Disrupting White Privilege and the Pristine Myth with Popular American Naturalists using the Example of William Bartram

Keywords: Privilege, Public History, Historical Markers, Wilderness
Session Type: Virtual Poster
Day: Thursday
Session Start / End Time: 4/8/2021 09:35 AM (Pacific Time (US & Canada)) - 4/8/2021 10:50 AM (Pacific Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 52

Abstract

Environmental justice is a useful frame to articulate, describe, and analyze white privilege. Teaching environmental justice often relies on examples of pollution, resource alienation, and identity politics in marginalized communities. Such case studies, paradoxically, risk reinforcing an essentialist gaze on subaltern people. As a cis, white, male, educator of privilege, I am positioned to reflexively critique seemingly benign and reproductive acts of privilege, do the work of an oppressor recognizing and disrupting oppression. Naturalists, such as John Muir, Ansel Adams, William Bartram encapsulate romantic notions of the USA, inspiring legions to venture into nature and advocate for its protection. The narratives attached to American naturalists, with their apolitical adoration of wild places, perpetuate privilege in a pleasant manner. Examining their legacies critically unearths these pathologies. William Bartram is an exemplary nexus for these processes. As a touchstone naturalist for the American south, he inspires garden clubs, historical societies, land conservation advocates from Louisiana to North Carolina. Drawn to him as a budding geographer, decades later I am working with Bartram aficionados to reframe his legacy. Bartram, though a slave owner turned abolitionist and sympathetic scholar of Native American cultures, is widely remembered merely as witness to a largely wild and pristine southern landscape coincident with the American Revolution. This presentation charts the processes using Bartram that perpetuate white privilege and the pristine myth. It then proposes interventions to disrupt them.