The Daily - January 30, 2020 - 40

Outdoor Afro's
Yanira Marie
Castro in the
Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge

African Americans to the Great
Outdoors, remembers meeting
Mapp during this coagulation
period in the late 2000s and
early 2010s. "Voices were coming
together, media was socializing, information streams were decentralizing with blogs and social media,"
Finney recalls. "I remember when
Outdoor Afro was just an idea
[Mapp] had, a blog post. Look at
it now. It's a national organization
that has constituents in almost
every state."
As Outdoor Afro spread across the
country-the network is now 37,000
people strong-the two women bonded over shared socio-environmental
justice missions. Like Mapp, Finney
grew up with nature as a constant
fixture. "The work is personal and
it's political," she says. "All human
beings should be able to participate
in [outdoor recreation], but you've got
Black people in the U.S. who have a
particular history here that complicates their relationship with nature."

Over the last decade both women have watched the outdoor recreation industry begin to navigate
the recognition and realities of this
history, which includes racism in
national parks, racist historical
environmental figures like John
Muir and Madison Grant, and the
fact that today, the Environmental Protection Agency confirms
Black people are much more likely
to breathe polluted air based on
where they live.
In some ways, confronting this
information has led to a slow and
steady industry-wide transformation that is more inclusive of
nonwhite people. Comparing the
Outdoor Retailer show today to the
first time she attended a show in
2012, Mapp says, "I see how much
more Brown it is."
Finney only attended her first
show in June 2017, and she says,
"It was one of the whitest spaces
that I've been in, and I've been
in a lot of places. I was looking

/ OUTDOOR + SNOW SHOW 2020

around and thinking, This is
interesting. There's a certain representation of outdoor recreation
at OR, a la John Muir."
Still, she reflects, "Ten to 15
years ago, my phone would
barely be ringing" with requests
for speaking engagements and
seminar leadership. By contrast,
this year Finney had the kind of
travel schedule airlines would
fight over. "Mapp is [also] always
in demand. It's exhausting," she
says. "There's a lot of emotional
labor involved."
AS OUTDOOR AFRO'S NETWORK

has expanded and thickened over
time, so has its mission. Promoting and expediting Black outdoor
leadership is now one of the nonprofit's central aims. "I also want
to help people attain executive
or at least direct-level leadership
in this industry, and not just be
happy to be 'in the door' but to
actually have influence and the

ability to affect change by design
and influence," Mapp says.
In early 2019, Outdoor Afro
launched a new Swimmership
Initiative. "We have a legacy of
Black children who are drowning
at five times the rate of white children," Mapp says. The statistic is a
product of the federal-level white
supremacist segregation laws that
lasted well into the '60s that kept
Black kids out of public swimming
pools. "Outdoor Afro this year has
decided that we want every child
and their caregiver in our sphere
of influence to learn how to swim."
As a 2019 National Geographic fellow, Mapp has spent the
last year calibrating the effects
of this initiative and Outdoor
Afro's general work to a broader,
deeper scope. "We want people to
feel good about being near and
in water, and have a relationship with [water] to protect it,"
she says. Having a connection
to something fosters a desire to
protect it, whether it's nature,
oceans, or animals.
"One of the things I love is that
people know Outdoor Afro as a
love story," she says. And looking
ahead in the storyline, Mapp's not
sure where her trajectory will take
her. "Outdoor Afro is bigger than
Mapp ... no founder syndrome is
going to happen here," she says,
laughing. "I've got more storyline in
my professional career to explore."
It has been a long decade of
progress since that first blog post.
Strands of mainstream outdoor
media-some social media,
catalogs, and ambassadorships-
have demonstrated observable
growth in representation. Mapp
herself has been featured in the
same glossy pages that were once
thoroughly white.
Still, work remains. "The fact
that some of the conversations
can be had right now has a lot to
do with the sowing of the seeds
of these conversations from years
ago," she says, pausing, "but to say
that we're where we need to be
and don't have anywhere else to
go-no, we've not by any means
arrived in terms of looking like
real America."

JA M E S M I L L S

FEATURE

The Daily - January 30, 2020

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