also about trust is embedded in there and within the trust there's an understanding that there's space. I'm not trying to get you to be like me and do what I do out here because I know it's fabulous and beautiful, even if it is. What I'm trying to get you to consider is that there is a beach beyond the sandbox.
Alex Bailey:Wow.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:And you got some stuff. I know you got some stuff. So let's just let's do some discovery. What's some of your stuff? I'll give you some of my stuff. Let's go out here and play on the beach.
Alex Bailey:That is so good. It just oh gosh, you're just speaking to so many points and kind of where I always like bump my head against the wall with not all, not all, but definitely some predominantly white led organizations that are we're trying to engage more youth of color, quote, unquote. It's like just come to our program and it's very much like we're going to come to our program. It's so great, we'll fill you up so you can be like us. Right, it's not actually caring about the whole vessel. I love that. That point, that point, that was awesome.
Langston Clark:I know you got one other question right. One other question, and I think it's good that you talk about not treating our children as empty vessels. Our children as empty vessels, and one of the ways that children gain experiences without actually being in those experiences is to read books. And so, dr Finney, as a final question, if you were writing another book about Miami, go ahead, talk about it. And you also have the documentary that's coming out too. I don't know if we already mentioned that, so if you could tell us what else you have coming out next, that would be great.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:The book I'm really glad that I wrote Black Faces, white Spaces. It wasn't everything I wanted it to be. It was my first attempt. I'd never had a child, but I imagine it's like you have your first child right, it was like, ah, and then you have it, and so you're always going to love it, even if you can see a little bit of its faults. But that's OK, you know, it's there and it's opened up so many doors for me.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:But the book I really wanted to write because I was embedded in academia and they fought me on that I wanted to make it accessible so anybody could read it, which isn't something that people in academia wanted me to do. And so the book that I want to write now is I call it creative nonfiction, but taking the story of growing up on the land. So I won't tell you the first half of the title, I'm just going to tell you the second half, which is the geography of a black imagination. I'm leaving out the first half on purpose, but I wanted to take imagine my parents' journey as Black people in this country, on the land in place, on the estate. You know questions of belonging and identity. You know how we each create a map of our world right, we create a map and that map in part is based on what we think, we understand and we know what we think is possible and how. My map of the world, compared to my parents, is so much larger and wider than that and so I want to ask questions of about race, land belonging, identity. I was adopted, so I want to look at DNA, like really, when we think about blood and blood in the soil and blood relationship, like what does that mean in this larger conversation of kinship to also nature and non-human and each other and the whole, you know sort of Afrofuturism part, and what is that transcendence look like in terms of what becomes possible? So, and I can work out a lot of my own stuff that's so really honest is my own healing and my family. That's also part of it. It's like I know I've got a lot of layers in there, but that's what I'm doing with that. And the documentary is so how I want to explain it, because it's not my documentary, but that in working on the one-woman show at the New York Botanical Gardens about two years ago, I gave a talk at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado and there were a bunch of us me and Teresa, james Mills, jose Gonzalez you know they were the focus that year.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:So it was, you know, film directors and everybody but the theme was equity. So they invited a bunch of us to come talk to a predominantly white, well-heeled audience about equity. Robin DiAngelo, who wrote White Fragility, was also there right. So we were all on the stage together at different times telling our story and I got up and my piece. I called it Whose Story Counts. And so behind me I tell the story. It went well, whatever.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:Last summer, after George Floyd got murdered and Christian Cooper had a skin weaponized against him and I wrote that piece for the Guardian, this woman, a white film director named Irene Taylor, who has won Emmys, who's been Oscar nominated, reached out to me and she said will you get on a Zoom call with me? And I said sure, she goes. I saw you tell that. You know, tell that story. She goes. And I'm right now doing a documentary for HBO on trees and the way that I'm going to tell the story is I'm going to pick a few stories of different trees, but the people in relationship to them and she said and I realized I didn't have, I thought about you said whose story can? I had nothing in here on black people and I just wanted to talk with you about you know, if you willing to give me some ideas of what I could think of. And I said, oh sure, I'm happy to do that.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:Now the obvious would be to talk about lynching in trees and then, before she could even, she says, oh, I don't think I'm the right person to do that. I said, and again, black people aren't only the bad things that happen to them. So I told her a much smaller story that I think I mentioned one line in the book in Black Faces where I said for my parents' 40th wedding anniversary, my father gave my mother a weeping cherry tree and when they left the estate it had been in the ground like 10, 15 years so they couldn't take it with them because the roots are there. And I'm telling her the story about this tree. She liked it so much. She says I think I want, can I do your family like about being on this estate and old movies, everything.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:So in the end and she was originally going to do a global thing and tell all these stories she decided in part. She said, because looking at going back and looking at land ownership of that estate. You know, because you know native people were on it before anybody else. Right, to really go back and think about that. She says I think I just want to focus on North America four or five stories in North America and your family is going to be one of those stories, because there's a deeper story. This is two pictures I want to show you. This picture was taken in 2003 when my parents had to leave the estate. So the weeping cherry tree is what you're seeing right behind them, right?
Dr. Carolyn Finney:So when I was talking to the New York Botanical Gardens and the film director, the New York Botanical Gardens and the film director, the New York Botanical Gardens was saying to me you know, I said there's a land trust on here. You know, because we want to get on the property. How can we do it? There's new owners there that we don't even know. And the New York Botanical Gardens says, well, we're an institution, we've got power, we could get access and maybe we could get a sampling of that tree. Bring it back to the New York Botanical Gardens and tell the story of your family. And I was so deeply moved I was like, yes, yes, yes, this is great.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:So they reached out to the Westchester Land Trust and then the three of us were emailing you know, can we get permission? Can we get permission? And back in December the Land Trust said you know, we get legally, or we're allowed to get on the state once a year to check everything. Show us a picture of where the tree is, so we know what to look for. So here it is right. So you can see the tree there next to a fuchsia, hydrangea bush. But there's the weeping cherry tree which isn't far from the house we lived in. The house is right in front of that, basically, and I sent them this picture so they know where to look, because it's been, you know, 18 years. This is the picture he sent back. So it's wintertime, but this is the picture he sent back. The whole thing's been landscaped. The tree is gone.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:So when I got this picture just after New Year's, for two days, I was seriously devastated. I was angry. Like talk about angry. I was angry, I was devastated. I said this is what happens. The only proof that my family had even been there, that my parents had been there, was that tree. Only proof that my family had even been there, that my parents had been. There was that tree and it just looks like they just landscaped that whole section. The old new owner knew about that tree because he took that picture of my parents in front of it, but he then sold the land again. You know, there's no plaque or anything, it's just gone, yeah, but out.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:And then I told the film director and she was devastated too. I sent her the picture. She said oh my god, oh my god, I can't believe this is what's happening. What are we going to do? Because suddenly we had this plan. We were going to go to the estate. They were going to see me next to the tree near Protelgo Gardens taking a sample Beautiful, happy, romantic ending of the story. But it took me three days.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:After getting angry and depressed, I said wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:This is actually the truth. So then I reframed and, going back to the director, said this is a truth. And she agreed. So, multiple conversation, new York Botanical Gardens. And I said and what I want to do is the land trust is on board and even the brand new owners who had avoided responding to our requests, are now open to the conversation, responding to our requests are now open to the conversation. So now what I want is that they will let me plant a new tree, but now everybody is accountable the new owners, the land trust, new York Botanical Gardens, the filmmaker who's telling the story, as well as myself, because you know what? Black people have been accountable to our stories for thousands of years, which doesn't mean we can't get better at it, but we've been accountable. The challenge for me in this country is to make other people accountable too, because it's not just our stories, it's everyone's story, right, and until everyone is accountable and knows what it feels like, I don't believe we're going to get that much further ahead. So that's where we are now.
Langston Clark:That was good.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:One more time, can you tell us the name of the documentary so that, when it comes out, yes, so it's got a tentative, it's HBO and it's slated for 2022, but the tentative title is Hidden in Plain Sight. Yes, and she's got four or five stories. One of them will be my family and, believe me, we're going to stay friends and connected. So when it's time, when it's coming out, you will know, because I'll be like it's coming out and I'm just you know for me?
Dr. Carolyn Finney:I'm nervous because I'll be like it's coming out and I'm just, you know, for me, I'm nervous about they want to film part of me doing the one woman show which I'm workshopping to be part of it, because they want my voice to be part of what books and bookends that. So I want to say this to everyone, to say what really moves me is the film director who gets it, is using her power and position and, like you know, and she meets me every time with is the film director who gets it, is using her power and position and she meets me every time with respect. There is no appropriation. She's just like, wow, she's creative and doing her thing, but she's coming at me in relationship, in right relationship.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:New York Botanical Gardens is like we're giving you money, we're going to give you space. Please come for three weeks. You want to workshop your show here? We love it, do it, and I'm not naive enough not to think that it doesn't serve them too. But why shouldn't it serve us both in a way that moves us all collectively forward differently, and I may actually get a chance to return home to a place I haven't been able to step foot on since 2003.
Langston Clark:Wow, fantastic I'll say that for sharing all of that with us. I think that's a great ending to the story and I think, a happy ending in the grand scheme of things, with how you reframed maybe what what seemed like a loss into something that makes a collective responsibility about the black story, which is not something that we we hear all the time, even thinking about the resistance to having black history month in some cases. Yeah, that that in a lot of ways, everyone can be a steward of our stories and that everyone should get the opportunity to be a steward of the earth and the outdoors environmentalism. So me and Aliceice, thank you for being here and also we have I have to say this that I I do this monthly, once or twice a month, and since we've started taking donations to support black businesses, to support this business, this time around, all of the money that we raise is going to Black Outside and it's the most money that we have ever raised.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:Oh, my God, it's fantastic.
Langston Clark:That's over $1,500. And you know we appreciate you being here to support what Alex is doing, because I know that some people came just to see you and even had a conversation with a young woman who's here named Danica, who works for Cirrus Innovations, which is one of our sponsors today oh, she doesn't mind me saying this she said that although she's never met you, you were still a mentor to her, and so I think that there are a lot of people.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:Danica, we're going to meet. We're going to meet. I love that and you know, I think of it as a friend who of mine said, it's the modeling, what we, what becomes possible right. And I have to. I recognize, if people are looking at me, I I'm that there may be something there resonant, but I want to say that it's a relationship. It's not. You know, I'm just a little bit farther down the road, that's all. I'm just a little bit farther down the road, and so I'm looking to and I like thinking of us all kind of walking, like this kind of walking, like this, and so my learning continues. The affirmation getting that for me is an affirmation that serves me. That's really important, because I don't always get that affirmation. I get some affirmation, but in some spaces not so much. So I really appreciate that. Thank you, danica.
Alex Bailey:Wow, that's amazing.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:And Langston and Alex you too. All thanks to you, danica Wow, that's amazing. And Langston and Alex you too.
Langston Clark:All thanks to you, Dr Finney.
Alex Bailey:Yeah, all thanks to you, for sure.
Dr. Carolyn Finney:Give you two some serious props. Did you notice audience? They never once called me Carolyn, like they just kept that Dr Finney going.
Alex Bailey:Oh, yeah, yeah, I was like I just saw the call, yeah, I was like he's right, yeah, no, the call. Yeah, I was right, he's right, yeah, no, we, of course. I was like I don't even feel weird dude saying that yeah, no, of course, and we just like I just want to really quickly, before everyone hops off, echo what langston said. I mean, you really have been an inspiration, like a role model to us, and I think about the power of stories, right and I say this a lot that it really sharing stories, sharing perspectives, is a gift that you don't have to give, and so you've provided this gift. And what's so beautiful is how this gift has had ripple effects on so many organizations, even in people and thinkers and decision makers and organizations like Black Outside, and slowly has ripple effects on the kids that the kids that we serve. So I just want to thank you for that.
Langston Clark:Thank you for joining this edition of Entrepreneurial Appetite. If you liked the episode, you can support the show by becoming one of our founding 55 patrons, which gives you access to our live discussions and bonus materials, or you can subscribe to the show. Give us five stars and leave a comment.