{"id":60821,"date":"2021-05-25T02:20:33","date_gmt":"2021-05-25T02:20:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=60821"},"modified":"2021-05-25T02:20:34","modified_gmt":"2021-05-25T02:20:34","slug":"the-racism-of-the-great-outdoors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=60821","title":{"rendered":"The Racism of the Great Outdoors"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Racism of the Great Outdoors<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Washington Post Magazine<\/a>
\n2021-05-19<\/p>\n

By Ikya Kandula<\/strong><\/a>
\nPhotos by Bill O\u2019Leary<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\nGabrielle Dickerson<\/a>, a member of Brown Girls Climb<\/a>, along the Northwest Branch Trail<\/a> in Silver Spring<\/a>.<\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Hikers and climbers of color face a host of obstacles, from bigoted route names to Confederate flags<\/a>. This D.C.<\/a>-based group is trying to change that.<\/em><\/p>\n

Five years ago, Gabrielle Dickerson<\/a>, then a sophomore at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, lay awake in her sleeping bag on her first overnight climbing trip, enveloped by the woods of the New River Gorge National Park and Preserve<\/a> near Fayetteville, W.Va.<\/a> Like many rock climbers in the D.C. area<\/a>, she\u2019d been drawn to the New, as outdoor enthusiasts call it \u2014 a five-hour road trip from Washington<\/a> \u2014 because it offers 1,400 of the best climbing routes in the United States<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The rest of her group had swiftly fallen asleep after a day of projecting \u2014 the process of strategizing about, and eventually completing, a climb with no breaks \u2014 but apprehension took hold of Dickerson. \u201cI was very aware of how uncomfortable I was in the backcountry<\/a> of West Virginia<\/a>,\u201d Dickerson recalls. \u201cNot only because I was a Black woman, but also because of the relationship and trauma my ancestors had with the woods.\u201d Her grandfather had been born on a North Carolina<\/a> cotton farm in 1930 and picked cotton until he escaped from the owner in his teens. On his way to Philadelphia<\/a> and a new life, he witnessed his best friend get lynched<\/a> in the woods…<\/p>\n

…Brown Girls Climb<\/a> was launched in 2016 by Bethany Lebewitz<\/a>, a biracial climber living in Austin<\/a>. A year later, when Lebewitz moved to D.C.<\/a>, she met outdoor instructor Brittany Leavitt<\/a>, and together with Monserrat Alvarez Matehuala, Laura Edmondson, Sasha McGhee, and Jael Berger, they built an infrastructure of meetups for Black and Brown women in climbing gyms and at outdoor spots in the Washington region. \u201cI was just floored by the fact that there was this large group of people of color climbing,\u201d Dickerson says of her first Brown Girls Climb meetup, \u201cbecause that wasn\u2019t like what I had seen when I went to my climbing sessions at the gym, and definitely not when I was climbing outside.\u201d…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hikers and climbers of color face a host of obstacles, from bigoted route names to Confederate flags. This D.C.-based group is trying to change that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,8,20,25],"tags":[31436,31430,31438,31431,31437,31429,31435,31433,31432,31434,2875,27606,2581,27607],"class_list":["post-60821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-media-archive","category-usa","category-women","tag-bethany-lebewitz","tag-bill-oleary","tag-brittany-leavitt","tag-brown-girls-climb","tag-gabrielle-dickerson","tag-ikya-kandula","tag-jael-berger","tag-laura-edmondson","tag-monserrat-alvarez-matehuala","tag-sasha-mcghee","tag-the-washington-post","tag-the-washington-post-magazine","tag-washington-post","tag-washington-post-magazine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60821","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=60821"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60821\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60822,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60821\/revisions\/60822"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=60821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=60821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=60821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}