An attendee at a 2013 Outdoor Afro event explores the Consumnes River Preserve in California’s Central Valley
What other stories are out there? Who has inspired you? Well, African Americans have historical role models, but we don’t necessarily connect them with conservation or outdoor leadership. So what I’ve been doing is rebranding people. Think about Harriet Tubman. She was every bit a wilderness leader: how else could she have brought hundreds of people to freedom under cover of night? She knew how to read the landscape and navigate by the stars. When you think about someone like her as a wilderness leader, it situates us in na- ture—and as leaders in nature—in a way that we don’t typically have the opportunity to tap into.
Right. Because for much of your life in the outdoors, you were the only black person on the trail. Growing up, I was always with people who looked like me in nature because I was with my family. But as I got older and started getting out of the city, I’d join the hiking groups, go on biking trips, and find I was always the only African American woman there.
Why do you think that was?
I was privileged because I had networks of friends who sup- ported me getting out in nature. I could borrow gear, or ride along with them. But if you don’t have that know-how or those networks, it can make it hard to do some things in the outdoors. When I hear people ask questions like, how come only white people go to Yellowstone?—I’m like, chill, it’s in Wyoming! It’s about where people can access. There’s a myth that people who look like me don’t have a connection to nature. When we talk about communities of color in nature, the question tends to be, “Why don’t they go out?” or “Why are they not doing these very specific activi- ties?” I ask different questions. How are people getting out? What are they doing when they go? Busy working families have a lot going on, so how do we make it easy for people to connect to nature, close to where they live? We need to lower the barriers between communities of color and the outdoors, whether they’re psychological barriers, or practical barriers like gear and transportation.
28 · LAND&PEOPLE · SPRING/SUMMER 2016
When you created Outdoor Afro, you were finishing your bachelor’s degree at UC Berkeley while also work- ing full-time at Morgan Stanley. Not to mention being a mother of three kids. How did you get your idea off the ground?
I was trying to figure out what would come next. A mentor asked me, “If time and money were not an issue, what would you be doing?” And without really thinking about it, I said, “Oh, I’d probably start a website to reconnect African Ameri- cans to the outdoors.” It was like I opened my mouth and my life fell out.
In two weeks, I registered the website and started writing and posting pictures, just telling my story. But Outdoor Afro was really born on social media. It wasn’t complicated; it didn’t take a focus group. It was simply the only way I could get a message out to thousands of people from my kitchen table. I just started talking about why I love being outdoors, and pretty quickly, people started to say, “Hey, you’re not the only one.” Soon, Outdoor Afro became a place for people to find each other and share and post their experiences. Wonder- ful things started to happen. In the first year, we were invited to the White House for President Obama’s signing of the America’s Great Outdoors initiative.
teresa baker
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