"Black people like nature, too. But you wouldn’t know it from looking at outdoor magazines — at least not before Outdoor Afro got started."
"If time and money weren’t an issue, what would you do?
That’s what Rue Mapp’s mentor asked her as she faced the completion of her college degree and an uncertain job market.
“I’d probably start a website to reconnect Black people to the outdoors,” Mapp replied, a story she recounts in her new book Nature Swagger. Soon after that, in 2009, she launched the blog Outdoor Afro, which began with stories of her own experiences in nature. It was inspired not just by her own love of the outdoors, but of a desire to increase the visibility of Black people enjoying those spaces.
“From my kitchen table I decided to tell a new story using images — unlike anything I had seen growing up among the glossy outdoor nature publications — of Black people in nature as strong, beautiful and free,” she writes."
Tara Lohan reports for The Revelator November 14, 2022.
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