 So, I was thinking about, you know, I wrote some notes and I go back and forth and I tend to want to get closer to the audience instead of staying behind here. I was thinking about, you know, I never, like, oh God, yes, so my Ph.D. is in geography, which is a social science. If anybody, I don't call myself a social scientist ever. I actually don't call myself an academic and I'm not in, I left full-time academia for a lot of the reasons that we're all here to discuss. The thing, when I think about data, I was thinking about this, you know, data is information. And so, part of what I want to ask you this morning is to say, yeah, there's some things I'm going to say. I'm going to weave some stories together. It's going to be both personal as with historical, just to kind of give us a sense. But the thing about diversity, I'm sorry, nothing's going to change if you're simply taking this in as information. You can't do it and have to also be personal. You should be personal for everyone, actually. And that's really what makes it hard. That's the tension to understand. We all know that data has impact. We can talk about it up here. But I also need you to understand it right here, right? And that's probably what I'm going to get at today a little bit. And recognizing the challenges of that. I was thinking about, here's what I wrote. I said, well, has anybody seen that movie this week? I came out this past week on the event called The Inventor. Oh, man. You have to see it about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos. That's some crazy mess. But that's not what I want to talk about her. But there was a scientist on here. And it was something that he said. It was something that he said about data. And I wrote it down here because I wanted to get it right, what I heard him say. I wrote it here at the end. I wrote it here somewhere. I did. One of the scientists talked about data, saying that data provides information, but it's the story that pulls people in and gets them to change. And you know, we know that. I'm sure all of you know that. This is kind of what you do. But sometimes I think we forget what that means, because we think of the story as being kind of qualitative. We think of the story as being, oh, just that woo-woo thing that we can kind of connect. And for me, the story is everything. It's actually what brings life to the data. When I wrote... So going back to school and stuff was a second career for me. And when I started the PhD in the early 2000s, and because of reasons that I could not control, because I was originally doing work on gender and environment in Nepal, and there was political unrest, and I couldn't do that. So then I decided I was going to do race and... I apologize for that. I was going to do stuff on African-Americans. So this was 2000 and 2003, and I remember going to the library to see what data and information I could find on African-Americans and the environment, and I found almost nothing. There was a little bit there around environmental justice, and environmental justice is incredibly important, and environmental justice tends to emphasize the bad things done to good people. They tend to emphasize the vulnerability. And the thing is about black people in any group we're not just the bad things that happen to us. So all the other ways that we kind of show up that we're resilient, creative, do the work that we do, there was nothing on the library shelves. There was no data there. So I was asking the question I found so little, so does this mean that we don't care? Does it mean that black people don't have nothing to offer? Or does it mean that we just don't matter? What's going on there, which has always been personal for me? So I found that when I was doing this work, it wasn't simply about interviewing black people and looking theoretically at things and taking history and pulling it in. I actually, it was also about how this work is done, how data is collected, what information is considered valuable, who's actually collecting that information, who's deciding, because Alicia, you had some great things up there, I was saying, like how do you even get promoted on that information? The way that information is framed, what's considered theory, and it goes on and on and on. What's adopted into policy? Who gets to adopted into policy? Because who's in that space? We don't know what we don't know. So how does that work? Privilege has the privilege of not seeing itself, and how does that work as well? This isn't about being good people and bad people, because we often get hung up on that conversation around diversity. You're good if you do these things, and you're not good if you don't. Actually, we're all way more complicated than that. And again, I think we don't know what we don't know, and how do we hold that? So I want to, you know, yes, and I wanted to put this up here. Don't you love her? I love her. I love her too. She's fabulous when I got a chance to meet her, and I was like, what? So for those of you who don't know, Bernice Reagan-Johnson, who found it, was one of the founding members of Sweet Honey in the Rock, which is an amazing acapella group. But this was probably maybe seven years ago now. At the University of Minnesota, they had a conference called Black Environmental Thought 2. It was a Black Environmental Thought 1. It was fabulous, and she was the keynote. And she started off talking. She didn't understand why she was asked to be a keynote environmental thought, but she found a way to do it. She sang half of her keynote. It was like, what's happening right now? But one of the many things she said that stuck with me, and she was looking out in an audience of professors, of artists, of students, and she said that she was talking very particularly about African-Americans, but I think this could be applied across groups. She said, you have to go below the intellectual paper record to get that story. She was saying to get that black story, but actually, I think it's to get really any story, a better understanding of who somebody is, and the challenges to being able to do that and why it's so challenging. The other thing is, and those of you, I can't have this conversation with you about this without it being personal. I joke around it, but I just can't be in Cognizio it just doesn't work. And again, I started off by saying it should be personal for everyone, but it's definitely personal for me. We're all biased. I'm biased, too. So the first thing I have to do is situate for you, myself, in a bit of my own personal story, why I come to think about the environment in a particular way, why I come to think of a story in a particular way, why I come to think about Vita in a very particular way. And this was going on when I was doing, it was personal because this happened around 2003 with my family at the same time I was starting to do this work and think I want to find out some more information about black people and the environment and be able to talk about it in a particular way. And some of you may have heard me tell this story before. I apologize because it's still the same story, but it's my story, right? So people always, earlier, a gentleman, he asked, he had the door, he said, he wanted to know where I'm from. And I said, well, I said to him, I'm going to tell you that story in a minute. But oftentimes, you see how I'm moving? I know, sorry. Okay, I want to be close. People often ask me where I'm from and I've moved around a lot, but sometimes I get a little attitude, you know? They're like, you want to know where I live? Like, you want to know where I'm from? Like, all in an attitude. And about me, it's probably been about five years ago, I was in Detroit, I was at a street fair there, and an older black man said to me, where are you from? You want to know where I live? You want to know where I'm from? And he just put me like this, but he left me from New York. I'm a parent, I'm a director, I'm a corner house. I grew up in a community, I grew up in a small town, I'm 40 years old, I'm 30 more than 50. High school education, grew up for a real last day life. Like that, not to fight the Korean War, and like a lot of black people living in the South decided that they would be a better life for their families. So my parents came to New York, my father used to be a job opportunity to New York, one was in New York City, five hours north of New York City, where I used to be a janitor, and the other was 30 minutes outside of New York City, in Western New York. There was a very welcome view of San Francisco, that my mother just, you know, one out of four women at the time in her 50s, she had dodged something wrong, adopted another kid, and without asking her permission while she was under anesthesia, they just removed one of her ovaries. They told her afterwards, the reason we didn't tell you about it, is because we didn't think she could emotionally handle her information. So they didn't think they could have kids and actually get benefit of me, because they adopted me. Oh, yeah, I can hear it now. Yes, it benefited me, because they adopted me, and then what I like to say is, they relaxed and had my first brother, and they relaxed some more, and had my second brother. And so that's us in this very, this was a very wealthy, all-white neighborhood except for us. We were the only family of color in this neighborhood, until the early 90s, when she moved in, she was there for a few years, and then she moved out. The story that I generally tell, and we were outside all the time, we all knew how to swim, by the time we were six or seven years old, it was a stunning piece of land and we were privileged to have access to it. I also want to say, in terms of wealth, Harry Winston had property down the street, Wingfoot Golf Club is around the corner, Schaefer of Schaefer Beer, you older folks will remember Schaefer next door, so you get the kind of money that's in the neighborhood. You always had police patrolling the neighborhood because you had the kind of wealth, that kind of wealth in this neighborhood. It's the story that I always tell audiences to say so. I was nine years old, we went to public school, I was walking home from school one day, I was looking very unimpressive, I had a little Afro and a little school bag, my little reading glasses. I was around the corner from the house, a cop stopped me, on an old white plains road, which is the address, and he just looked at me and said, oh, do you work there? I'm thinking, dude, I'm nine. But I can't say anything like that, I was just confused, I said, no, I live there. And I go home, I tell my father, who called up the police station and gave him holy hell basically, and I never bothered me and my brothers again. But as an adult, I have to think about the logics there. This is a conversation we're hearing all the time, little girl, mid-afternoon, school bag, all the things that maybe he should stop today. Are you okay where you're going? Can I help you get home? But instead can only imagine me in this beautiful place if I work there. I want to jump ahead now to the 90s. So now my parents have been on this land for 40 years. They've been caring for it full-time. The Tishman's come up on weekends and holidays. They've got other properties and places they can go. They've got quite a while, years earlier. But Mrs. Tishman is now sick and she knows that she's going to die and what's going to happen to my parents. They've been on this land for that long. To her credit, she wanted to try to keep them on this land. This land was worth over $3 million in the 90s. The property taxes were over $125,000 a year. My dad had been making about $20,000 a year. They had a complicated relationship. It was paternal in many ways. But she also had my father by her bedside when she died. So her children, it was complicated. Her grown children, no, we couldn't stay on the property. Let me just leave it like that. And so in the end, she had a house built for them in Leesburg, Virginia. Now my father's four, he was never going back to the state of Virginia, but at that point my youngest brother was married with kids and he was sort of settled. And me and my other brother were moving around too much. So they have a beautiful house. So Mrs. Tishman passed away. They came on, but they couldn't leave. So now they're in their late 70s. So now they've been on the land almost 50 years. And they need a new family to move in. They find a family from the Dominican Republic that's now going to take this job. When they leave, the house is beautiful. They live on a half an acre of land. My dad in particular got very depressed. And all he was talking about was the land. And missing the land and feeling like this was home. This was right when I started doing this work on African-American environment, so I was trying to find information about that. And thinking about how in this country when we're talking about the environment and land, we largely frame it in two ways. Why don't we talk about it in terms of recreation? The other is the natural resources. They're natural resources for us to use. But for me, we don't look at labor and work as another way to build that relationship, as a way to contribute, as a way to be creative and resilient and to love the land and love the environment. That's what I was talking about as an environmentalist, ever. You say that to them, they're just going to look at you. Fun. But that doesn't mean that they weren't engaged and didn't care, right? And I started to think about all the people in this country who have had the same experience but are largely invisible in the data. They're largely invisible in the conversation, which means that they're largely invisible in the policy, the legislation, the curriculum and universities, and it just rolls itself down the hill because everybody becomes invisible, not everybody, but significant groups of people become invisible in that story. The last thing I want to say about that is that in about 2003-2004, my parents received a letter, a copy of a letter from one of the neighbors because the Westchester Conservation Land Trust had decided to put a conservation easement on this piece of land. And they had sent a letter out to everyone to say, here's all the environmental reasons why we're doing it. Where it sits in the watershed, the wildlife on the property, all these reasons why it needs to be protected, which means in perpetuity, nothing can be changed on this property. At the end of the letter, it thanked the new owner for his conservation mindedness. He'd been on there for about three years at that point. There was nothing in the letter thanking my parents who cared for that land for 50. So just like that, gone. I'm sure the Westchester Conservation Land Trust are good people. I'm sure they're nice people actually and well-intentioned. And yet the power just to not see my family and gone and that happens over and over. So you can then go collect data and unless you know how to look for something different, why would you even look behind the shadow, behind that existing data to see what else might be there that we're not talking about. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. That's the big house. So, yeah. Ooh, I lost my way there, but not really. So let's put it a different way. I wrote here, what did I write here? I said, how do we, just because there was nothing on the shelves didn't mean black folks were producing knowledge about ourselves. That's the other thing. When you have historically not been allowed to participate in traditional spaces of knowledge production, so one of those questions I saw up there that Alicia had on her slide, thinking one of the things that reasons why we may not see people there, because actually historically if you've never been invited in, why would you trust people in that space now? Because again, it's not just intellectual, it's not just professional, it's personal. Do people actually see your difference? One of the hardest things for me to take is when somebody looks at me and says, I don't see your color. You're just like me. I understand, I know people are laughing because you know what that thing is. And I know in their hearts, because I'm an empathetic and compassionate and optimistic human being, what they're trying to say is, you're human, you are human like me. But what they're also doing is invalidating my history, my experience and my presence, which means I can't trust you. Which doesn't mean I don't think you're a good person. It just means I can't trust you. And so now you're going to invite me into work with you as the only one. How am I supposed to trust you because I know how nice you are and we can go get drinks but this means that you can't see who I am and imagine my experience which means you can't be my ally which means you can't support me which means you won't even know when you need to be able to do that because privilege has a privilege of not seeing itself and again, you can't see me. So for me, how do we change that? How do we have that conversation? And I said earlier everybody has bias so I always put these two stories up here because an example of how my bias, everyone is biased and we can have a conversation but bias is not the same as prejudice is not the same as racism. They kind of live together but they are not the same and we're all biased based on who we are, what's situated in our lives, we have experiences. You don't need to apologize for that. Nobody should have to apologize for their bias but I think you have to understand what your bias is and where your blinders are on. So I usually put up these two stories often times when groups, internal groups want to talk about sustainability and I ask the question, what is it that we're trying to sustain? And so this story of Ian Gibson, this was maybe I don't remember, maybe three, four years ago the story that actually six months later came out in the news that people were talking about was a white dentist who goes sport hunting in South Africa and killed the grandson lion of the famous lion or something like that but six months before him Ian Gibson who's also a sport hunter in Africa to hunt elephants for sport and he was with a group of black and white men African and non-African and he got too close to a bull elephant and he got gored to death. He was about 53 and I was reading this online myself, I can't support sport hunting I just have a real hard time understanding why anybody would want to do that I love elephants, they're one of my two favorite animals, so there's all these reasons why I feel like I've gotten enough. I'm not thick around him as I was reading the article and I was reading it online, then I did the thing where you start reading the comments yes time passes, you don't even know what's happening by the time I got to the end of the comments I was in tears I was in tears because every comment saved for one said things like he got what he deserved one for the elephant and it just kept going and on and on and on and I realized in my own anger and in my own bias that that felt terrible because this man died a horrible death this man had a family this man came from a community and even though it seems like we have very little in common if I can't actually open my mind to considering him differently then what is it that we're trying to sustain because actually we can talk about protecting the lake protecting the beach protecting the forest and in our own relationships it doesn't matter for me how far we go because all that's kind of surface stuff the activities we can do without doing the hard and deep and conscious shifting work of actually looking at ourselves in the mirror and then deciding our relationships are worth the risk to actually go there around these conversations of difference I put it up here next to this little guy because actually I don't really have to do as much work over here this little boy was part of a story on Clint Michigan his mother over time the impact it's going to have on kids which they actually don't know what that's going to be and it's just easier for me not to be, I can kind of look at him he's African American he's a little child he didn't have any role in that and I feel less conflicted about what he must be going through this is where I have to do my work over here where my bias is to try to understand could I sit with his family and have a conversation and how do I build my capacity and skill set so that I might do so yes in terms of data and thinking about how do you know the stories, for me again what's also behind it and I'm always sort of putting up some broader brush strokes of our history around any environmental conversation in this country in particular so I put this up in this way and there's a lot of things I could have put up there but I put up everything from Japanese to German to slavery to poor people to immigrants I mean just putting it up there to say like these things have always existed in this country always now we have a conversation about environment and often what we talk about right smack in the middle there's President Roosevelt and John Muir it's 1903 they're in Yosemite on overhanging rock they're having this conversation about wilderness and conservation and commitment and national parks and they're doing the whole thing and I'm not interested in denigrating them because they had an effect on even the way that we have this conversation now right they've had an impact on it the commitment was real I have no doubt at all about their commitment the thing for me what else was going on in 1903 while they were talking about using this universal language about how we all should be and what that relationship should look like how we should manage, preserve, take care of blah blah blah blah yes it is important sometimes I just went blah blah blah I can't even believe I did that because sometimes that's what it is because 1903 let's think about Jim Crow segregation firmly in place so if you were black and or non-white actually I'm sorry it didn't matter if it was a beautiful park didn't matter if it was a beautiful forest beautiful beach you couldn't safely and securely go into those spaces didn't matter what they were saying actually let's go back a little earlier than that I like to go back to 1862 back in the olden days of 1862 I never thought about the Homestead Act before doing this work I never thought about it at all until I understand that that piece of legislation changed the way we relate to land right in 1862 for the most part if you were in a European immigrant you could come over here that gun went off at midnight you could run out you could put a stake down on 160 acres of land and if you stayed on that land for five years if you built a structure if you farmed and survived that that land was yours free and clear folks that can't happen anywhere at any time anymore not on this planet we make a bus on another planet but we can't do that here anymore and understand that land isn't just about land it's about political and economic power and it is about legacy and it is about belonging is the right to claim your place and say my story counts my presence counts this land is mine I have to think of who was on that land and had to be removed so you could get it for free the general you I'm just saying all the native people who were killed and or removed because this land is stolen no matter how far we get down the road this land will always be stolen so how do we hold that I think about three years later Emancipation Proclamation enslaved Africans are freed they're given 400,000 acres of land and then white plantation owners say whoa we didn't just give them land people that we held as property we gave them economic and political power and I do believe they're going to be pissed off we're going to take that land back and for the most part they can't participate in the Homestead Act now I'm not interested in denigrating European immigrants many of them died something like 60% of them didn't make it through those five years many of them were leaving circumstances where they couldn't have the land and where they wanted to be in their original home and things like the common cold our loneliness because our closest neighbor could be 100 miles away it was hard, it was a risk they were taking a risk the point is not to denigrate them to understand how complicated that history is lack of people for the most part couldn't participate native people were killed we can keep going down the history in terms of the legislation against the Chinese Japanese in terms of it just keeps going a lot of the stuff we're experiencing today it ain't new news, it's old news for me rooted in our lack of reconciliation around those differences and how, and it's just exploded in all different kinds of ways and it gets embedded even in the way we understand data and what data we think is important and what data we can't see and who's in the room and who's making the policy and who's making the curriculum and again it's not about good people versus bad people it's all about living in the country that's complicated and this stuff is not easy to talk about right, so how do we hold that I'm starting to sweat man, it's like working up ok bam oh I put converges it's all converging that's just fancy oh I know I'm sorry see I'm so, I just don't behave well ok yes yeah yeah yeah of course can you hear me, yes you can ok so originally Whitney Tome was going to be here today and I wanted to put this slide up since she couldn't be here today to talk a little bit about some of the data out there around this and I'll read this out because I realize that I usually don't put a lot of words up there but I wanted to get it there so Dr. Darcita Taylor at the University of Michigan where I was just this past week and her folks there created something called Green 2.0 her team looked at NGOs NGO foundations and government agencies something like 171 non-profits 74 government agencies 28 leading grant-making foundations to really see in terms of staff and leadership in terms of diversity who are we seeing there and these are some of the colors some of the data they came up with people of color are 36% of the US population of the science and engineering workforce but they do not exceed 16% of the staff in any of the organizations surveyed well organizations have been talking about diversity for decades the numbers don't lie diversity composition has not broken that 16% ceiling none of the largest budget organizations had a president vice president or assistant associate director who was a person of color and here's the so we a lot of us already know that data but here's the piece that actually got me they said while many organizations believe that they should support what the study called external talent delivery initiatives that number drops 20 to 30% when asked if they would likely support these initiatives that's the piece we don't talk about that's the very human place the consciousness shift because even though they see the data they're not convinced to support the data and that's why I always want to ask and why is that what's going on bias fear privilege all that stuff that really doesn't it doesn't it's hard to quantify it's and it's hard to qualify but exists there so how do we engage that the other thing that I want to say about this too is that we are never forget we're talking about individuals you know oftentimes the approach and I guess I understand this from an organizational or institutional perspective is we have to come up with a policy for the institution or the organization but people can hide behind that policy really easily I have my own personal story if there's time I will tell you being in the department that recruited me as the only African American in the department 75 environmental science policy management and it was nasty right it was nasty if you had a 16 million dollar endowment to do diversity inclusion work that you see Berkeley in the College of Natural Resources I bought in more African American doctoral students than anyone in the history of the department I created classes around it people they were overloaded but the fight over my tenure went on for almost three years it was public students protested people wrote in from around the country it was brutal and dirty and I didn't get tenure all because of the book nothing else they couldn't come up with anything else they didn't think it was long enough I was told that I didn't have enough pages but the fight was nasty and it actually revealed for me a lot of what I need to be true because diversity is not assimilation oh well we'll come back to that man I totally went off the thing I went off the rails there but we're coming back I wrote here I want to read this a short letter I got by email part of the challenge is never to forget we're talking about individuals and the impact it is it has on people I served on the National Parks Advisory Board it was really amazing and we all actively walked away last January because we were getting no traction we couldn't even meet with anybody with this administration and this is from two the letter I got says we are two young women of color currently employed with the National Parks Service we recently read about your resignation from the National Parks System Advisory Board and we wanted to let you know that your actions meant something to us as women of color at this particular park we feel very isolated and often times unheard and underrepresented there are no people of color supervisors above us that want to take action towards making a change and the lack of diversity in the workplace or in our visitation it can feel very demotivating when we feel like the only one the only two that want to work towards change we run the social media accounts for our park which holds a lot of promise for forwarding the mission of the National Parks Service and attracting a more diverse generation of park stewards from our position we feel that there is not much that we can do to subvert the system except in little ways through our interpretive outreach by featuring marginalized faces on our social media feed we embarked on this career path out of college because we wanted work we wanted to work towards making public lands more inclusive and protecting the environment unfortunately it was a rude awakening to enter the agency and realize that it is very antiquated homogenous entity not to mention we have personally been affected by the current administration's views on climate science and our jobs have become less fulfilling more surveilled and ethically questionable so you think about all the things that they're holding to be at their job all the things that many people are holding and some of the things that other people because of their privilege don't have to hold it all but they have to hold it every day and how do they do that oh, just wonder why that thing looks familiar that's what I was supposed to have up there at that moment boom I want to talk a little bit more about history this is one of the chapters of my books and stories here it seems like a story you may be wondering like this doesn't make any what does this got to do with anything and the issue of representation and who we see and what stories we see so this cover of Vogue I believe is 2008, 2009 the first time they put a black man on the cover of Vogue and so they put on LeBron James and the supermodel Giselle Lynchon and when this came out a lot of black people online were pissed because they said you finally put a black man on the cover and why is he looking all primitive like that why couldn't he be looking more elegant and then somebody uncovered that poster which is from 1917 right down to the color of her dress now the editors of Vogue said they didn't know anything about that over there which I don't really believe but here's what I know to be true whether they knew it or not consciously that historically black and brown people have always had a negative association or were given that negative association with all things non-human in terms of nature and thinking about land and thinking about the primitive when I think about the world's fairs that we had to share information how we're going to become a better country in the late 1800s if you went to those world fairs and you were white it must have been pretty amazing the idea and at that time they might not have called data but were sharing information about how we can be innovative and different and move in many ways to be closer to God as they were thinking if you were a black and brown person you were put on display as a thing that we want to move away from I thought about Otabanga, 19, African discovered brought back to the United States put on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City as the missing link and because they didn't think enough of the public to see him to the Bronx Zoo and to the primate exhibit until enough people protested unfortunately there's tons and tons of stories so we jump ahead now let's say to our first self-identified African-American president and suddenly you have Glenn Beck a political conservative talk show host calling it Obama's Planet of the Apes you have a woman who runs a non-profit in West Virginia talking about Michelle Obama as an ape in heels you have Sean DeLonis a cartoonist for the New York Post a stimulus bill comes out he does a big cartoon it's of a dead chimpanzee a sign that's a stimulus bill pinned to his chest two white cops with smoking guns standing over him and it goes on and on these are not outliers, they're not unconnected it's rooted in something at the consciousness level it's not so much the intellectual level as it is the consciousness level about how we think about people in this case race who are different than us and the privilege to be able to either ignore it or actually draw this is what a stereotype often is how it's often grounded there and we may not even know that this is in our consciousness that's sort of back there operating in very particular ways because our bias may not allow us to see that how do we hold that oh, the other thing that I want to say is that we're so complicated so in 1964 we had the Civil Rights Act which was really amazing because across the board hopefully a quality for all kinds of people for gender in terms of race all of it, we were trying to cover it the same year we had the Wilderness Act the same year these two groups of people weren't talking to each other in part because they were focused on what they had to do but if you read the Wilderness Act it's long but if you read the Wilderness Act Howard Zaneis and his people thoughtful committed what they're using all of this universal language about what we all should be doing and how we should be universally the spiritual connection to the wilderness this was 1964 if you didn't look like Howard Zaneiser that was going to be really hard for you to have that kind of experience and to drive the point home a friend of mine sent me an article it was a white professor who was at Boston College late 50s, early 60s he was friends with this African American couple they wanted to go to a national park but he figured we can't do it here in the United States let's go over the border to Fundy Bay National Park in Canada so he wrote the superintendent there he said I'm bringing this African American couple they're educated, they're nice you know, I would like them to be treated with respect he didn't hear anything for a while and when he did the superintendent said I'm really sorry I cannot make you that promise because we get a lot of American visitors here the couple was Dr. Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King who wanted to take a break from their civil rights work in order to have that spiritual renewal and the wilderness that Zaneiser and his people were talking about that's how complicated it is they couldn't even do it safely and to our security to understand its security this is like being at a job when you're the only one in the room it's not just that you may I'm not talking about the violence done to you I'm talking about the lack of capacity of those around you to see who you are and then support you and give you what is needed in order for you to show up which means everybody in the room has to change you can't simply hire somebody who's different you can't do it you cannot do it and think you're going to get something different oh yeah, I'm driving it home okay let's move on Carolyn one more story this is a recent one again to drive home the point of individuals so I got this on my Facebook feed in 2012 and I still haven't met Vanessa Garrison but you know how you become friends with people you don't even know but Vanessa Garrison and Morgan Dixon were just non-profit they did it in 2012 in the United States for black women in health and the idea is getting black women in the outdoors walking, walking, walking, right and so she sent this out to a bunch of us and here's what it said she was at, oh my god she was here in Colorado oh yeah, this is the first time I tell this story a year because I got to read exactly what she wrote she was at Rocky Mountain National Park September 5th when I have a little more time to clear my head I was driving a van full of black women down the mountain after experiencing a magical hike together I'm going to tell you about the park police officer who approached my van with his hand on his gun and demanded I roll down the back window so he could see who's inside I'm going to tell you how he accused me of being drunk asked me what I was doing in the park and then told me if I cooperated he wouldn't give me a ticket a ticket for what I asked driving too close to the car in front of you that's a crime in Colorado I led three advanced hikes over the course of three days this last weekend I've personally brought hundreds of black women to Rocky Mountain National Park over the past four years I've organized trips at every park in the country inspired thousands of more to take a step into the great outdoors I was on the cover of Outside Magazine started a Christmas commercial for REI partnered with the Sierra Club to train outdoor trip leaders was neighbor Yosemite National Park Ambassador and yet this man was asking me what I was doing in the park asked me while still holding his hand to his gun despite seeing our hiking gear when we rolled the windows down asked me what I was doing there as if he wasn't standing on stolen land and I was somehow trespassing this is why I turned down opportunities to speak on diversity and inclusion in the outdoors nope I don't want to be on your panel no I don't want to write an article or give a quote no I don't believe that things are changing diversity and inclusion how about decolonization and reparations when you want to talk about that I'll be ready in the meantime we'll be back to the park next year thinking we'll bring a thousand black women this time thinking I'll pack a fried chicken sandwich and wrap it in foil and then eat it at the lake next time because I can thinking I'll listen to some Tupac while taking in the views thinking I'll do whatever I want because I can because I have a right to be there because you won't scare us off I belong here we belong here so the other statistic that doesn't come up she said it right it's powerful but this goes on all the time and it's the thing that doesn't show up in the data that having to negotiate the duck and the weaving you have to think about everything that you say can you trust this person is my culture going to be seen is my experience of the world going to be valued what do they actually want from me and then first I said oh my god I just got a diversity fellowship does everybody else know that and then think I must not be good enough I only got it because I'm diverse it just goes the emotional and psychic stress that comes and you can't tell people this because you can't trust them because you don't know if they have the capacity to actually hold that for you to know that you're coming in and doing double time all the time but when you have a history where people have never been fully seen ever legislation doesn't reflect it curriculum doesn't reflect it mission statements don't reflect it it doesn't make people bad but we have to start with that reality that we may have to change it all up and that's right it's going to be hard to do but for me that's where we have to be I'm going to tell some funny stories now because it's going to get good soon so how am I doing with time all right so I wanted to one of the things in talking to black people around the country that came up all the time is memory and it's really interesting in terms of thinking about memory in terms of data because historically for African Americans in this country when you can't trust institutions so you know things like the Tuskegee experiments and there's tons of examples where governments, agencies and institutions cannot be trusted they often rely on their own memory and we use that often times as a way to collectively do in this case environmental work with all kinds of work in terms of how they frame and understand who they are and what they trust but it's also around how people can carry of all walks of life in terms of their own diversity carry around that carry it around even if they're not thinking about it in their own consciousness and the story I often tell is in 2005 that I was living in Atlanta doing this work and I got my parents Henry and Rose to come visit me and I decided we're going to have the black experience and we're going to go to Martin Luther King National Historic Site and people live on the street and everybody's Baptist churches on the street and Dr. King's house he grew up in is on the street and there's a visitor center we're going to have like the whole thing my father is old school, old school, old school like he doesn't show any vulnerability he still scares me no matter how old I get dude you know his full name is Henry Lee Finney and I tell people he hated the middle name Lee he was sure was at the Robert E. Lee and around 2000 he said tell me how I can change my name we told him the paperwork he needed to do he is now Henry X Finney he's a scary dude so when we walk in my mother kind of wanders off and when you walk into the visitor center there's all this there's sounds coming over the speaker of Dr. King's voice and police rioting there's all this imagery everywhere there's life-sized statues of people marching there's all this stuff going on so you're having a full sensory experience a sensory overload and I'm standing with my dad in front of one of these pictures because it still kind of moves me and my dad suddenly grabs my arm now, you know, I'm groaning stuff I was like what's happening there and I turned and looked at him and he completely blanched so what I thought was happening was that he was having a heart attack and I got scared and then a couple of seconds after that he giggled if you know Henry Lee Finney that's just really weird and then he pointed and what he pointed to was a picture and it was an image of a sign that he said for whites only he said I saw that sign and for a minute I thought we weren't supposed to be here his memory had taken him back 40 years that fast and he couldn't do the thing that he'd been doing for 40 years which is keep that vulnerability hidden I'm the man, you know, I can protect it all went away and so grabbing my arm was to get me out he couldn't, and that's why so I understood the whole thing and I was so deeply moved because it was at that moment I understood the vulnerability he had been carrying around his entire life so when I look at the issue of diversity broadly in this country what are people carrying around every day because we have never fully reconciled how we've treated each other around this stuff and the tension that's there and how do we all stand with that not just the people who carry that difference around but how do we all stand with that and hold that story okay, it's coming okay I'm not going to talk about this but you can ask me about representation in an outside magazine I'll come back Mavine is so fabulous but I'm not going to okay, no I'm not going to tell that to you oh it's such a good story you all know the beach lady you know the beach lady one of the things I want to say in terms of how people sort of citizens take their own data and do the work that they do regardless and in this case they always pull race into the stories I always like to tell the story of Mavine Bech people haven't heard of Mavine Bech but Jeanette Cole was her sister and is a well known African American academic they grew up on Amelia Island off the coast of Jacksonville Florida in the 30s 40s and 50s they came from a very wealthy black family so they had the money her great grandfather was the first man black or white to have a life insurance company in Jacksonville but they were black in the 40s and it didn't matter how much money you had they paid people so they decided to buy a beach so they bought a beach on Amelia Island they called it American Beach and you could be a janitor and have a house you could be a lawyer or government official you could have a modest home on the beach so here's that's what Mavine the atmosphere she grew up in she went to Oberlin College she decided she wanted to be an opera singer she went to Germany for a number of years did fairly well and then decided she became interested in environmental causes when she came back to the United States she gave all her wealth away to environmental causes all of it over $750,000 her house that had been bequeathed to her by her great grandfather was given away to environmental causes right I asked her where she was living on she was living on a Shays Lounge on the beach and I would always ask her weren't you scared of stuff she said no I had a big stick then her sister got her trailer she moved into that and the fight was for Amelia Island I mean it was for American Beach and she was surrounded by two beach resorts on either side prime beach from properties sand dudes, maritime forest the whole nine yards developers wanted to build in their own hotel a golf course or whatever it is they wanted to do and she was going to fight it but the thing about the way that Mavine would fight that was by understanding that it's also about the African-American story in the place it isn't only about the maritime forest and so she did a really good job of telling the story in that way talking about what she saw as the experience collectively of black people and understanding that if we're going to talk about the maritime forest we have to talk about that too right and how do we hold that because you know there's been books written about her there's a film written about her I go all around the country doing this particularly with environmental organizations who've never heard of her so the question for me is why is that the story of John Francis is the same have you all, John Francis a couple more people have heard of John John be amazing and look how handsome he is I love me some John Francis who are we seeing who's being represented who's not being represented John lived in the 70s in Northern California there was a small oil spill he got real upset by that so he wasn't taking any motorized transport he was just walking around he said after about a week he was always getting arguments with everybody because they wanted him to just get in the car do whatever, stop whatever he was doing and he wouldn't do that so he decided to stop talking about it so he was walking across the United States and Latin America to raise environmental awareness and he did it for 17 years without talking he got his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison without talking so 8990 Exxon Valdez happened he was talking but still only walking and riding his bike when Exxon Valdez happened he was the only PhD in the country who'd done a PhD on oil spills so he got a call from some folks in Washington said we want you to interview for this job we got to create a policy and he wouldn't fly down we'll give you a train to I won't take the train how will you get here and ride my bike how long is that going to take a month, they waited, he wrote his bike he interviewed, he got the job he's one of our early architects of our early oil spill policy he decided that he wanted to write a book about his experience called Planet Walker in the early 2000s dude couldn't find anybody to publish the story because we got so many stories about black men spending 22 years walking across the country walking so he self-publishes it I want to say that National Geographic came around there's a back story that I'm just leaving out for the moment and decided that they would republish it and now he's a National Geographic fellow Hollywood bought the rights to the film I got real excited for a while it was Will Smith now I'm thinking man Idris Elberwood anyway I got sidetracked there anyway often when I tell the audience that audiences will say well Hollywood's going to mess it up I don't care who makes the film because when is the last time you've seen a story about a black man who's been 22 years walking across the United States to raise awareness of two years without talking it doesn't matter who tells the story we'll see someone who looks like him on the screen people will be in the audience it'll be out from the shadows the story is going to be up front he will be represented he's done Ted Talks all kinds of things I still go in rooms for the most part most of the room has never heard of him again I have to ask the question what stories are we telling what data are we collecting in terms of who cares and does what it is they do I want to tell this one more story then we can have a conversation I'm going to come back to that so the last story that I want to tell here is about Brenda Palms Barber because I want to talk about I'm going to tell you a story a little bit so Brenda this was maybe 15 years ago she was from Colorado it's so funny to me when I realized that she was from here in Chicago who said we have a lot of previously incarcerated black men and women come out of jail can't get a job could you come here and help us think about what they can do and she said sure I want to get to know the community it's all moved there she did she talked to community folks they thought about landscape gardening they thought about driving around the elderly decent ideas but none she felt had long legs right into the future then she was having a random conversation with people about beekeeping with a friend she said she was like that's what we're going to do we're going to make urban honey on the west side of Chicago you know people thought she was crazy but she made her company sweet beginnings honey and honey related products it's incredibly successful the reason I like to tell you her story is because I want to tell you what she does when she interviews some of these young black men and women for a job so she'll go up to I come off the stage she'll go up to one of these young men and say so you're looking for a job and they'll say yes and she says so you were in jail and they'll say yeah and she'll say so what were you in jail for and they might say well they're selling drugs she kind of looks at them she said I do a dramatic pause were you good at it and usually they'll say yeah until I got caught well what were you good at well I understood the quality of my product and everything they rattled off she'd just be like that's all transferable over the year this is the legal thing that we're going to do and the point for me is and I tell people for me the term outreach is outdated because she wasn't doing she recognized that that individual comes fully formed with ideas it didn't matter it mattered that they were in jail just in terms of how that informed the way they think about themselves in the world they have something that she doesn't have the possibility and the potential for where they might go is in part embedded in that person's experience it's not about outreaching because here's what outreach means to be and I know it's well intentioned outreach is like I get to reach over to one of you if I come up a stage I can take your hand I'll be like how you doing you tell me your name I bring you over to my table I squeeze in a chair for you at my table squeeze in and then you have to learn everything about everyone around the table about the culture of the table you have to learn about the language of the table you have to learn about the mission statement of the table and we don't have to know anything about you right and for me there is nothing sustainable about that it's about a relationship of reciprocity which means we may potentially have to throw out the table or the configuration of the table or we may have to decide the leadership model as we set it up doesn't work this is one of the reasons people resisted so bad and the human side of me you know understands the resistance but really if you are telling me that you want something different around diversity you have to actually do something different this isn't about being comfortable understanding it's not about being comfortable so many of us have never been comfortable it's hard to be comfortable when your story isn't reflected in the data that's being used to make policy and curriculum right it's not about being comfortable a couple of years ago in NPR on Michelle Martin's show she had Spetlana Alaziovic on there who just won a Nobel Prize for her work on Belarus and Chernobyl and a lot of her people from her country were pissed at her for saying this stuff out loud her government was pissed and Michelle was saying you know they're mad at you for saying this stuff and basically Spetlana Alaziovic said you know I love my country but I'm not interested in it being comfortable I'm interested in it being better so what are we willing to do to get there so alright because I want to have time for us to talk I'm going to put this that's just a lovely picture of emergency we can talk about that but what I want to do is I'm going to leave it on this because we didn't have this is what I hope that we can kind of get at I always end with these two quotes just because I like them Albert Einstein who said you can't solve a problem with the same consciousness Albert Einstein smart I love Mr. Albert you can't solve a problem with the same consciousness that created it this isn't simply about coming up with a series of steps I sort of wanted to push back on something that I heard earlier in a good way that actually we forgive me for this and we can have a conversation you can't this isn't a problem to solve this is a process changes ongoing so we have to build our practice and our skill set to engage it better you will never solve the problem diversity isn't a problem it's who we are as human beings so how do we show up to that in a better way and engage that with less fear so even though Albert Einstein says you can't solve a problem with the same consciousness that created that's so deep I like the way the comedian moms maybe said it better if you always do what you always did you always get what you always got your turn thank you