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Bird-Watching Now Also Racist
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On September 23, 2014 @ 2:50 pm In The Point | 31 Comments
Is the sky racist? Yes.
Is the water racist? Obviously.
Is watching birds racist? If there aren’t enough black people watching birds.
If you’re a black bird-watcher, “be prepared to be confused with the other black birder.” That’s what J. Drew Lanham, a wildlife ecology professor at Clemson University in South Carolina, wrote last year in his list of nine race-related “rules.”
Lanham’s sarcasm is warranted. Minorities have always seemed to be underrepresented in U.S. environmental groups. Now there’s new data to support that old anecdotal observation.
According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in 2011, 93 percent of American birders were white, 5 percent were Hispanic (which includes both blacks and whites), 4 percent were black, 1 percent were Asian American, and 2 percent were “other.”
But were there any handicapped gay Micronesian birdwatchers… and if so why not?
This slice of Social Justice Warrior crazy is brought to you by the National Geographic, which once upon a time used to discuss animals and rivers… but now pushes the same Tumblr “Everything is Racist” narrative as any media publication the left controls.
(Now would be a good time to cancel your subscription)
There are infinite possibilities here.
Are there not enough black people who build ships in bottles? There must be something racist about it. It couldn’t possibly be that black people aren’t as interested in building ships in bottles.
It must be racist exclusionism.
In the past three years, a group of birders has pulled together to try to bring more minorities into their community, staging a series of conferences called Focus on Diversity: Changing the Face of American Birding.
Because you can’t watch birds without diversity.
The meetings have covered a range of reasons why minorities may find it hard to embrace birding, including concerns about how onlookers might react to seeing a black or Hispanic man with binoculars wandering the woods—or a suburban neighborhood—at dusk, dawn, or night.
And what about the KKK?
Conference speakers have also cited lingering fears about racism in the U.S.—like whether it’s safe to go to areas where the Ku Klux Klan had been strong, or where militias still thrive—and, for some who grew up in cities or suburbs, a fear of the unfamiliar woods, full of critters.
What about militia raccoons who might be in the KKK?
“About 120 years ago, birding organizations were anti-immigrant,” he says.
It’s a little known fact that birding organizations used to be an obscure arm of the KKK. Unfortunately the sheets got in the way of the binoculars.
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