The Resonance of Anti-Black Violence in the Great Outdoors

Abstract

The events of 2020 reached a fever pitch with the May 25th murder of George Floyd, but earlier on the same morning, a chance encounter between dogwalker Amy Cooper and birding enthusiast Christian Cooper also laid bare enduring social relations. As video footage of the encounter spread across social media, it sparked both public outrage and discourse regarding Black nature enthusiasts. Employing a historical-interpretive method informed by conversation analysis and guided by “whiteness as property,” I assemble news articles, social media posts, and video footage to analyze the events in Central Park and their aftermath. To unsettle existing paradigms regarding who we imagine are entitled to the great outdoors, I identify potential collaborative partners across scales who can further the goals of education, recruitment, and visibility for Black nature enthusiasts and professionals. I demonstrate how expanding environmental justice to include anti-Black racial violence allows us to recognize that the specter of lynching defies geographic boundaries, diffusing across space and time, occasionally coalescing to defend white privilege and historic racial orders.

1. Introduction

For many, the turbulence of 2020 promised a racial reckoning in the United States and an opportunity to leverage large-scale mobilizations into tangible social change. Similar moments had occurred before, such as the 2014 Ferguson, Missouri protests, for example, but the convergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, high-profile police killings, and Donald Trump’s ascent to the Oval Office seemed to be a distinctive inflection point in the nation’s history. The tinder match proved to be the May 25th murder of George Floyd, an African American man, at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin amid a crowd of onlookers and fellow officers. Protests erupted throughout the country and quickly spread around the world with demonstrations and marches reaching Paris and Rio de Janeiro. But in the early hours of May 25th, a chance encounter between dogwalker Amy Cooper and avid birdwatcher Christian Cooper (no relation) would also spark public outrage and provide an opportunity to discuss the challenges faced by African American nature enthusiasts.

Using the Central Park Birdwatching Incident, I ponder Wright’s (2021) call to expand our understanding of environmental justice to include anti-Black violence writing:

For Black people in the United States, the relationship between land, environment, and race, has often been a violent panoramic…And though…there are examples of joyous relations between Black communities and nature, these relationships remain circumscribed by anti-Black acts of violence [1] (p. 791).

I posit that this expansion of environmental justice creates a critical lens through which to consider the impact that lynching has had (and continues to have) on African Americans’ ability to freely engage with natural landscapes [2,3]. I argue that although lynching is one of the most sinister forms of placemaking, its shadow has spread beyond the borders of lynching sites. Lynching’s ability to diffuse culturally has created a specter that both empowers whites and haunts African Americans, having a profound impact on enduring social relations and who we imagine is entitled to and safe in the great outdoors [4].

In this study, I seek to answer the following research questions:

• How does the expansion of environmental justice to include racial violence highlight systemic barriers to equitable engagement with the outdoors and natural landscapes?
• How can the Central Park Birdwatching Incident explain why lynching, a phenomenon imagined to be dead, rural, and Southern, haunts African Americans even in a northern, urban space?
• What are some actionable steps, with a keen eye to collaboration across scales, to unsettle race-based social barriers to deep engagement with nature in an era of democratic and federal uncertainty?

The study provides a historical narrative connecting relevant literature to an illustrative contemporary example of an applied grassroots movement. Grounded in the work of ecologists, geographers, and tourism scholars, I demonstrate how a chance encounter can be rife with 400 years of racial order predicated on white privilege and supremacy. Section 2 explores existing literature that undergirds the study’s intellectual perspective and details how conversation analysis informs the study’s historical-interpretative approach. Then, Section 3 describes the Central Park Birdwatching Incident and Black Birders Week, a virtual grassroots event created in response. Section 4 analyzes the events guided by Harris’s (1995) “whiteness as property” and provides some actionable steps for unsettling racial barriers. Section 5 offers final thoughts for consideration [5].

2. Materials and Methods

2.1. Linking Trauma, Memory, and Environmentalism

The study’s methods, conversation, and historical-interpretive analysis mandate a firm grounding in empirical research that contextualizes the foregrounded events. In the following literature review, I reveal the linkages between geotrauma, lynching, and the whiteness of environmentalism. This section acts as not just a theoretical backdrop, but as a prologue, by which the main events of the study can be read against and through.

2.1.1. Environmental Justice and Geotrauma

Like many other academic disciplines, ecology, geography, and urban planning have historically undertheorized the socio-political consequences of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and the impact of anti-Black racism on historical and contemporary society. By doing so, these disciplines have crafted and perpetuated discourses and practices that dehumanize and silence Black narratives of agency, injustice, and ways of knowing [6,7]. Emerging as a response to this academic (and applied) erasure of Black perspectives, Black ecologies and Black geographies act as epistemological kinfolk, overlapping and combining to reconceptualize our processes of identity, place-making, and use of the built environment and ecological systems [8]. Most importantly, the intersection of Black ecologies and geographies charts a path forward for antiracist worldmaking, asserting that “…freedom is a place,” understanding “place” as the result of reiterative social relations in specific geographies [9] (p. 227). Black geographies “…demand[s] an interdisciplinary understanding of space and place-making that enmeshes, rather than separates, different theoretical trajectories and spatial concerns” [10] (p. 7). Specifically, McKittrick’s (2011) “Black sense of place” describes the process by which we conceptualize and physically site Black resistance to “…domination,” “the difficult entanglements of racial encounter” (emphasis omitted), and “…the violence of displacement and bondage, produced in a plantation economy, extend[ed] and …given a geographic future” [11] (p. 949). African Americans’ engagement with and resulting knowledge of nature in itself embodies cultural resistance such as Harriet Tubman’s mimicking of the barred owl’s hoot to signal safe passage to freedom seekers [12,13].

Consequently, Black ecologies scholar Bruno (2022) remarks, “This framing foregrounds precarity, devaluation, and persistence of Black life as bound up in and with the biophysical environments which Black people have worked, lived on, cultivated, and love” [14] (p. 1543). Wynter (1971; 1995) and McKittrick (2015) discuss the ways in which “social legacies of slavery” have been entrenched in today’s social relations and the environmental politics that they produce [15,16,17]. Wynter (1971) posits that the European Enlightenment and its accompanying scientific discoveries consistently and routinely left non-white people outside of its narratives of humanity (and freedom) [15]. The resulting social stratification provided justification for the simultaneous degradation of the natural world and the exploitation of Black people. During slavery, being seen in nature, off the plantation, was punishable by death for African Americans [18]. The plantation’s mapping of who belongs where, and which ecological relationships are nurtured and in what ways, results in the following:

The positioning of the Black body always outside of land, with all its privileges in regard to leisure, well-being, health, and so on, is a key aspect of the narrativizing of power and of the determinism that shapes geographies of Blackness that inscribe Black culture as always already within urbanized space, and much less within the “outside spaces” of freedom, leisure, and escape [19] (p. 34).

The violence wrought by the plantation has “seeped into the ecologies and natural environments around the globe,” impacting biophysical landscapes and the social relations that govern them even as the plantation morphs into new manifestations over time [14] (p. 1545). Wright (2021) shares that “…through violence, placid, scenic, and biologic ecologies are reproduced into Black ecologies” [1] (p. 793).

Because the residual matter of slavery is evident in holding cells, ocean beds, and, of course, the soil of lynching sites, Bruno (2022) asks, “What has the surrounding environment witnessed? What memories does it hold within it?” and situates, “…trees as witnesses” and mutual survivors of anti-Black violence [14] (p. 1547–1548). Wright’s (2021) statement that “…racial and environmental violence, have codified race into the earth” aligns with Finney’s (2014) [2] argument that the long history of anti-Black violence and forced expulsion from natural spaces is to blame for the Black community’s “distance” from the great outdoors [1] (p. 791). Understanding that the collective trauma that Finney (2014) [2] and Wright (2021) [1] are referencing is chronic, complex, and rooted in the spatial, Pain (2021) posits that “geotrauma,” represents the “…multiscalar, intersecting and mutual relations between trauma and place” [20] (p. 974). Merola (2014) describes geotrauma as the “…violent inscriptive processes…and the traces left by such acts” [21] (p. 123). For minority groups, cultural trauma is pervasive, and its subjects perpetually live in constant lookout for danger [22,23,24]. Specifically, slavery has been cited by Black scholars as a psychic event, shared by subsequent generations “…and the frequent re-enactment of racist violence impacts on African Americans’ collective and individual psychology” [20] (p. 277). Those affected experience time not as a linear function but as a present that results from the intertwining of the past and future. Pain (2021) elaborates, “Traumatic time is simultaneously lived as past and anticipatory, looking to present and future environments for signs that danger is reappearing” [20] (p. 978). Traumas can also accumulate in layers, allowing interaction between traumas over time [20,25,26].

Accordingly, the “spectral agency of place” is the “seething presence” of sites that endures despite the absence of historical structures (e.g., bridges, buildings, headstones, or site markers) [27] (pp. 7–8). Larsen and Johnson (2018) describe the lynching site of James T. Scott, a now-demolished bridge in Columbia, Missouri, as a place that could no longer be seen, “…[b]ut it was still there” (emphasis original) [28] (p. 22). The social residues of a place persist and it becomes “…a medium or field through which haunting occurs” [28] (p. 23). The haunting unsettles present realities in disturbing and violent ways and “…highlights histories that cannot rest” [28] (p. 22). The agency of such places rests in their ability to exist not just across, but through time, bringing with them an obligation to reckon with the past [28,29].

2.1.2. Lynching as Place-Making

My own discipline of urban planning has been explicit about the role of space in the ordering of society and as a site of culture, and planners have also increasingly articulated the ways in which planning has been an instrument of systemic anti-Black violence [30,31]. However, planning has not thoroughly considered the ways that overt violence has helped to establish the social ordering that entrenched racial segregation in the U.S. through coups, lynchings, and riots [32,33,34]. In particular, lynching, the murder of mostly Black men by white mobs, has a long history across the United States and is well-documented [35]. Black women, Chinese, Latinos, and white Americans were also the victims of lynchings, but Black men have overwhelmingly been the targets of such violence, and the term almost exclusively referred to the murder of Black men by the 1930s [36,37,38,39,40].

This review of lynching literature must begin with several key misconceptions, allowing us to more properly understand lynching’s role in contemporary social dynamics including racial relationships with natural landscapes:

• lynchings are a phenomenon of the past,
• lynchings only occurred in the American South, and
• most lynchings were the reaction to a Black man raping a white woman.

Lynchings were a common occurrence through the tenure of chattel slavery but are most frequently referenced as a post-Civil War phenomenon. Estimates suggest that close to 4000 lynchings of Black men and women occurred from 1882 to 1941. This number does not include lynchings that occurred prior to 1882, including during the pre-Civil War era of America, or the lynchings that have continued since [41,42]. Lynchings are not a practice of the distant past, with incidents continuing through the 20th century, with the deaths of Michael Donald in 1981 and the 1998 death of James Byrd Jr. [43,44]. The dawn of the 21st century witnessed victims’ names become social media hashtags [45]. For instance, the 2020 murder of Ahmaud Arbery has been referred to as a lynching [46,47]. Although modern imagination constructs lynching as a horrific practice confined to the American South, lynchings took place a lot further north and west than genteel notions would have us believe, being documented in places such as Waco, Texas; Cairo, Illinois; and Duluth, Minnesota [39,48,49].

Of note, Wells-Barnett (1895) is credited with pioneering investigative journalism in her pursuit of truth, traveling across the country and examining the phenomenon of lynching case-by-case [50,51]. Thomas Moss, a dear friend of Wells-Barnett, was lynched with two other Black men in retaliation for opening a grocery store that competed with the business of a local white man, serving as the inspiration for her investigations [52]. Wells-Barnett (1895) asserts that although most lynchings were rooted in economic anxiety, they were also fixated on Black masculine sexuality and pointed out that many lynchings included the castration of the victims [50,53,54]. The rhetoric of protecting the chastity of white women from Black savagery would ultimately become lynching’s most infamous narrative, with fourteen-year-old Emmett Till’s lynching in Mississippi, of which Carolyn Bryant Donham’s (later recanted) false allegations played a major role, becoming notorious [50,55,56,57]. Till’s mutilated body was so disfigured that images of his open casket funeral have been cited as a catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. [58].

Rosewood, Florida, became the site of a massacre based on the allegation that a Black man had assaulted Fanny Taylor, and the firebombing of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, only required the scream of Sarah Page as its catalyst [59,60]. However, in 1900, only 27% of lynching victims were accused of rape [36]. In fact, there was a much stronger correlation between economic crises and lynchings, for example, when cotton prices rose or an affluent Black community expanded its borders [36,60]. Phipps (2021) offers, “If anger is the main expression of white power in a masculine register, tears are its feminine equivalent” [61] (p. 84). Even today, “…white ‘women’s protection’ upholds the edifice of criminal punishment and the violence of the national border” [61] (p. 84).

Next, we consider the processes by which natural landscapes become a utility for the project of white supremacy. Mitchell (2000) finds that a feature of space is its potential for social control, providing a means to exercise ideological and “raw power” (violence) to reinforce segregation [62] (p. 251). Waldrep (2006) states that lynching sites were chosen on the basis of their cultural significance and were not random or spontaneous [63]. Mowatt (2009) concurs, stating, “The calculated selection of a larger and open site to handle a sizable crowd led the way to parks and open fields as prime event spaces…” [48] (p. 192). Although lynchings took place across the country, the 1893 lynching of Henry Smith:

…was the founding event in the history of spectacle lynching…the first blatantly public, actively promoted lynching of a southern Black by a large crowd of southern whites” featuring “…[a] specially chartered excursion train, the publicly sold photographs, and the wide circulated, unabashed retelling of the event by one of the lynchers [64] (p. 206–207).

There is no universal notion of what leisure is and what it is not, but a consensus dictates that leisure is an activity through which one experiences intrinsic enjoyment [48]. Mowatt (2012) writes that lynching is a form of leisure for white supremacists, defining leisure as a recreational activity characterized by a state of freedom from obligations that is indelibly tied to its setting or space [49,65]. Kelly (1983) and Kivel and Kleiber (2000) find that recreational experiences become integral parts of one’s identity, and attachment forms around the corresponding activities and locations [66,67]. Mowatt (2012) suggests that through this iterative practice of leisure, the associated landscapes take on social meaning and become sites where cultural and societal dynamics “…are developed, nurtured, and reinforced” [49] (p. 1362). Over time, locations become repositories of memory [49]. So, “…we assign meaning to places, and places bring to mind emotions, feelings, and attitudes connected with the experiences and perceptions we associate with them” [68] (p. 177). Causality and social implications can be demonstrated in geographic clusters or proximity. Diffusion processes reveal how “…spatial effects spread over time and space” by mapping the spillover effects that increase or decrease “…the likelihood of like events occurring elsewhere…” [69] (p. 152). In their case study, Deane, Beck, and Tolnay (1998) use spatial-effects regression to demonstrate that if a lynching occurred in a particular county, the likelihood of another lynching happening in nearby counties lessened [4]. This suggests that lynchings create a negative spillover effect resulting from a “satisfied white population” and “an intimidated [B]lack population” [69] (p. 152). Mowatt (2012) suggests that memories are not confined to those who personally experience events but that stories can be “…shared within a culture from one generation to another and become the basis of understanding and behavior for a new generation” [49] (p. 1363). Mowatt (2012) writes:

I drive past places, those meanings linger and live on for me. Why was I afraid to go and visit relatives down South? Why do I not go to places where lynchings possibly once occurred? … Why would I at times be so humble around White people to the point that any sense of self-respect and decency I had would be discarded? Why would this fear of ‘them’ be so tangible? … What pre-experiences laid to rest in my very soul? [49] (p. 197).

Lynchings are a well-documented phenomenon, their accounts being supported by news media, oral narratives, and photographs. Given the ritualized and even festival-like ambiance of lynchings, souvenirs (often consisting of mutilated parts of the victim’s body) were commonly collected and sold [36]. Those far from the lynching sites were able to purchase postcards decorated with the images of cheerful white participants posing in relation to brutalized corpses. When engaging in lynching, the souls of white people are laid bare in their “…most relaxed, most skilled…” and most ideal state of being while their identities are “developed, maintained, and expanded” (emphasis original) [48] (p. 193). The social relations depicted in these photographs are not unique; in fact, they are quite repetitive by design [70]. The established convention of white spectators and a Black victim conveys to all audiences that this was the fate of any Black person who did not remain in their “place” [49]. In this way, lynchings were a direct tactic of spatial policing, cautioning Black people to only venture out of their communities for work and an exercise in white identity-making [62]. This is because lynching is less about being guilty of a criminal offense; instead, the offense is simply existing as Black [49].

Thus, because the experiences of people differ in natural landscapes on the basis of race, the meanings imposed on the land “…[develop] completely different and conflicting meanings by different, racially segregated meaning makers” [49] (p. 1365). McAvoy (2002) references the relationship between Indigenous people, white people, and the U.S. national parks, the latter of which are often praised as monuments of natural conservation efforts [71]. McAvoy (2002) finds that the national parks represent majestic natural beauty and freedom from “civilization”, but for Indigenous people, the parks are symbols of cultural death, dispossession, and continued occupation [71]. Here, geography and leisure studies intersect, with both disciplines finding disparities in park usage by race and racial discrimination as a factor in the lower number of African Americans utilizing the natural outdoors for their recreational needs [2,72,73,74]. Their work aligns with Mowatt’s (2012) assertion that lynching “…will forever affect the interaction and intention of a people. This will forever affect the feelings and interactions within locations” [49] (p. 1382).

2.1.3. American Environmentalism and the History of Central Park

Whiteness as a socio-political manifestation of racial hegemony and class identity is embedded in both the founding and cultures of public parks in the U.S. From the great national parks such as Yosemite and Yellowstone to the local urban gems such as Central Park, the histories of these spaces are far from the democratic and inclusive ideals that they purport today. White, wealthy men such as Madison Grant, Gifford Pinchot, and U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt were instrumental in national conservation efforts, including the establishment of national parks [75]. They were also eugenicists, believing that the wilderness was key to maintaining white masculinity, supposedly vital in ensuring white social dominance “…as the U.S. frontier was vanishing, African Americans were gaining freedom, and immigration to the U.S. was increasing…” [18] (p. 242). Furthermore, Jim Crow segregation allowed public parks to be “…socially and politically constructed as a white space that white people are expected to visit and occupy” [75] (p. 73).

The dominant narrative and vision of public parks also erases the historic relationship between African Americans and nature while simultaneously masking the ways in which white environmental leaders excluded Blacks [76,77,78,79,80]. African Americans are descended from West African agrarian societies and became proficient anglers and hunters in the South and expert cattlemen in the West [81,82,83]. Although natural landscapes were intertwined with enslavement in the Americas, they were also the sites of refuge and sanctuary [2,84]. During the Jim Crow era, access to outdoor recreation was significant to Civil Rights leaders, and African Americans developed their own “…resorts, beaches, and travel agencies across the nation to enjoy outdoor recreation activities without the intrusion of white racism” [75] (p. 72).

During the mid-1800s, urban elites influenced by European standards of beauty and sophistication argued that the creation of Central Park would create a “…national, liberal and cosmopolitan spirit that is generated only by one acknowledged central city of a great country” [85] (p. 80). The siting of Central Park, far from working-class neighborhoods, was designed to reinforce racial and class boundaries and was supported by New York City’s elite: businessmen, newspaper editors, and politicians [86,87,88]. New York City leaders hoped to use Central Park as an instrument of gentrification, displacing Blacks, as well as Irish and German immigrants [88]. Built by an all-white labor force, Central Park partially sits atop what used to be Seneca Village, a Black and Brown community and a stop on the Underground Railroad, razed by eminent domain [89,90,91,92]. Because New York State required Black men to hold residency for three years and own at least $250 in property to exercise the right to vote, as the first free Black settlement in New York, Seneca Village’s demolition disenfranchised Black men [90,92].

In addition to the racial conflict, class divides were apparent in Central Park’s daily operation. The park’s co-designer and first superintendent, Frederick Law Olmsted, claimed that class mingling was possible at the park and highlighted the potential for working-class residents to take cultural cues from their middle- and upper-class counterparts. Olmsted stressed walking and sightseeing as “appropriate” park behaviors and eventually criminalized dancing, drinking, gambling, picnics, and sports for their association with the working-class [93,94]. According to Moulton (2024), Central Park became a racialized space, not through:

…overt racial discourses, but under the aegis of cultural sensibilities and class consciousness. The production and distribution of racialized political imaginaries of nature does not only create and reproduce symbolic racialized terrains, but it also results in materially different human-environmental relations. Racialized environments as socio-ecologies structured by race are ecologies of differentiated access, displacement, dispossession, and domination [18] (p. 242).

Central Park inspired other cities to build public parks on the basis of environmental conservation when, in fact, they worked as a means of social control: assimilating immigrants, criminalizing Black (and Brown) residents, and attuning working-class residents to middle-class values [77,87,95,96,97]. Public parks are the result of “…a multiple-century history of white bodies, white epistemologies, and the dominant logic of white supremacy” [98]. Even the way that participation in outdoor recreation among whites is used as the baseline against that of other races is indicative of how whiteness is not confined to the histories of parks but continues to center and ultimately, empowering white participants “…with entitled access to natural spaces, which can manifest as implied authority in relation to the places in which they recreate, affinity for them, and a sense of responsibility over them” [98] (p. 196).

This sense of responsibility leads participants to see themselves as “keepers and stewards” of park spaces, often resulting in interactional injustice, in which Black (and other non-whites) are criminalized, harassed, and profiled by white visitors [99] (p. 576).

Most infamously, Central Park is known as the site of the 1989 beating and rape of Trish Meili, a white woman who was attacked while jogging in the park. Due to public outrage and racist police practices, five African American and Latino youths, then known as the “Central Park Five,” were coerced, convicted, and wrongly incarcerated: Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson, Antron Brown (formerly Antron McCray), and Korey Wise. President Donald Trump, then just a real estate developer, bought full-page advertisements in four New York City newspapers, including The New York Times, calling for the youths to be executed [100]. Their moniker changed to the “Exonerated Five” after their convictions were vacated in 2002, when serial rapist Matias Reyes confessed and was tied to the crime by DNA evidence [101].

2.2. Conversation and Historical-Interpretative Analysis

My analysis of the Central Park Birdwatching Incident is influenced by, but not bound to, conversation analysis, an independent area of inquiry that emerged from sociology’s ethnomethodological tradition in the 1960s [102]. Inspired by the works of Garfinkel (1967) and Goffman (1964), and pioneered by Sacks (1992), conversation analysis is concerned with what social interaction reveals about social order [103,104,105,106]. The Central Park incident does not conform to the ideal circumstances of conversation analysis because it is not a part of a collection of cases (although another researcher might be interested in compiling the dialogues of “Karens”, white women usually captured on video via social media who have engaged in extreme forms of entitlement and distress) [107]. However, I find conversation analysis to be useful because of its focus on naturally occurring interactions and its use of “…relevant knowledge about the general types of casual relationships of which the particular case being analyzed provides a specific instance” to elucidate “…the casual connections between narrative sequences” [108] (p. 1100). Put another way, the method allows me to use the historical social dynamics of lynchings to explain the Central Park incident, revealing why Amy and Christian say the things they do and how. Further, conversation analysis’s affinity for close analysis of a single instance of conduct “…guided by a well-developed conceptual foundation grounded in empirical findings from past research,” aligns with the aims of this study [109] (p. 590).

I began by sourcing the video footage of the Central Park Birdwatching Incident, which is available at the site of its original posting, Melody Cooper’s (Christian’s sister) Instagram account, @melodycooperfilm, posted on 25 May 2020. The use of readily available video footage allows public scrutiny that supersedes simply reviewing an appended transcript that I create, but instead permits others to examine the raw phenomenon itself. Thereby, exposing my “…processes of inference and interpretation” and “…enabling readers to independently assess the validity of analytic claim” [109] (p. 592). Using the footage as the cornerstone of the study, I then transcribed the audible and non-verbal behavioral events with an analytical focus on the intonations and function of statements loosely based on Jefferson’s (2008) conventions [110]. The coding key is as follows:

_	vocal stress due to amplitude,
hh	breathiness,
:	prolongation in articulation,
↓	decrease in vocal pitch,
↑	increase in vocal pitch, and
(gh)	guttural vocalization.

Relying on Zimmerman’s (1998) work, I strive to leverage my “…intuition and its offspring, interpretation” in explaining the details of the social interaction [111] (p. 421). Specifically, I use critical viewings of the video footage to ascertain three things: what is said, who does what, and when. Researchers can never know if the events captured are unfolding as they would have without a recording taking place, but conversation analysts have found that people still filter their behavior based on familiarity with co-participants in conversations that are unrecorded [112]. Using the transcription, I note the specific words used, how the speaker delivers their statements, and the function and sequence of the statements [113,114,115]. It is crucial that I understand not just each statement’s meaning in isolation but also the context that it was created in and creates, following its utterance [116]. Context is understood in two ways that are important for this study: the internal context created by the interaction’s participants and the external context in the form of social relationships [106]. In this way, turns at talk indicate shared understandings [106,117].

Additionally, prioritizing the social context in which the data is produced, I take a historical-interpretative approach in both the construction and organization of this study. Considering all data to be historical in nature, I am interested in how “…human beings shape and are shaped by history” [69] (p. 147). In congruence with my own positionality in this work, Smith (2004) affirms that the “the deepest source of the impulse to study history is the desire to understand ourselves” [69] (p. 147) Driven by the desire to understand the distinctiveness of the present and why it possesses the character that it does, the impulse to study history arises from a “puzzlement” [69] (p. 149). Hence, the historical data collected for the pursuit of research is subjectively deemed relevant by the researcher’s perspective [69]. Smith (2004) argues that there are two tasks in the work of historical analysis [69]: First, to explain the sequence of events in a specific society during a specific time period, including the perceptions, constraints, and possibilities for key actors [69]; Second, historical analysis requires a search for social mechanisms that operate across time periods and ambitiously seeks to develop some sort of empirical generalization from which to glean causal character [69]. The generalizations may vary in strength, from conditions X and Y causing Z to happen, or whether Z is more likely to happen when X and Y conditions converge.

Historical-interpretive methods were heralded as a result of the cultural turn of history as a discipline. The cultural turn was influenced by a disciplinary dialogue with cultural anthropology and proposed point of view as a key part of research and narration [118]. A significant shift in the field, the cultural turn of historical analysis finds value in “…what is stored in memories and subjective ‘geographies’ as opposed to, or in addition to, what is only captured in documents” [119] (p. 176). To this end, I assess the American racial order, the domestic geopolitics just prior to the Central Park Birdwatching Incident, Amy and Christian’s retrospective perspectives, and the creation of Black Birders Week. I conducted a Google search of the phrase “Central Park Birdwatching Incident” to find news media articles with direct quotes from either Amy or Christian, as well as public statements they released in the wake of the incident, including the editorial piece that Amy composed three years later. This was supplemented by a search of academic journal articles in which Amy and Christian’s names appeared. I also searched Christian’s name on the app formerly known as Twitter, using the “min_faves:” function to identify the most “liked” tweets made within 24 h of the incident, beginning with 100,000 and decreasing in increments of 5000. I saved the top ten most-liked tweets and noted the number of their combined and individual likes and the accounts that posted them and repeated the same for a search of Amy’s name. I then employed Vaismoradi, Jones, Turunen, and Snelgrove’s (2016) four steps of theme development to analyze the tweets [120]. Organizing expressions from the tweets into categories, I abstracted them into themes based on a comprehensive understanding of both the data’s meaning and what aspect of the data each theme represents [121,122].

The search for Christian Cooper’s name also led to my discovery of accounts such as @BlackAFinSTEM and key hashtags including #BlackBirdersWeek and #BlackInNature. There, I found the denouncement of the Central Park incident, the racialized challenges that Black birders face in nature, and the announcement of the inaugural (and subsequent) Black Birders Week events. I noted the “roll call” exercise in which Black birders were encouraged to post pictures of themselves in nature and introduce themselves and their outdoor interests, including the most “liked” tweets in this paper (see Section 3.2), mostly from figures significant for their organizing efforts or membership in Black-centered nature-based organizations. I noted institutions reposting Black Birders Week-affiliated events. I also searched the National Audubon Society’s website for news articles pertaining to the event. The National Audubon Society, named for naturalist and slaveowner John James Audubon, is one of the oldest bird conservation organizations in the Western hemisphere. The organization champions habitat conservation and climate solutions through a three-pronged approach of “advancing science,” “building community,” and “driving policy” [123]. I reviewed three articles centering Black Birders Week, detailing racism in the great outdoors, and one regarding the gendered perspectives of Black women in nature.

To date, the literature detailing how social relations governing landscapes, the placemaking implications of lynching, and the ways in which whiteness pervades environmentalism are substantiative is written about discretely. However, when discussed conjointly and illustrated by a real-world incident, the converging theories make clear that history (as an ongoing, past-to-future process) contextualizes the specter of lynching, while social relations and inequitable access to natural landscapes continue to be informed by it. Guided by the principles of conversation analysis, social encounters reveal how lynching-induced geotrauma informs white supremacist commands of natural spaces both for those who invoke the history and those who are subject to it. In the next section, I consider the events in Central Park already contextualized by their historical antecedents and later by their contemporary social reception.

3. Results

3.1. Central Park Birdwatching Incident and the Aftermath

In the U.S., 2020 was fraught with incidents of police brutality and extrajudicial murders, captivating international headlines and driving protests in cities around the world [124,125,126,127,128]. Media reports frequently depicted African Americans’ encounters with law enforcement due to engaging in everyday, mundane activities [129]. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated social tensions, and the first term of Donald Trump’s presidency laid long-lasting racial tensions bare [130,131].

Christian Cooper, an African American man, is an avid birdwatcher, an interest he developed during his childhood. He was president of Harvard’s Ornithological Club in the 1980s and served as a New York Audubon Society (now known as the NYC Bird Alliance) board member while enjoying a successful career as an editor. On 25 May 2020, Christian encountered Amy Cooper (no relation; due to their shared surname, I use first names hereafter for disambiguation), a University of Chicago graduate and then, a senior vice president at Franklin Templeton Investments, in a confrontation that would make national headlines on CNN, in The New York Times, and The Washington Post [132,133,134]. According to their accounts, sometime between 7:30 a.m. and 8:00 a.m., Christian was birdwatching in an area of Central Park known as the Ramble, known for its heavy vegetation and as the home of over 230 bird species. The Ramble’s rules explicitly state that dogs must be on leashes at all times, a guideline established for the protection and safety of the park’s wildlife. Upon encountering Amy’s unleashed dog, Christian informed Amy of the park policy and suggested another area of the park for her to have the dog unleashed. Amy declined, prompting Christian to tell her that if she was going to do as she liked, then so would he, and she would not like the outcome. He then beckoned her dog with a dog treat. Christian later explained that in his experience, dog owners do not like strangers feeding their dogs treats and will usually leash them as a result. Amy then yelled, “Don’t touch my dog!” At this point, Amy took out her phone, as did Christian, and he began filming the encounter. The resulting video footage captured the following exchange:

01		[Video begins with Amy crouched over her dog in a dirt-covered area, peering at Christian before she stands erect.]
02	Amy:	“Will you please stop.”hh
03		[Takes three steps toward Christian with a leash in her right hand and leading her dog by its collar with her left hand.]
04	Amy:	“Si:r, I’m asking you to ↓stop.”hh
05		[Takes three steps toward Christian, lifting the dog off its front legs by the collar as she walks.]
06	Christian:	“Please don’t come close to me”.
07		[Remains in place.]
08	Amy:	[Amy takes three steps toward Christian, leaving the dirt area, stepping over the curb onto the paved ground, and stops.]
09		“Si:r, I’m asking you to stop recording me”.hh
10	Christian:	“Please don’t come close to me.”
11		[Remains in place.]
12	Amy:	[Takes a larger step toward Christian and extends
13		her right arm toward Christian, pointing at what is presumably his cell phone.]
14	Amy:	↑“Please turn your phone ↑off”.
15	Christian:	“Please don’t come close to me”.
16		[Remains in place.]
17	Amy:	[Lowers arm and takes a step back to the curb, still lifting the dog off its front legs by the collar.]
18		“Then I’m taking a picture and calling the cops”.hh
19		[Raises her cell phone and proceeds to press the screen multiple times while holding the dog by the collar as it constantly writhes.]
20	Christian:	“Ple:ase call the cops. Ple:ase call the cops”.
21		[Remains in place.]
22	Amy:	[Looks at her phone, appears to be pressing keys, and looks up at Christian.]
23		“I’m going to tell them there’s an African American man threatening my ↑life”.
24	Christian:	“Ple:ase tell them whatever you ↑li:ke”.
25		[Remains in place.]
26	Amy:	[Takes three steps back while looking down at her cell phone, pressing the screen multiple times.]
27		“Excuse ↑me”.
28		[Pulls down her face mask and raises her cell phone to her ear, as she takes ten steps backward while she wrangles the frolicking dog by the collar.]
29		“I’m sorry, I’m in the Ramble and there is a man, African American, he has a bicycle helmet. ↑He is recording me and threatening me and my dog [three-second pause] …↑There is an African American man,hh I am in Central Park. He is recording me and threatening myself and my dog…and my…” [Squats over dog, which is now lying on the ground.] ↑“I’m sor(gh)ry, I can’t hear you either. ↑I’m being threatened by a man in the Ramble! ↑Ple:(gh)ase send the cops immediately!
30		[Pants twice.]
31		I’m in Central Park in the ↑Ramble…↑I don’t know!”
32		[Leashes dog.]
33	Christian:	↑“Thank you!”
34		[Video ends.]

When local police responded to the call, Christian was no longer at the scene, and Amy told the police that Christian did not try to touch her [135]. In a public statement, the New York Police Department reported that the officers determined it to be a “verbal dispute” and did not make any arrests or issue any summons [136]. However, an October 2020 criminal court hearing revealed that the 911 dispatcher called back, and during that second phone call, Amy told the dispatcher that Christian had attempted to assault her [135]. The incident became publicly known after Christian posted the video on Facebook, and Christian’s sister, Melody Cooper, posted the video to her Instagram and Twitter accounts. The Instagram video received over 165,000 likes, the Twitter video received over 40,000,000 views, and the top twenty tweets appearing after searching Amy and Christian’s names amassed a combined 800,000 likes. Prominent media personalities weighed in on the incident, citing it as an example of the ways that Black people are victims of race-based discrimination enforced by law enforcement and the role that white women often play [137,138]. The incident even inspired the Blumhouse horror film, Soft & Quiet (2022) [139]. National Audubon Society senior vice president for state programs, Rebeccah Sanders, said, “Black Americans often face terrible daily dangers in outdoor spaces, where they are subjected to unwarranted suspicion, confrontation, and violence. The outdoors–and the joy of birds–should be safe and welcoming for all people” [134].

Amy was charged with filing a false report, a misdemeanor, and the Central Park Civic Association called for a lifetime ban to be imposed on her. Amy’s employer, Franklin Templeton Investments, posted a statement on Twitter reading “…We take these matters very seriously, and we don’t condone racism of any kind” [140]. The firm placed Amy on administrative leave, pending an investigation, and terminated her employment on 25 May 2020. In an interview with NBC New York, Amy released a statement reading:

It was unacceptable and I humbly and fully apologize to everyone who’s seen that video, everyone that’s been offended…everyone who thinks of me in a lower light. And I understand why they do.

She also claimed that prior to the beginning of the video, she was “fearful” because Christian “had been yelling and offering my dog unknown items”. In a CNN interview, Amy stated that her “entire life is being destroyed right now…I think I was just scared…When you’re alone in the Ramble, you don’t know what’s happening. It’s not excusable, it’s not defensible” [134]. She also said, “I’m not a racist. I did not mean to harm that man in any way” [134].

In a written statement released by a public relations service, Amy said:

I want to apologize to Chris Cooper for my actions when I encountered him in Central Park yesterday. I reacted emotionally and made false assumptions about his intentions when, in fact, I was the one who was acting inappropriately by not having my dog on a leash. When Chris began offering treats to my dog and confronted me in an area where there was no one else nearby and said, “You’re not going to like what I’m going to do next,” I assumed we were being threatened when all he had intended to do was record our encounter on his phone. He had every right to request that I leash my dog in an area where it was required. I am well aware of the pain that misassumptions and insensitive statements about race cause and would never have imagined that I would be involved in the type of incident that occurred with Chris. I hope that a few mortifying seconds in a lifetime of forty years will not define me in his eyes and that he will accept my sincere apology [141].

In regard to Amy’s apology, Christian said, “… it was just a conflict between a birder and a dogwalker, and then she took it to a very dark place. I think she’s gotta sort of examine why and how that happened” [142]. In the wake of the incident, some have examined Amy’s use of “African American” and speculated about her campaign contributions to Democratic candidates, to highlight how a white person who does not consider themselves a racist can behave when their social power is threatened [143,144]. Amy is Canadian, historically and physically removed from the history of chattel slavery and Jim segregation (but not anti-Black discrimination), but clearly knowledgeable enough of it to know that she could leverage that history (and enduring present) for her own ends. Christian refused to cooperate with Amy’s criminal prosecution, citing his concern that the public backlash to the incident was more focused on a single person, rather than systemic issues regarding race in the U.S. He also voiced his disdain at the irrationality of individuals threatening Amy’s life [145]. Amy ultimately avoided prosecution by completing a racial bias education training program [146].

The details surrounding the murder of George Floyd, primarily, but also of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, fueled massive protests that eventually spread around the world [127,147]. Christian’s national prominence rose exponentially, but Amy returned to life as a private citizen, albeit with the stigma of her viral fame [133,148]. Her name occasionally returned to headlines, mostly due to her wrongful termination lawsuit against her former employer, Franklin Templeton Investments, and the subsequent appeal, both of which were unsuccessful [149].

Three years later, Amy published a Newsweek piece in which she described her account of the events and life since the incident. In the piece, she cites a myriad of mitigating factors contributing to her decision-making back in May 2020: COVID-19 pandemic “anxieties,” her unfamiliarity with the Ramble, the tone of Christian’s voice, her teenage sexual assault, and Christian’s perceived “threat” against her and her dog [150]. Amy cites her repeated description of Christian’s African American identity to the 911 dispatcher as the result of poor cell phone service, asserting that this aspect of the incident went unreported, “skewing perceptions” [150]. Amy states, “There were never any racial implications to my words. I just felt raw fear, and desperately wanted help” [150].

Then, Amy assigns blame to Christian for being the first to engage, writing, “Later that day, Christian took to Facebook to proudly describe to his followers that he instigated the encounter and boasted that he keeps a bag of dog treats to lure in off-leash dogs. Consider that for a moment. He admitted to instigating the incident” [150]. Amy then cites the legal filing of her wrongful termination suit, which includes a statement from Jerome Lockett, an African American dogwalker, who describes an experience almost identical to the encounter Amy had with Christian. Lockett describes Christian as “aggressive” and stated that Christian used identical wording with him, which he perceived as a threat, just as Amy claimed [151]. Amy highlights and concurs with Lockett’s claims that other dogwalkers who share their experiences are reluctant to come forward because they are white and fear “cancel culture” [150]. She says that her personal information was shared online, leading to a barrage of death threats and hate mail that still continues. Accounts from Amy’s neighbors reveal anecdotes about her “combative behavior” and sense of “entitlement” [133]. Speaking of Amy’s interactions with building staff, neighbor Alison Fairchild says, “There’s always a narrative from her about someone who has done her wrong” [133].

Amy writes:

Over three years later, I am still in hiding. I am scared to be in public. I still can’t get a job that meets my qualifications. And there have been long stretches of unemployment. All leading to thoughts of self-harm [150].

Amy cites the public response to the incident as a source of suffering for her family and her departure from New York City as a loss to battered women who used her home as a safe haven [150]. Regarding the incident, she states, “I don’t know if I did everything right in that park, but I know I didn’t do everything wrong” [150]. Near the end of the piece, she asserts:

I want to clarify that I never filed a false police report. That charge, which resulted from the onslaught of media and political pressure on the prosecutor’s office, was quickly dismissed because it had no basis in fact. For context, where I grew up, which was outside of the United States, uttering threats is considered assault and does not have to include physical force, just a lack of consent. I only reported exactly what happened to me that day when I was threatened by a man with a history of aggressive behavior towards other dog owners in a remote, isolated area of Central Park. I was terrified and traumatized. Even now, when I think about it three years later, the fear quickly wells up in me again [150].

In 2021, Christian Cooper partnered with DC Comics to create “It’s a Bird,” a graphic novel that intertwined a teen’s discovery of birding with the narratives of victims of anti-Black police killings [152]. Two years later, the same year that Amy published her Newsweek piece, Random House published Christian’s memoir Better Living Through Birding (2023) [153]. The memoir is a collection of essays about Christian’s life with a particular focus on birding, race, and queerness. Christian also hosted a six-episode National Geographic television series entitled “Extraordinary Birder with Christian Cooper.” The series features Christian traversing the U.S. in search of different bird species. Christian denies being traumatized by the incident and has said that he did not think the police would have necessarily killed him [12,133]. However, in an NPR interview to promote his memoirs, when asked how Amy’s use of “African American” changed the situation from “dog owner vs. birdwatcher” to something else, Christian responds:

…[S]uddenly, it had a racial dimension because it took us to a place where a white woman is saying, a Black man is putting my life in danger. And that has led to so many dark places in our nation’s history, you know, most famously Emmett Till, the lynchings in the South, so many instances of a white woman making a damsel-in-distress call and the full weight of the authorities coming down on sometimes entire Black communities as a result…I’ve spent my whole life living as a Black man in the United States, and I know what it can mean if a white woman accuses you of something like that. So, her attempt at intimidation almost worked. Part of me was like, oh, shoot, if I stop recording, maybe this’ll all go away. And that was the intent on her part. And that’s when—I don’t know—something inside me said, oh, hell no. I am not going to be complicit in my own dehumanization [148].

Similarly, Dr. Yusef Salaam, a member of the “Exonerated Five,” previously commented on the birdwatching incident, saying, “When they (white women) cry, we die” [154]. Christian later won a 2024 Emmy for Outstanding Daytime Personality for his role in the National Geographic series. He continues to be a prominent figure in birding and naturalist culture and media.

3.2. Black Birders Week

In response to the incident, Black Birders Week was created by @BlackAFinSTEM, a group of 30 Black scientists in natural sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Black Birders Week is a series of online events to increase the visibility of Black nature enthusiasts and draw attention to the challenges faced by them (see Figure 1). On 29 May 2020, Black birder Corina Newsome posted a video to Twitter in which she states:

For far too long, Black people in the United States have been shown that outdoor exploration activities are not for us. Whether it be the way the media chooses to present who is the ‘outdoorsy’ type, or the racism Black people experience when we do explore the outdoors, as we saw recently in Central Park [155].

On 31 May 2020, the @BlackAFinSTEM account tweeted:

We can’t even organize for one Black trauma before another one happens. #BlackBirdersWeek is in direct response to what happened to Christian Cooper. But it’s also in response to the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and countless others. Many of us work in the outdoors, in urban areas and the wilderness. It could’ve easily been [any one] of us. We want our peers to not only recognize our existence but our experiences being Black. The history books set a precedent for civil unrest in the face of injustice. We want it to be clear that we stand with the protestors fighting against police brutality even as we organize a protest specific to being #BlackinNature [156].

Earyn McGee, a herpetologist, Coordinator of Conservation Engagement at the Los Angeles Zoo, and Black Birders Week co-organizer, states, “We all have this shared experience where we have to worry about going into the field. Prejudice might drive police or private property owners to be suspicious of or antagonistic toward Black scientists doing field work in normal clothes, putting them in danger. That could easily have been any one of us” [157].Three goals were offered by Newsome on behalf of @BlackAFinSTEM:

“…to counter the narrative that the outdoors are not the place Black people should be…,”

to “…educate the birding and broader outdoor-loving community about the challenges Black birders specifically face” in the hopes that “people in the community who are white can hold each other accountable to make sure these spaces are not hostile to Black people…,” and

to “…encourage increased diversity in birding and conservation”. As Newsome states, “Diversity is important for the robustness of any community trying to do anything” [155].

Black Birders Week was conceived of as a virtual event, first due to the ongoing pandemic during which it was created. Then, organizers discovered an unforeseen benefit: the digital nature allowed more people to participate. Twitter users introduced themselves online through hashtags, photographs, and videos, and discussed their hobbies, professions, and research (see Figure 2 and Figure 3).

Tykee James, a government affairs coordinator for the National Audubon Society and a Black Birders Week co-founder, says:

From a social media standpoint, it has been absolutely breathtaking and just so remarkable to see the amount of Black faces, to see the regional diversity of Black joy across the world—not just the country even or the continent or hemisphere, but the world…We didn’t pick our moment, but we are going to rise to the occasion. The Black experience is not one of only trauma; it is one of joy and it is one of pride and it is one of strength [157].

4. Discussion

The social relations that forged lynching continue to chill the relationship between African Americans and natural landscapes. Through a historical-interpretive analysis, contextualized by empirical literature and foregrounded by the Central Park Birdwatching Incident, this section explores how the interaction between Amy and Christian fits into a larger narrative of anti-Black environmental injustice. Further, I offer some actionable steps to unsettle the status quo, with a keen eye to grassroots movements and institutional partnerships, in this time of democratic and federal uncertainty.

First, there is no recorded footage of the events that transpired prior to the start of Christian’s video. Both Amy and Christian agree on the sequence of events, but both offer differing accounts of their intentions and perceptions of each other’s actions. When examining what is available of their encounter, several aspects are of particular note: body locations, narrative sequence, vocal intonations, and word choice. For instance, the first statement in the recording and moment of emphasis is a command for Christian to “stop” recording Amy (line 2). According to her later statements, Amy contends that at this point, she is already fearful for herself and her dog after perceiving a threat in Christian’s assertion that he will do what he wants and that she will not like it. Throughout the duration of the video, Christian does not approach Amy or move towards her at any time. She also does not say anything that would suggest she is unable to leave the vicinity. In fact, she traverses the area through most of the footage, although her refusal to leash her dog until the end of the video and instead hold and drag the dog by its collar seems to make her movements more cumbersome. Both parties use conventional language, governing politeness in their interaction. Amy refers to Christian as “Sir”, and both use “please” to preface their requests. Such polite language may be innocuous or even garner goodwill under different circumstances, but here, the emphasis and prolongation with which they are spoken suggests a range of underlying meanings including frustration (lines 4 and 9), assertiveness (lines 4, 6, 9–10, 14–15, 33), and refusal to capitulate (lines 20 and 24). Even when the same word is used by both parties, in this case, “please” (lines 14–15), Amy’s changing locations and increased vocal pitch compared to Christian’s repetition (emphasis, pitch, and word choice) and static location suggest that Amy is escalating. Amy approaches Christian on four occasions, taking a larger-than-average step towards him and pointing her finger in his face on the last occasion. DiAngelo (2018) argues that the constant state of fragility in which white people live causes “…even a minimum amount of racial stress…” to become “…intolerable, triggering defensive moves” [158] (p. 57).

Further, Amy makes her decision to call the police contingent on whether Christian complies with her command to stop recording. If Amy “…desperately wanted help” as she contends, why not call 911, regardless of whether Christian continues to record? Amy then previews what she will tell the dispatcher (line 23), to what end? Amy pauses, waiting for a response, suggesting that this is not a declarative statement but a coercive negotiation tactic. Amy raises the stakes of their encounter, laden with the full weight and history of the geopolitical context of not just that moment, but centuries of America’s cruel racial order. Amy’s pause is Christian’s final opportunity to comply. Her emphasis falls on “African American man threatening…” (line 23), keywords distinct for their association with rationales for anti-Black violence. Her pitch rises on “life” (line 23), another preview of what is to come.

Bentham’s (1978) “Security and Equality of Property” and Harris’ “Whiteness as Property” (1995) are helpful for understanding Amy’s tactics [5,159]. Bentham (1978) asserts that what constitutes property “…is not material, it is metaphysical; it is a mere conception of the mind” [159] (p. 51). Building on Radin’s (1982) [160] work, Harris (1995) states, “In a society structured on racial subordination, white privilege became an expectation and whiteness became the quintessential property for personhood” [5] (p. 280). If whiteness is property, as Harris (1995) claims, then owners are entitled to property rights that:

…[draw] boundaries and [enforce] or [reorder] existing regimes of power. The inequalities that are produced and reproduced are not givens or inevitabilities; rather, they are conscious selections regarding the structuring of social relations [5] (p. 280).

Bentham writes, “The idea of property consists in an established expectation; in the persuasion of being able to draw such or such an advantage from the thing possessed, according to the nature of the case” [159] (p.51–52). It is here that we have to ask, what advantage was Amy attempting to draw from her whiteness? Christian’s immediate response and raised vocal pitch on “like” indicate both an understanding of the “rights” that Amy was attempting to invoke and defiance to her proposition, perhaps even subtle mocking. A month later, in a Washington Post interview, Christian says:

If I had to guess, I’d say she was just looking for any way to get an advantage in the situation. It was a stressful situation. We were at odds, and she was looking for a way to get a leg up. … And she just went to a place that she should not have gone [161].

Interestingly, Christian describes Amy’s entitlement to whiteness in spatial terms, as a place.

Amy then says, “Excuse me” (line 27), another polite convention in the midst of her “assault,” as she retreats to call 911 [135]. Amy speaks with the dispatcher as she wrangles her dog, appearing to repeat her description of Christian due to some inability to be heard clearly. As her dog finally settles on the ground, Amy’s pitch rises, despite no audible stimuli from Christian or discernible change in his proximity to her or her dog. Her intonation becomes guttural, and her pitch and amplitude rise quickly, seemingly without prompting from Christian, as she requests that police be sent to her location. What appears to be Amy’s contrived panic fits Phipps’s (2021) assessment that “political whiteness involves a will to power: in the case of bourgeois white women, this was and is often achieved through performances of powerlessness” [61] (p. 86). Amy leashes her dog, and Christian delivers a curt “Thank you!” in response to her compliance with the park’s leash policy just before he ends the recording.

Subsequently, the public sentiment on social media was critical of Amy and swiftly condemned her actions as an attempt on Christian’s life. Thematic abstraction of the top twenty tweets containing mention of Amy or Christian’s name revealed four major themes discerned from explicit text and also meaning derived from the contexts of the posts: birding, death, status, and racism (see Table S1). The abstraction process requires drawing implicit meaning when the text is not explicit. For example, tweet 12, regarding Christian, explicitly states “ruin a man’s life,” but the use of that phrasing is implicitly different in meaning than in tweet 14′s “entire life is being destroyed”, which is in reference to Amy. The former is a reference to “death by police”, as Christian’s name is sandwiched between Ahmaud Arbery’s and George Floyd’s names, while the latter refers to Amy’s infamy and job loss, making tweet 14 about status. Christian’s involvement in birding generally and during the encounter was discussed in tweets to provide an explanation for his activities in the park, and the National Audubon Society referenced it in a long-form statement that directly addressed the dangers of the outdoors for African Americans due to racism, receiving over 40,000 likes. Status was an unexpected theme, with a tweet by Marc Lamont Hill receiving over 90,000 likes. Hill commented on resisting the appeal of positioning Christian as a “perfect victim” as information regarding his background as a Harvard graduate and a successful editor circulated on social media. Tweets often referenced Christian’s name in conjunction with other prominent victims of police killings, the circumstances of their deaths paralleling the hallmarks of lynching: a vigilante mob and Ahmaud Arbery, a public spectacle and George Floyd, and a lawless home invasion and Breonna Taylor. Tweets that spoke to racism, the most represented theme, frequently speculated not just on Amy’s intentions but on her weaponization of racial tropes regarding Black men and white women.

There are countless cases of lynchings that I could have used for this case study, but I chose this case because it almost happened, on the same day that another actually did [125]. True to the tenets of historical-interpretative analysis, I ponder which detail would have irreparably changed that day? If Christian had not addressed Amy, would their lives have continued unchanged? If the police had arrived earlier, what would the Ramble trees have witnessed? If Christian hailed from a different part of the African Diaspora, he might have feared the police, but the situation would have lacked the resonance of lynching for him, the African American experience having its particular histories. Perhaps most interestingly, Christian is the exception that proves the rule: he is an African American man with a long and public engagement with that space, a public park in one of the most “liberal” and urban parts of the country, empowered by privilege and social status with the rules on his side. Christian’s parents, Francis and Margaret Cooper, were Civil Rights activists who, according to his sister Melody, a film and television writer, taught him and her “…to move through the world as if [they] had a right to be there” [161]. And yet, in a single statement by Amy, Christian still felt the dread of lynching, if only for a moment. No, Christian was not lynched, but the threat of lynching was deployed to force his compliance by a woman unaware of his background; even so, the list of his accomplishments was a weak shield for a barrage of bullets or the grip of a chokehold [162]. Christian’s personal accolades following the incident do not indicate a deviant or negative case; by virtue of his previously established social status and personal connections, he was well-positioned to capitalize on the notoriety of the incident.

Black birders used the Central Park Birdwatching Incident to broaden the public discourse, underscoring the ways in which a Black body that is autonomous and free in natural spaces still troubles the proverbial plantation. Recognizing that Black solidarity is not a zero-sum game, Black birders mourned the death of one African American man while celebrating the survival of another with an event whose objectives fall squarely within established practices that aim to empower people by converging participation, community, and counternarratives [163]. hooks (1992) suggests that while transgressive images (Black Birders Week roll call posts) play a key role in providing “…a context for transformation,” additional labor is required for social change, including “…shifting paradigms, changing perspectives, ways of looking” [164] (p. 4). In the absence of mourning and redress, historical repetition is likely to occur, naming violence without acknowledging and deconstructing its underlying drivers, and corresponding acts of resistance can result in stagnation [11,165,166,167].

As previously mentioned, African Americans have long engaged the great outdoors in spite of state-sanctioned segregation and overt racial violence. Looking forward, actionable steps should prioritize equitable access to green spaces and facilitate the socioecological relationships of African Americans, though, even prior to the current regime, the same communities, governmental entities, and professions tasked with improving equitable and inclusive environmental outcomes are responsible for dismantling and targeting Black communities for the last century [168,169]. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the “uneven and inequitable distribution of nearby outdoor spaces for recreation, respite, and enjoyment,” the shameful result of racist urban planning practices. In 2017, the U.S. Census Bureau reported stark disparities in the “nature gap” across the country, with 68% of Black neighborhoods being nature-deprived compared to 23% of white neighborhoods [170]. We must unlearn the misconception that racism is bounded geographically, given that four of the top five states with the largest Black/white nature gap disparities are in the northeastern corridor of the country, none are in the Deep South: Connecticut (93%/10%), Massachusetts (94%/14%), Rhode Island is (93%/13), Kentucky (94–13%), and New York (87%/9%) [170].

Added, Lee’s (2024) recommendations for “…recruiting more Black environment leaders, highlighting Black accomplishments in the creation of nature tourism destinations, and promoting authentic Black experiences in nature…” can be achieved by building sustainable partnerships across scales [75] (p. 71). The recruitment of more Black environmental leaders can be accelerated through increased visibility (and funding) of the offerings of historically Black colleges and universities. For example, Delaware State University, Tennessee State University, and Savannah State University offer degree programs in natural resources, environmental sciences, and marine science, respectively. Six land grant HBCUs appear in the top 100 list of university landowners, supporting the self-determination of their institutions, which are designed to serve underserved communities and first-generation students: Tuskegee University (5000 acres), Alabama A&M University (2300 acres), Alcorn State University (1756 acres), Prairie View A&M University (1502 acres), and Kentucky State University (915 acres). Museums such as the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University (both of which already promote grassroots events, including Black Birders Week) are an avenue for building partnerships that yield visibility campaigns for the role of African Americans in the creation of nature tourism sites. Organizational partnerships can include groups such as Conservation International, the National Audubon Society, and the Sierra Club, strengthening policy advocacy and training opportunities. Additional non-profit organizations, such as 4-H, in which Christian developed his love for birding, are also useful, but partnerships may prove to be precarious due to government- and university-based administrative models. Local nonprofit organizations and municipal-based outreach and programming are key to community-level activities and the establishment of pipeline programs led by faces familiar to their constituents; examples such as Vibe Tribe Adventures in Denver, Colorado, and Outdoorsy Black Women (multi-state) come to mind. Of course, one social barrier often feeds another, with race-related economic barriers remaining a significant hurdle to higher education and nature tourism travel, and diversity, equity, and inclusion-focused initiatives being defunded at the federal and state levels.

5. Conclusions

The Central Park Incident engages Mowatt’s (2012) question, “…What if [natural landscapes] are also filled with expressions of power, spectacles of horror, and acts to maintain a segregated society?” [49] (p. 1362). Beginning in the late 19th century, the Great Migration served as a domestic diaspora, routing African Americans to northern and western states with economic oppression and the Ku Klux Klan on their heels [171,172]. Although I grew up in the Deep South, my partner hails from Detroit, Michigan, a generation or two removed from Alabama. Christian Cooper’s family found their way to New York instead, a journey that he compares to birds’ migratory instincts [12]. Yet, despite their midwestern, northern, or west coast upbringings, many African Americans still feel an intangible, lingering, and palpable alarm at the sight of an open field, a tree with thick branches, or a bonfire’s flame. Like an environmental contaminant that leeches into nearby soil, diffusing its toxins and disfiguring future crops, the geotrauma resulting from lynching has spread like a cultural contagion [173]. In this study, I find its ability to accumulate looms heavy in the Central Park encounter as the layers of racial violence compound and interact across and through time, merging the past and future to create Christian’s then-present [20].

Five years removed from George Floyd’s murder and the racial reckoning the moment seemed to promise, police killings continue to rise, environmental protections are being gutted, and Donald Trump has returned to the White House with a vengeance [174,175,176]. Climate change is poised to decimate Black communities, and Black immigrants are disproportionately deported [177,178]. The human conditions and social relations that informed that fateful day in Central Park have only worsened for African Americans and others who find themselves in the lower ranks of the American racial order. But this year, just as in years past, the enduring and resounding sentiment among African Americans can be captured in a short, declarative statement: We outside.