Black Girls Trekkin
What is it: A community and advocacy organization based in LA with a goal of making the outdoors more inclusive.
What you need to know: Friends Tiffany Tharpe and Michelle Race started the group three years ago with the goal of increasing the representation of Black women in the outdoors. Both share a love of hiking the trails around their home city of Los Angeles — a way to escape the urban hustle and a form of wellbeing in their everyday lives — which they wanted to share with other like-minded Black women and girls while shifting the narrative of who gets to even be outdoors. From inclusive group hike meet-ups to a range of outdoor activities like camping, backpacking, and nature adventures (kayaking, rock climbing, outdoor yoga) as well as education and conservation programs that focus on caring for the planet as much as understanding its history (particularly that of displaced native Americans), Black Girls Trekkin is making the outdoors safe, accessible and inclusive.
How to bring this into your life: Though it’s on pandemic pause, BGT’s group hikes around LA will hopefully be back soon. In the meantime, BGT is continuing its support of hiking for everyone in its online spaces.
Why it matters: We’ve written often of the benefits of nature for our wellbeing (there’s a whole category dedicated to the impacts of our green and blue worlds on our mental health), but we’re also conscious that access to nature is neither equitable, in how it is accessed or received. An understanding of the natural world, what it represents, who gets to connect with it and how, and its impacts on our psychological health, is deeply woven with issues of racial injustice.
Just a handful of studies that attest to this fact: A study of the 4,600 photos of people within Outside Magazine from 1991-2001, depicted just over 100 images with Black Americans. Data from the National Parks tell a story of deep racial inequality: with non-White Hispanics comprising between 88 and 95% of visitors to national lands and African Americans 1 to 1.2 percent. While another study showed that people of color were three times as likely to live in nature deprived neighborhoods.
Black Girls Trekkin works against the stereotype that Black girls and women don’t go outdoors. The co-founders' experience speaks to the biases that came with their own experience of the natural world: As a kid, Tiffany’s understanding of nature came from watching PBS, Discovery, and Animal Planet – exploring was just something that her family didn’t do. When Tiffany did start hiking in her twenties, she realized how few other Black people were on the trails, an insight shared by a Yosemite National Park Ranger. Similarly, Michelle was the only Black person to graduate in her class of marine biologists, a subject and area of interest that wasn’t “something black people do”. The narrative of who gets to explore our natural world has been primarily focused on the experiences of white people.
BGT also works against the judgment and condescension that can occur when Black women do head onto the trails, from stares to offers of help to outright hostility, advocating safety and respect for everyone who enjoys the outdoors. Alluding to a history of the natural world entangled with persecution in the minds of black people, Michelle has said this of the perceived barriers to the outdoors: “It might also come from the story we inherited, from a time when venturing out into the woods alone could end in violence and when certain spaces were literally off-limits due to racial segregation. As these well-founded words of caution have been passed down, the aversion has persisted even as the original reason has fallen out of the story we tell.” BGT is shifting this narrative, creating new stories of the Black experience of the natural world.
In their own words: “We’re here to show the world that not only do black girls and women hike, we also run, climb, swim, and have a thirst for adventure that is too often underrepresented or unacknowledged. We’re beautiful, black women who trek it out in the great outdoors!”
Something to inspire: Interested in forming a local chapter, reach out to BGT or seek out one of the other organizations listed below:
Outside the US? Let us know about other groups active in making access to nature more equitable and diverse.
To find out more about Black Girls Trekkin: Website / Instagram / Facebook
