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Black Faces White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors. Author: Carolyn Finney Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2014 Price: $24.95 ISBN: 978-1-4696-1448-9.
Carolyn Finney's (UC Berkeley) Black Faces, White Spaces critiques the absence of African Americans from mainstream environmental narratives and movements. She argues that popular perceptions of environmentalism fail to recognize the historical role of race and racism in shaping nature, perpetuating a discourse of a "white wilderness" waiting to be conquered (p. 3). The book is much more than an environmental studies text, however. Clearly influenced by Critical Race Theory, Finney's Black Faces, White Spaces is also a veritable counter-narrative to the dominant notion of environmentalism as a "white space." Analyzing magazine content, park brochures, and catalogs, as well as interviewing Florida citizens, National Parks Service (NPS) employees, and environmentalists, Finney shows that representations of African Americans and their experiences shape collective memory about the environment. Finney's book is an excellent study of how perceptions of the "Great Outdoors" intersect with the African American experience.
Chapter one, "Bamboozled," questions the dominant one-size-fits-all narrative of Americans' relationship to the land, namely the 1862 Homestead Act and western expansion. This view neglects the complexities of the American experience at that time. Black free men were by and large restricted from Homestead Grants, necessitating a sharecropper livelihood. Finney also explores some of the early narratives of nature and how they largely maintain unchanged to the present. Environmentalists such as John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt created a "rhetoric of wilderness conquest, Romanticism, Transcendentalism, and the belief that humans...