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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
Outcry is growing over the Trump administration’s move to drop free admission at national parks on the only two federal holidays honoring Black history: Juneteenth and Martin Luther King Day. Instead, the parks will become free on Donald Trump’s birthday, June 14th. In addition, the Interior Department has announced a new fee structure to charge more money for non-U.S. residents to visit the parks, in what it’s calling, quote, “America-first entry fee policies.” The new move comes months after President Trump signed an executive order titled Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, which called for the elimination of, quote, “divisive, race-centered ideology” at federal institutions.
The Interior Department claims the new changes are part of an effort to make national parks, quote, “more accessible, more affordable and more efficient for the American people,” unquote. But not everyone agrees with that assessment.
We’re joined now by two guests who’ve spent years trying to make the national parks more accessible. Audrey Peterman is with us. She’s been an advocate for national parks for over 30 years, promoting the history of people of color in national parks. She’s the recipient of the NPCA Centennial Leadership Award and author of the books, Our True Nature: Finding a Zest for Life in the National Park System. She’s joining us today from Kingston, Jamaica. And in Burlington, Vermont, Carolyn Finney is a storyteller, author and cultural geographer who served on the National Parks Advisory Board for eight years under the Obama administration. She’s the author of the book Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship Between African Americans and the Great Outdoors. She’s currently a scholar/artist-in-residence in the Franklin Environmental Center at Middlebury College.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Carolyn Finney, let’s begin with you. First, your simple response to what has just been announced, that no longer will there be free admission to the national parks on Martin Luther King’s birthday and the celebration of the end of slavery, Juneteenth?
CAROLYN FINNEY: Thank you, first. Thank you for having me on the show, Amy.
And I love how you said “simple response,” because I don’t think there is one. But what I will say is that you can take away the holiday, but you can’t erase the truth. And it’s not going to change how we feel, not just as Black Americans, but Americans in general, about honoring our history, because our history tells us who we are. So, somewhere in my mind, it actually doesn’t matter, not in the way that I think he hopes it matters. That’s my simple response.
AMY GOODMAN: And Audrey Peterman —
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Carolyn, this —
AMY GOODMAN: Sorry, Juan.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, and, Carolyn, this idea of a president declaring a free admission on his own birthday?
CAROLYN FINNEY: Yeah, you know, I don’t like to give it much airtime, you know. It’s his prerogative. He is the most powerful leader in the free world. That says more about him. It says actually nothing about us. And I mean “us” collectively as American citizens. I’m more interested in what it means to try to diminish and dismiss history, that’s not just Black history, it’s American history, and what we all lose when that happens.
AMY GOODMAN: So, why don’t you talk about what you mean by your title, Black Faces, White Spaces?
CAROLYN FINNEY: Yes. Oh, what do I mean by that? Well, and the funny part is, I came up with that with a white colleague, who actually — we came up with that title together. I just — I want to make sure that I say that.
I was really pointing to — when I was interested in looking at national parks in particular, it’s because national parks, historically, were created as a way to represent American identity in the world. We didn’t have the old cathedrals of Europe, you know, 400 years ago, but what we had were spaces like the Grand Canyon and Yosemite and the Everglades and Yellowstone. And so, when I think about the parks as a place representing American identity, American identity is diverse and deep. For me, that’s the good and bad and the ugly of who we are, who we’ve been, right? And so, I was thinking about slavery. I was thinking about Reconstruction. I was thinking about Jim Crow segregation. When I was thinking about Black people in particular — and we could have longer conversations about people of Asian descent and Indigenous people, but thinking about Black people in particular — it was almost ironic that we had created the space representing American identity, but if you had Black skin, your ability to move freely in those spaces was highly limited. And that’s really what I was trying to point to. And I was trying to poke the bear of that, of that particular truth of what that means. And it didn’t matter that it was a beautiful beach or a beautiful natural surrounding, a forest, a national park, a mountain. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t just about restaurants and movie theaters. It was any space in this country.
And we still have it. It’s still present. It’s buried deep in some of our legislation. It’s buried deep in our cultural mores. It’s buried deep in who we are. We still believe certain people shouldn’t be living in certain neighborhoods, certain people shouldn’t be landowners. When you look about the history of farming and Black farmers and their inability to get financial support for the work that they were doing, we’ve been doing this for a very long time. And just because you’re out in the natural environment doesn’t change that. So I wanted to point to that, because the other side of that is the magnificence of those spaces, the beauty of those spaces, the fact that, as American citizens, we pay taxes to support those spaces. And I believe we should be doing that. They tell us something about who we are. They tell me something about who I am and the idea that my movement can be limited. And I’m not saying that somebody can say to me I can’t walk into the park, but it’s also about behavior. It’s also about the way I’ve been stared at, the way people can feel uncomfortable about you because of the way you look. They know nothing about you, but they make assumptions about you.
I want to tell you something else. That book was on a park shelf at some national park service center, and I’m not sure where. And I got an email once, a couple of years ago, from a woman who described herself as “Sarah the Great.” She described herself as being white. And she said, when she saw that book, she removed it and put something else in front of it, because — and told me to stop being racist. And, you know, I initially got really angry about that, but over time, I’ve come to really feel some compassion for Sarah the Great, because I realized Sarah the Great never cracked the cover. I’m not — I don’t talk about or try to diminish the experience of people who identify as white, right? But whiteness is about power, as James Baldwin said. What I’m interested in is making space for all of our stories. And the reality is, I’d love to sit down with Sarah the Great and say, “What was it that antagonized you about that? What came up for you?” Her response to me said more about her than it did me. And I’m interested in that conversation, so we can start to bridge that divide.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, I’d like to bring Audrey Peterman into the conversation. Audrey, how has the visual propaganda to the American public from Hollywood, from park marketing, from outdoor brands perpetuated this myth that Black people don’t belong in the wilderness?
AUDREY PETERMAN: Well, I would say that in building, helping to shape public narrative, that has been true, but in later years, like in the last five years or so, that has begun to change because of the assiduous action from people within communities of color striving to change that narrative. Rue Mapp at Outdoor Afro actually had a line of — has a line of outdoor clothing for people of color, so we’ve moved a long way from that.
But if I might address the question of the president’s action, may I?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yes, surely.
AUDREY PETERMAN: Oh, thank you so much, because I want to say I love it, I love it, I love it. I think it’s the greatest thing he could have done, because it is going to backfire spectacularly. For multiple years, people like Dr. Carolyn and I and other Black and Brown environmental and national park leaders, who are domiciled together at the Diverse Environmental Leaders Speakers Bureau, we have been striving to have this conversation about what the national parks are to America — right? — who gets to enjoy them, and the stories they have, right? And as you can imagine, that conversation has dissipated tremendously since January 20th of this year. And now, lo and behold, we’re talking about it, because the president aligned himself with racial animus against the national park and an American hero. I think that there are people who didn’t even know that Martin Luther King had anything to do with the national park system, you know? But now they do.
And there’s a common thing, a common parlance, that says there’s nothing that you can do to make people take greater interest than to have them feel that you’re trying to keep something from them. You know, this administration has taken a lot and kept a lot from us. But I think in this actual case with the national parks and fee-free days, we can flood the parks en masse to learn about our history within them, because the entire history of America, the entire history of every racial and ethnic group in America, is in the national park system. And I have traveled it from coast to coast, and I’m telling you, once you know the history, you become a totally different person.
AMY GOODMAN: The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, the founder of The 1619 Project, wrote on social media, quote, “It might be easy to find things like this merely petty or superficial, but that would be a mistake. Demeaning, erasing or eliminating celebrations or acknowledgments of Black America is straight from Redemption playbook, and is intended to reinforce the racial hierarchy and signal its reinstatement. … Today’s renaming of military bases for Confederates, re-installing of Confederate statue, denigration of Black holidays, refusal to acknowledge Black contributions while decimating civil rights by an openly white nationalist administration is all to signal the ‘restoration’ of the racial order,” unquote, she said. And I wanted to ask you, Audrey Peterman — data collected from the National Park Service revealed Latinos and Asian Americans made up less than 5% of visitors to U.S. national parks, and less than 2% visitors identify themselves as African Americans. Can you talk about the historical context and how you have spent so many decades trying to increase the population of color in the national parks of the United States?
AUDREY PETERMAN: Yes, absolutely. And I completely agree with the quote that you cited. And here’s another side to that. We know that the president thrives on making people feel outraged. And I will not give him the benefit of that. I have been to 195 units of the 433 units of the national park system around the country. So, I dare say I know this country and feel connected to it in more ways than he does, and — or that a lot of other people do. And that’s why we have been trying to get the word out, particularly to Americans of color, to say, “Look, you need to embrace the national parks, get to know about the national parks and visit them, in order to see the tremendous historic contributions and legacy that your ancestors have left here.”
So, I think that there’s a lot of — there’s a very false understanding about America and also about the national park system. And I will tell you this. You know that old story about the six blind men who went to see the elephant? They had heard about this amazing animal. And one fell against its flank and said, “Oh, it’s a wall.” And the other one felt its trunk and said, “Oh, it’s snake.” You know, that is kind of what we’re like in America now, and the national park system provides the anatomic — the anatomical material of what our country is.
And this is why we’ve been trying to get the word out for 30 years, ourselves and many other people. But, you know, it’s a heavy lift to connect 150 million people who don’t know about the national parks. And when they hear about a national park, they probably only think of that little playground down the street. And they don’t know that, you know, Yellowstone can hold New York City 11 times, and Yellowstone has half of all the geysers on Earth. They don’t know that the Buffalo Soldiers were the ones who saved the giant sequoias in Sequoia National Park and in Yosemite National Park. There are millions of people from all over the world come to see these 3,000-year-old giants that were alive at the time Jesus walked the Earth.
I mean, the national parks have so much to offer every racial and ethnic group and every American. My god, I really think that this conversation that the president has opened by trying to shut out Martin Luther King and trying to shut us out of the holidays has opened a keg, which I hope will anoint greater awareness among all Americans and greater passion and love for our national parks, that he’s trying to destroy.
AMY GOODMAN: Audrey Peterman, I want to thank you so much for being with us. Audrey Peterman has been an advocate for national parks for over 30 years, promoting the history of people of color in national parks, author of the books, Our True Nature: Finding a Zest for Life in the National Park System. Carolyn Finney, thank you, as well, joining us from Burlington, Vermont, author of Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship Between African Americans and the Great Outdoors, served on the National Parks Advisory Board for eight years under the Obama administration, now teaches at Middlebury College in Vermont.
Coming up, we get an update on how Mumia Abu-Jamal, the imprisoned journalist and former Black Panther who’s been jailed for 44 years, is doing in Pennsylvania. His supporters have marched over 100 miles to his prison to urge the state to provide the medical care he needs to see. Stay with us.
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AMY GOODMAN: Sweet Honey in the Rock performing “Down by the Riverside” in our firehouse studio years ago.
