Featured Interview: “Love Is Risk”
​with Carolyn Finney

Transcript by Emily Herrington and Carolyn Finney

I met the writer and cultural geographer Carolyn Finney on a Thursday afternoon, during what had been a hectic day for the University of Kentucky scholar. Two days prior she along with every other member of the National Parks advisory board resigned from their voluntary positions, after having been ignored by the new Administration despite repeated efforts to communicate their work and ideas. News networks had been calling her all day for commentary on the decision; when I arrived, she was still juggling pings from reporters, but made time for our scheduled interview, anyway.
 
I had come to talk to Dr. Finney about her research on the geographies of race and space in America, and about how deep disparities in our patterns of inheritance have left seemingly intractable cultural divisions in our country. At a time when calls for equal treatment provoke not action but resentment among some dominant groups—especially white Christians—it is imperative that we learn to have productive conversations about race. I talked with Dr. Finney about the pain of these inherited legacies and the legitimacy of black anger. We talked about loss, and we talked—a lot—about love. I hope readers will appreciate and consider her words; they left a deep impression on me about the necessity of doing the work of racial reconciliation, and the grace to be found in this process.
 
You’ve written that, “You can come to love a place like you can come to love a person” and I was wondering how the concepts of care and love, which often come up in Christian environmental discourse, relate to the concept of ownership? How have black people and white people in America experienced the idea of ownership differently?
 
In the past, if you were a black body, a black person, in this country you were enslaved; you were somebody’s property. So your sense of ownership has got to be completely warped.
 
There was a time when being black meant that you didn’t even have ownership over your own body, your own name and ability to name yourself or your ability to decide where you could go, who you could love, all those things that, for me, encompass a broad idea of ownership.. Some of that has changed over time, but I think there’s a legacy to what that means, because with ownership  comes a sense of responsibility. And a sense of commitment, right?
 
You know, it’s so funny that you ask this as the first question, because of what I’m writing about at the moment [an essay I’m writing about the National Parks]. I’m struggling over how to say, “We can talk about commitment, service and responsibility, but I want to talk about love. Because we don’t talk about it.”  How do we talk about love?  Not just as an idea, but as a practice.

In the Newsweek piece I said, “Here is why I love the Parks: I love the mountains and the vistas and the forests—but actually what I love is the potential, because it’s the story of the Parks, that tells us who we’ve been and who we can become.”
 
I love a thing that you can’t grasp. I’ve been trying to articulate this sense that: Love is risk—right? If we’re looking at the history of this country, since we’re talking about race, collectively speaking, we need to talk about what black people have had to risk. Now I also know that European immigrants had to risk. A lot of people had to risk. But in this question of ownership in this country, what black people have had to risk to love this country—that’s a big leap - a massive leap -  in a very short time, few hundred years.
 
It’s also a massive leap of faith—1965, 1964, the Civil Rights movement is not that long ago, only about 60 years. So it’s a leap of faith for African Americans to say that “I’m gonna love—in this case it could be the Parks or the land—I’m gonna love the idea of the potential of this democracy” because love means you have to risk, in order to do that.
 
I believe in meeting people where they are.  I mostly talk to predominantly white audiences about a wide array of these issues. And I try to say that, you know, I have great empathy for individuals who are just becoming woke and who are incredibly uncomfortable, grappling with feelings of guilt, of resistance, of feeling like now they have to work harder—there’s something I understand [about that], and I want to remind them: “Let’s put that into context.” It doesn’t mean that your difficulties, challenges, resistance, pain, anger, fear—aren’t real.
 
But if you understand a people that have had to love and risk, every day for four hundred years because they started as your property (the collective “your” in this country, in order to bring it to where it is today)—who have then been asked to love… what that takes—can you meet that, as a person with your feelings of resistance? I want to say, “Can you step up to that?” Instead of feeling defensive? And understand what it must take to love? It’s easy to love something you recognize, that you feel safe with, that you understand, something that doesn’t ask much of us. It’s much harder to love that thing that emotionally destabilizes our sense of truth and comfort. 
 
Can you talk about inherited differences in terms of the access afforded to different groups, when experiencing and describing “nature”? What about this saying that, “Black people don’t camp”? Can you unpack some assumptions for us?
 
It’s a myth actually because black people do camp. But I think what it points to is a couple of things. The dominant way that we talk about the environment and how we engage it as human beings in this country has been developed largely from a white, European American perspective; it’s grounded in a certain set of values about the way we engage with non-human nature as a recreational space or as a “supermarket of resources” as a friend of mine says. And “conservation” has been built on the backs of those ideas.
I’m not saying it’s bad or good, I’m just saying we’ve privileged and elevated those ways of engaging with non-human nature. And camping fits very squarely into the recreational half of that view of nature.
 
This “white” environmental perspective  talks much less about work as a way to engage with nature, and, the spirit, which can overlap into some of those areas as its own thing…people connect with non-human nature in so many ways. So when I hear the “black people don’t camp” narrative, it’s in part because we (black people) collectively did not create that narrative.
 
It also implies that we are somehow limited to our urban experience.—if that’s the only, or the primary way we can engage, and you don’t see us doing it, then we must not be doing it. And “urban” is often used as code for black people! I mean I see the humor every time, I get it—there are a lot of black people in cities. But there are a lot of black people in rural areas and suburbs as well. We’re there. And we’re diverse, just like any other group of people.
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One of the things that I am quick to say is that John Muir had some really good ideas as an environmentalist. And if you read his writing, you see that he was a racist, in his own words. He was both those things—a thoughtful and passionate environmentalist AND a racist. He was both those things. And it doesn’t mean we can’t still value—that I can’t value—his idea of the National Parks. I can value that idea.
 
How do you—because sometimes I feel like it’s easy to brush away a person’s entire scholarship because they have some unsavory ideas, so how do you compartmentalize--
 
So, I try not to compartmentalize. I frame it differently and I have to work at this all the time. There’s a lot I haven’t completely figured out.
 
Here’s the thing: If I openly believe in the thing I have faith in, which is people—what does that demand of me? I think part of our work that we do together as people living on this planet at this given time is to make each other better. Right? I want you to be better. I’m going to call you out on the things you do that are [not okay]. Now the trick would be, that I love you anyway. Part of loving you anyway is showing up to you and being able to tell you what I see, knowing that you may disregard me, hate me, dismiss me, cut me out of your ranks—I may be gone because I told you the truth about what I’m seeing in who you are, and what I don’t like and how you could be better. And I still love you anyway, regardless of your response. I think that’s the real work.
 
So I try not to compartmentalize—I think more relationally.  I ask myself, “What is my intention?”  And I try to do that with with compassion. Because all I gotta do is look in the mirror—I ain’t perfect.
 
One of the things I say about National Parks is that the National Parks, as an idea, is actually kind of messed up. I mean, all that land was stolen from American Indians. I know it’s a hard truth. But it’s true and we can’t change that no matter how much we whitewash it, forget it, don’t talk about it. It is true. And what I have to be able to be able to do—is love them anyway! That’s the work!
 
Our country got built on all those things, as well as on the potential of who we could be, and the possibility of who we could be. I think democracy is more than an idea, it is something, really magnificent if we can only address all the shit we continue to put on each other. (Crying) I’m sorry, I’ve been here for two days talking to folks from the media about why I resigned from the National Parks Advisory Board, so I am very emotional - do not be concerned—my heart has just, been in this space… I’m frustrated that some of the interpretation of me or anyone else [who just resigned from the National Parks board]—will be that we don’t care. And the opposite is true—we care deeply.
 
I work on being and thinking about “What does it mean to be a global citizen?” and to think about relations beyond what I can see. But there’s also something about being able to see what’s right in front of you. It can be easy to look afar at a place or a people that you barely know. What about what or who is right next door?
 
There’s something about seeing what’s right next door to you that can be really hard. Because in my experience, if I look at something that’s right next door to me, and I actually want to address it, it means I have to, in the immediate moment, risk something. I have to risk something. I have to risk losing something in order to gain something else. 

For example, if I’m gonna fight for my neighbor, who may be having some issues for whatever reason—let’s say he’s having issues with his landlord- and I get out there and protest, it may mean that my landlord is gonna say, “Well I don’t want you around either, I’m not gonna renew your lease.” You can lose! You can lose membership. You can lose a sense of belonging, you can lose a sense of being loved and cared for. And we can internalize all of those feelings that can materialize inside as self-doubt or illness.

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Just now you were saying something about how, it’s not about compartmentalizing but about holding things together that may be uncomfortable. And this is a magazine for scientists who are Christians (for the most part) and in the Christian church we have this preoccupation with being good. But I’m curious to know what you think of this sense of—having to be good—how it may impoverish our conversations on real issues, because it’s hard to be open, vulnerable, and realistic about your own complicity, or your own resentment, or your own racism or whatever it is that’s down there that you don’t wanna look at. Or someone is pointing it out to you actively and you would rather push them away and say no—no you’re the problematic one. Can you talk about this tension a little bit?
 
Yeah, it’s a good question. I was raised in the Methodist Church, and I grew up as a kid with what I thought was a clear idea of  “it’s all about being good.” And I was obsessed with the idea of [being good]. I went from being a Brownie to a Girl Scout to a Cadet, which I thought were good examples of what being “good” looks like…
 
I think the idea of being good is a hard one! I mean first of all, what do we mean when we say that—how do we define what being good is? And the minute I say, I wanna be good, it assumes that I could also be bad, and what is bad?  And somewhere, buried underneath, aren’t we really saying that we want to be loved?  And equating “goodness’’ with love?
 
You know, “darkness” and “light,” “black” and “white” —when I look at all the ways that we categorize ideas and actions and people, I think it’s really limiting. Because I think we’re more fluid than that as human beings. And we’re more complicated than that.  Our choices and our responses are rarely any one thing - we are not “categories”.  And what about time? We tend to privilege a linear way of thinking and we tend to understand time in human years. I think if we were to think in geological time—because we think in human time maybe a hundred years is about as much as we can do—but there’s something about geological time that if you look how things evolve, how species or rocks or places evolve—it’s slow. But things do change over time. It’s less about some end date that we have to make changes by.  So I’m more interested in how I can evolve to—I know it sounds corny but I keep saying it—how can I evolve to love in the fullest sense? For me, part of that is compassion. For ourselves and each other, as we do that work.
 
A moment ago, you mentioned some of my favorite archetypal metaphors, you know, “dark and light,” “black and white.” Dark and light is the hardest one, because it really is, or seems to be, something about our experience. Dark is scary. Light gives…crops and food and warmth and these things. But black and white is one that isn’t quite so clear. Where did we get the way we use these terms and what does it mean in your work to explore these binaries?
 
There’s this well-known black photographer named Teju Cole, who’s won awards for his work. He spoke at UK in November, and I love something he said about how he thinks about darkness. Because he does a lot of black and white photography, or because in photography generally, “darkness” and “light” is a big thing—he said, “Darkness is not empty, it’s information at rest.”
Isn’t that good? Teju Cole. I wish I had said that, but no!, Carolyn Finney wrote it down, Teju Cole said it.
 
“Darkness is not empty, it’s information at rest.”
 
How do we reframe these ideas so that black and white can become not something against each other but in and of themselves become something different?” How do I understand whiteness as, not simply and only about power—that’s one way to interpret it in certain kinds of conversations—but how do I understand it as, something else? And I’m still working on it. Whiteness has multiple meanings. It’s part of blackness, blackness is part of whiteness, I mean I have to change my own limited conceptions of whiteness.  So I don’t have a full answer because I’m still working on it.
 
And it’s become really personal for me. I always knew I was adopted, I had black parents who raised me who adopted me when I was six months old. I couldn’t get much information about my biological parents because of the strict laws around adoption in New York State, but I was told by the adoption agency that my biological parents were black. There was also some other descriptive information like, my biological mother had gone to college, her grandparents and what they did, etc. So while the information I received did not give me details about where my biological parents were from and what their names were, I was told that my biological parents were black.
 
I know that like a lot of African Americans, I’ve got mixed heritage in my background, I understood that—but what I always believed was that my biological parents were black. When I thought about finding and meeting my biological mother, I always imagined her face as a brown face. When you’re missing information about who you are - the basics that many of us take for granted - you fill in those blank spaces with any details you can get which you then fill out with your imagination. Anyway, last year I decided to send away for my DNA because I’m working on my next book and I wanted to get ideas about how we come to understand blackness in America, and ideas about ownership and some of the things we’re talking about here. Part of how we know who we are is this narrative of slavery, of cultural heritage, but it’s also our personal narratives of genetics, our DNA.
 
So I thought I should at least get some genetic information, you know? And lo and behold the short answer to that was—here I was looking at the first set information, which showed 51% Sub-Saharan Africa [which I expected]—but 49% it was split between the British Isles and Scandanavia, and a little bit East Asian.
And I’m still not getting it, in my head, I’m going “Oh that’s so cool”—until I got the mitochondrial DNA, which is your mother’s mother, her mother, all the way back to Eve [so to speak]. I stared at that information which I couldn’t quite wrap my head around—what the information revealed is that my biological mother was white.
 
So there was a lie in there - I’m not sure where it originated - wait the adoption agency or with my biological parents?  I’m not sure. But I know that my parents who raised me did not lie because they did not know, they still don’t know, because I have not told them this information. And now, I’m grappling with the reality that, I’m black and white! And the irony is that race and how we might work together across our differences—is what I go around the country talking about. I often talk about race, particularly “black and white” as two separate entities and ideas and ways of living in the world. But now I understand more fully that they’re one and the same, on many levels because they’re one and the same in me! Holy moly, you know? (Laughing) so that’s where I’m at and I can’t go any further down that road right now because, I’m at that place of grappling with the idea that I am both black and white. How do I come to terms with that and continue to do my work in an authentic way? What does that look and feel like?
 
So I think we have covered most of my questions but the last thing I wanted to ask was about race-related trauma. Trauma is this thing we inherit but also this thing we experience. So, what is it about inheriting trauma—how does trauma, other people’s trauma, become more “legible”? How can we be more aware?
 
There is a really great book called Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, by Dr. Joy DeGruy—I’ve seen her speak twice, she’s fantastic. Her disciplinary focus, I believe, is Social Work and I think her primary point in writing the book is to get to healing. And to ask what, “to dream” means and how to achieve that for your family. I mean we’re still struggling over that question today.
 
In various degrees, we have all descended from that trauma. That’s gotta be traumatic for anyone, any human being on earth, to be enslaved. It has to be traumatic for any human being to live in a place where you were considered “three fifths human.” It’s gotta be traumatic because this past is still present in our consciousness. And I think one of the things the new Administration has brought back to the surface is how much of these beliefs are still present in the way we think and feel about different people—who we value, how we see each other and who is not valued. And what that means for people who have lived through the Civil Rights and Jim Crow, well…
 
In my book there’s a story I tell, about a time I was living in Atlanta and my parents came to visit me. We went to the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Park—as a family, we had never visited a national park before.
 
So my dad and I were standing in front of the exhibit that’s full of photos and recordings from the ‘50s and ‘60s. We heard the voice of Dr. King talking while looking at all the images of that time and seeing life-size replicas of people protesting— it was a full sensory experience. Suddenly my father grabbed my arm and I saw that he was afraid—his face blanched and I thought he was having a heart attack. But right after that he giggled which was really alarming and he pointed to a sign that said, “For Whites Only” and he said, “I saw that sign and for a moment, I thought we weren’t supposed to be here.”
 
That’s what trauma can look like. He was surprised by that sign and he grabbed me like he was gonna get me out, like he was having a flashback in 2005. He had buried this trauma of living through Jim Crow for 40 years. And suddenly it came rushing back. Watching him relive that fear broke my heart.
 
Even though he laughed it off, I tell this story over and over again because this is a man who has had to show—and had to be—strong his entire life. Not just because he had traditional ideas about what a man is supposed to be, but also because he’s black. And if he wasn’t strong he believes that he would have died a long time ago. You know, in a way, part of him died in here anyway [pointing to my heart], because he’s been angry his entire 85 years. And under that anger, is hurt.
 
So I would say to people who want to understand—that’s it’s important to do reading. Reading stories about history. To do your own work.  Let me say this, it’s not the job… I’m gonna say this and it’s going to sound a little harsh. I’m saying it in love; it’s not the job of black people to relive their trauma so other people can have a better understanding of what it is. But, we live in a relationship, right? How can we be in better relationship with each other?

I think it’s important to be honest about where we stand. And be willing to stand in relationship even when - or especially when - it’s uncomfortable. I struggle with this as well. I would like to better understand, and I am grappling with, the American Indian experience. It’s so very different, and the pain, and the depth of loss—I can’t quite wrap my head around it. So when I talk about public lands I’m not comfortable anymore.  I’m conflicted. Because what does it means for American Indians? Are we giving anything back? When talking about the National Parks, what do they get? I mean I really don’t have an answer for that.

I try to read more. I try to practice deep listening.  I try to raise my own questions with the people I’m talking to, like I’m talking to you. I try to be more honest about my own—call it complicity, or lack of understanding, or, inability to grapple with this thing—and just try to be open about that. Not to present this clean image of who I am at any given time when I’m thinking about these things. Like everyone, I’m a work in progress.
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So, if you want to talk to somebody who is not you-- whatever that means—how much are you willing to share? How much of your story are you willing to tell? And, you have to be willing to accept that they still may share with you nothing. And you have to be willing to say, that’s alright. There’s also the question of “good intentions”.  You know—when someone says that they didn’t mean to hurt you, or when YOU say “I had good intentions!”. Sometimes I get this—but it’s not about your good intentions. Are you willing to attend, to the consequences of your good intentions?  Are we willing to stay in relationship even when or especially when you are uncomfortable?
 
There’s a practice of what that looks like. Of listening, of holding someone else’s stories. Of attending to the consequences of our good intentions. Of being present. Being flexible—not in the way of throwing out your own ideas and groundedness, I mean being flexible in our thinking.  And being open with our hearts.
 
It’s being able to take those terms we spoke of earlier—black and white—and being able to turn them over and think of them differently and consider another way of holding them that gives them room to breathe, so that you have room to breathe, so that person you didn’t know was different has room to breathe. And to be committed to no end date but instead be committed to the process. 
 
Just to be committed to change. And discovering for yourself, your practice.   

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Carolyn Finney, Ph.D. is a storyteller, author and cultural geographer. As a professor in Geography at the University of Kentucky, she is deeply interested in issues related to identity, difference, creativity, and resilience.  In particular, she explores how issues of difference impacts participation in decision-making processes designed to address environmental issues.  
 
More broadly, Carolyn likes to trouble our theoretical and methodological edges that shape knowledge production and determine whose knowledge counts.
 
Carolyn is grounded in both artistic and intellectual ways of knowing - she pursed an acting career for eleven years, but a backpacking trip around the world and living in Nepal changed the course of her life. Motivated by these experiences, she returned to school after a 15-year absence to complete a B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. The aim of her work is to develop greater cultural competency within environmental organizations and institutions, challenge media outlets on their representation of difference, and increase awareness of how privilege shapes who gets to speak to environmental issues and determine policy and action.
 
Carolyn has appeared on the Tavis Smiley show, MSNBC, NPR and has been interviewed for numerous newspapers and magazines. Along with public speaking, writing and consulting, she served on the U.S. National Parks Advisory Board that is worked to assist the National Park Service in engaging in relations of reciprocity with diverse communities. As a national spokesperson, she is part of The Next 100 Coalition - a first-of-its-kind coalition of civil rights, environmental justice, conservation and community leaders from around the country who put together a vision statement and policy document on diversity and public lands for the Obama Administration with the intention of having President Obama issue a Presidential Memorandum.  She has recently resigned from her full time position at UK (as of June 2018) to pursue her various projects. 
Carolyn's first book, Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors was released in 2014 (UNC Press).