Readers’ Roundtable “Black Bodies Labeled Suspicious in Nature: from Our Neighborhoods & Parks to Our Hair.”
This roundtable will address Anti-Black racism as one of the greatest injustices in climate justice through an exploration of beauty standards that center Eurocentric norms resulting in environmentally harmful practices that are linked to health issues like uterine cancer and fibroids;
When Black People’s existence in nature is criminalized – On October 22, 2022, a neighbor called the police on nine-year-old girl Bobbi Wilson in Caldwell, NJ, because they believed her to be deviant, though she was innocently killing lanternflies outside by spraying them with a homemade mixture. We will also explore the criminalization of the Black man Christian Cooper birdwatching in Central Park on whom the police were called by white woman dogwalker Amy Cooper on May 25, 2020 and a false account of aggression was given.
