Interview: Latria Graham on being Black and loving the outdoors
Writer, editor and cultural critic Latria Graham talks about being Black and loving wild spaces, when she fell in love with the outdoors, what she loves to do outside, her favorite outdoor place to visit, organizations that connect and help explorers of color, and what's she working on now.
This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist.
Transcript
Jessica: Welcome to Burn It All Down, the feminist sports podcast you need. I’m Jessica Luther and today I’m joined by writer, editor and cultural critic Latria Graham. She lives in South Carolina. I’m a longtime fan of Latria’s gorgeous writing and I encourage you to seek out her words anywhere you can find them. In today’s interview we talk about two of her pieces for Outside Magazine. The first was published on May 1st 2018 and is titled, We're Here. You Just Don't See Us, and the follow up was published about a month ago on September 21st 2020 and is titled Out There, Nobody Can Hear You Scream. Let’s get into it.
Latria: I’m Latria Graham and I’m a freelance writer.
Jessica: So, in an interview earlier this year you said, “My work primarily revolves around the body and the tensions and/or stressors on it—from the environment, other people or policies put in place.” Can you tell us more about this? I’m so interested in the body as a way to think about the world, so why is this particular lens important to you?
Latria: It’s so important to me because it’s something that I wrestle with, that I know intimately, in some ways that I very much fight with privately. I know it’s something that everyone has an opinion about because everybody has one, right? Not everyone has a house or a car or some of these other material possessions to sort of move beyond, but if you can start with that, everybody knows what it's like to have hunger or to have thirst, right, or to have a lot of these emotions. So it’s like, how do we move these parts around, and things that resonate with people come from the fact that they can identify some of these very basic essential things. So how can I use that to talk about some of the major anxieties that we have at the moment? That’s why I always have…I tend to return to the body. Naturalists get a little frustrated with me on that, because they're like, it should be about the animals or about the environment or about nature and it shouldn’t always be human-centered. But it’s like, if I can start here with getting people to care from this perspective then we can continue to branch out and extend the conversation.
Jessica: I just find that so interesting. On September 21st this year Outside Magazine published a piece by you titled, Out There, Nobody Can Hear You Scream. This was your response follow along to a piece you wrote for Outside titled, We're Here. You Just Don't See Us; the latter piece was about the misconception that Black people do not love the woods and wild places. But you deeply love them, it’s really clear in your writing that this is true. When and how did you fall in love with the outdoors?
Latria: I mean, I can’t say from birth because obviously you don’t remember that far back, but I mean truly in childhood, you know, my parents have always fished and things like that. Some of my first memories are standing on a riverbank with my dad with a fishing pole and things like that and learning that you can get things that you can’t see from a river. So a lot of that…It’s almost like, mystical. We think about miracles and all of that other stuff, but the idea that something exists that you can't see and you can grasp onto it, like, that is just one of those sort of indelible moments growing up. But because my family’s always lived very close to the land, you know, always gardening, always farming, there’s always been this tether to it. So I always knew about it, I always understood its purpose, but I don’t think I fell in love with it really until I left it and went off to college, right? And went to Dartmouth, which is in New Hampshire. I’m from South Carolina and, you know, our mountains peak out at 3215, that’s Caesars Head, that's where I was this weekend, you know, where you go to Mount Washington in New Hampshire and you deal with a whole climate, and I realized that difference…
Jessica: That’s like, a mountain.
Latria: Yeah! It’s a true mountain. We have Mount Mitchell which is cool and everything, but it’s like that exposed rock face and the intimidation and the way the trees grow, you don’t realize that what you have is precious until you see something different, and that made me really appreciate the landscapes when I would come home, right? Especially up there in the cold, everything is buried in snow six months out of the year, which is very very different from here. I live in the foothills of the mountains – because Asheville technically has mountains, still, not the same – but we get a little bit of snow, a little bit of ice, but here we’re talking about ten feet of snowfall a year, like, a very different sort of world. I really do miss home, and not just the hospitality part of it, just the green, the cathedral of green that exists around my house. We don’t have the views, we don’t have those Instagram moments, but we have this really rich sort of peat moss rainforest thing going on, you know, that I love, from March/April through…We still have leaves here that have not turned, so, through like mid-October/November we’ll have…It’s just like, it smells almost like that fresh cut grass thing that people really adore. It's like stepping into that all the time, and you don’t know that you miss that scent or you miss that color and all of that until you go somewhere else. Then you realize not everybody has this, how do I share what I have, what I know, what I love?
Jessica: That was a beautiful answer, the “cathedral of green” – that immediately made me think, my mom for many years lived in Atlanta and she lived in this house that there was a huge…Not a valley, that's too big, but it was too dangerous that you didn’t go down into it or anything, but it was covered in kudzu and I just remember I understood that kudzu was not supposed to be there, that it was bad that it was so invasive, I guess.
Latria: Right, right.
Jessica: But that cathedral of green is very much what I think of when you say those words. That’s lovely. So, what do you love to do outdoors? Are you a hiker? Do you go birding? Do you camp? I’m not a huge outdoors person so I wanna hear what it is that you love doing outside.
Latria: Yeah, I will try it all and I’m still extending my experiences. I’d say that I love to wander, mostly because here you don’t think about elevation, like, people think about hiking, you think about hiking a mountain, right? Whereas I live in sort of this…It’s hilly but it’s not mountainous, the peaks and valleys don’t make you think hiking, but hiking is truly just wandering. Sometimes I don’t know where I’m gonna go or what direction I take so I’m just gonna…I wander, a lot of times, and I do that especially with my state parks and things here where I have some idea of what the trails are, I just kind of meander throughout and think. I’ll sit next to a creek and write for a little bit and things like that. I’ve recently gotten into water sports some, so I started kayaking. That is something that I did not do growing up. We had a couple relatives that had boats and would go out on, you know, Lake Greenwood or something to go fishing, but the idea of just recreational boating or being out just to be out is fairly new and no one in my family does that. So when I have the opportunity to sort of up my skills I go out and I take a lesson. I’ve done stand up paddleboarding, which is slightly terrifying, on the Tennessee River.
Jessica: Whoa!
Latria: Yeah, and I’ve written about that, and what it was like to fail at it the first time, because I was like, no, everything’s gonna be cool and I’m gonna stand up on the board and it’s gonna be amazing! And I was like, nope, no, I’m gonna sit here on my butt and just kind of cruise down. But going back and doing it again, you know, learning how to dive. There’s a story that I wanna do so I have to get comfortable underwater, which is a new thing. This history of water for African Americans is a whole big deep thing because obviously segregated pools and not being able to learn how to swim. So my family signed us up. My brother and I know how to swim, my parents did not, and they did not want water to have that type of power over us so they signed us up and the YMCA and we went through all the swim lessons and all of that stuff, so we’re capable. Actually, to graduate Dartmouth you have to take a swim. It is one of maybe 3 or 4 schools in the country where you have to be able to swim a couple of hundred yards in order to graduate. [laughs]
Jessica: Why? Do you know why that’s a thing?
Latria: I have to double check on this, but I looked at one point because most schools dropped it, a lot of places had it, and it sort of came out of military academies, I think–
Jessica: Okay, okay.
Latria: –and some of the physical education requirements with those things. But Dartmouth still keeps it.
Jessica: Fascinating.
Latria: Two weeks before graduation so many people are there in the pool trying to doggy paddle their way through hundreds of yards in order to graduate. [laughs] But yeah I realized I meandered a little bit there.
Jessica: That’s fine.
Latria: Trying different water sports and things like that, canoeing, just stuff that I didn’t have the chance to do growing up, you know, wandering and hiking are fairly inexpensive and some of these things take more gear. I laugh because my dad was a birder in the sense that he had great eyesight and lots of patience, and I don’t have great eyesight [laughs] and I have zero patience! So I’m trying to make myself, especially during the pandemic, sit still, meditate, observe and listen, because my ears are much better than my eyes and I identify birds that way. So I don't think of myself in some ways as a traditional birder. I love going out with them and learning and observing, because the things that they know, it just blows my mind and I love it. But it’s not what I would consider home, I’m a newbie in it, I’ll say that.
I love snowshoeing, I’ve had the chance to do it a couple of times, like, going out to Colorado. I mean, I will try just about anything other than climbing and that’s just because I don’t think that I have the core for it yet, but eventually I’m coming for it. There was a plus size mountaineering…Obviously it was cancelled because of the pandemic, but a plus size mountaineering course, and I was like, THAT. I want to take that! So I’m willing to give it all a shot because you don’t know what you’re missing if you never try it. I try to be…Fearless is the wrong word. I try to be curious.
Jessica: I love that. Maybe you’ll inspire me to be more curious outside. Can you tell me about your favorite wild place? Will you paint me a picture of it?
Latria: Oh, man. Okay, I have a couple that have my heart. That's gonna be the hardest part of this is not even describing it, it’s choosing the right one. Okay, so Hunting Island State Park in Beaufort, South Carolina. I love this place because, number one, your cell phone does not work. It’s the best. You drive through the gates and you pay your admission and there are just these huge palmettos…It looks like you’ve driven into Jurassic Park, and it feels ancient and it’s vibrant and it’s lush and borderline tropical with everything that is there because it's so close to sea level. You have these kind of swampy, boggy waters and you’re like, oh yes, I can see live crawling out of this and moving forward. But it is just…If heaven does not look like that place, I might not go.
It is just warm, ugh…And the water is incredible, light colored beaches. There’s usually no one there. I like to go sort of in the shoulder seasons, I don’t go much during the summer. I also go very very early to watch the sun rise somewhere like that. It’s just there’s no where else I’ve found – this is traveling both nationally and internationally – that feels quite like that spot. There's the potential to be at peace out there, so running on the beach is not real sexy though, that’s not my skill set, but just to go and take a blanket and just think about seeing out over the marsh and out into the ocean. I didn’t grow up with the ocean very much. It connects parts or so many elements that you don’t think about every day when you’re out there.
Jessica: That sounds amazing.
Latria: Yeah. You hear the John Williams, like you can almost hear the Jurassic Park theme whenever you go underneath that first set of trees, into the canopy. It’s just…agh!
Jessica: Yeah. I wanna go there. I’ll have to get over to the east coast again.
Latria: Yes please. Welcome.
Jessica: Yeah. Alright, so in We're Here. You Just Don't See Us, back in 2018, you wrote, “I would not experience real backcountry wilderness—the kinds of places Outside celebrates—until I went off to Dartmouth in 2004. That’s also when I started learning about the various things that black people don’t do.” What are some of those various things, and how did you learn them?
Latria: Yeah, because I had an interest in them, and people would just look at me, like, “WHAT?” Like, opera was one of them. There was a class on American opera that I took with Steve Swayne, my freshman year, and I think there might have been one other Black person in it. It was a freshman seminar, so every freshman had to take something, and Dartmouth does not have that many Black people but there would’ve been, I don’t know, 120 of us as freshmen, and the fact that there's maybe like 2 of us in this class, right? There’s a little bit of that, and it comes out of the fact that I was a clarinetist and had gone to school for it and trained in that – and there are no Black people in that either, in some ways. But it was very much like the world that I was in here, what I knew is what I knew and I just didn’t have that larger regional context or racial context for it, in some ways. I know in the piece I’m like “Black people don’t eat tofu,” right? That is considered to be one of the things…Which is not true! There’s this huge, like, look at Tabitha Brown and the TikTok vegan movement. Black veganism has always been a thing, and my family has been very vegetable-based because we’re farmers and meat can be expensive to grow and kill and process and all of that stuff. So it’s very much like a punchline, but part of it is you don’t see many Black people on the trails, or Black people don’t camp, Black people don’t swim, so, water sports like sailing, oh my god. If you saw another Black person on a sailing team or something like that, you look. If you look at the statistics even for the AT and hiking, the number of Black hikers that get to do that…Some of it is cost and some of it is time, there are lots of reasons I think they don’t do it. But the make up is really really small. But it’s like that old stereotype, there’s a little bit of truth to it but there’s historical reasons for it. It’s one of those things that it’s always seen as sort of being closer to whiteness or trying to be white to do certain things.
Jessica: So, you wrote We're Here. You Just Don't See Us back in 2018 which, again, is about the misconception or the racist idea that Black poeple don’t do things outside. What happened after you published it? What was the response to that piece like for you?
Latria: So, that was one of the first major pieces that I had, sort of major bylines, right? Like, print bylines for sure. It sort of opened up this world where people where like, oh, I never thought about it that way. I got a lot of emails that were like, “Thanks for bringing this to my attention, I’ve never considered this or looked at these statistics.” Because one of the things I talk about in there is how people of color specifically…It’s broken down also by race in between, wondering whether or not these national parks are safe, right? I was like, people are not thinking about safety right then, they’re not thinking about the limits of geography and things like that. The reception to that…Before the reception to this 2020 piece I would’ve been like, that was a little overwhelming and sort of hard to grasp. But now I have a whole different sense of relativity in some ways [laughs] for what ‘overwhelming’ could mean. So many specifically people of color that loved nature or were curious about nature were like, “Thank you for putting our experience in a mainstream magazine.” They felt seen, they felt heard, right? They had some desire to try to get outside.
And I very much was not really embarrassed by this but hesitant about this, for my face to take up a whole page in a magazine! [laughs] Because I’m this slightly shy, reclusive writer. I’m just kind of like, “Noooo! We’re good!” But it mattered to people to see my big nose, my thick lips and cornrows, you know? All that stuff, standing in this field. I realized that my body and the imagery that goes around these things that I had to say matters. But also a lot of people that were inspired by what I had to say or wanted to take a chance on some of these recreational experiences that they historically had not had or had not had with their families or with the girl scout troop or any of these things. But a lot of them really wanted to know where to go or how to navigate some of those spaces, and what to do – because they knew safety, I talked about safety and sort of the lack of safety or the structure of racism in some of these places. I don’t shy away from it. I don’t dive into it like I do in this 2020 piece, but they were like, “How do I navigate something that may happen?” and that was the harder thing to try to figure out.
Jessica: Yeah, which brings us to this 2020 piece, which is Out There. I know this might seem like an obvious question on some level because, like, [gestures at everything] but why did you write this piece now and why did it take two years from We’re Here?
Latria: Yeah. I realized I had something to say and it bugged me to the point that I could not sleep. It was one of those. It’s really hard, you can’t make a living this way as an artist, but a lot of the things that I write about are things that I’m either curious about or that bug me to the point that I have to write them out, and that was the place that I got to. I often write about things that I’m ashamed of or frustrated by, and I call myself a coward in this piece, like, I am unmerciful to myself as I am to white supremacy and this situation people of color find themselves in, specifically Black people in this country. It’s like, I’ve ignored this thing for so long and I can’t because it’s not fair both to the people that need hope or found some hope in what I had to say, and I think that there’s something to be said overall for the fact that what is happening now in our country is not our fault even though we’re trying to change it, because that’s something that we saw a lot with George Floyd. They were like, “If he hadn’t used the counterfeit $20 bill…If Breonna Taylor hadn’t been, like, sleeping in her apartment…” you know?
We have all of these things happening in this summer, I just saw some of it in the face of my fellow Black explorers, sometimes on Instagram, sometimes in real life, and the things that they were struggling with. I have seen this historically from my vantage point as a southerner, right? A lot of these things are just starting to pop off with Trayvon Martin and then Mike Brown later, but we’ve had that in this state for a long time, right? Those tensions and those reservations have been living in my body ever since I learned about it, like George Stinney Jr, the 14 year old that they electrocuted back in I think the 1920s. He weighed like 90 lbs, they killed him anyway. It is very much one of those things that my area has not shied from the brutality in some ways. When I go for runs 5 miles from here, when emancipated slaves went to go vote for the first time, what will eventually become the Klan but sort of the southern insurrection, they find these people and they cut their ears off and whip them and burn down their houses. I’ve run past that place, right? Like, I know this terror and this violence with an intimacy that most people shy away from, you know, this really really detailed…Hang a man, cut his fingers off for souvenirs type of reality that some people are just waking up to.
So this was my way of saying to fellow explorers, “Here is what I’ve seen and here is what I know to be true.” I say that to my friends all the time when they’re struggling with something. I was like, I can’t tell you what to do, but here’s what I know to be true. Here are the facts and you have to make your own decision. So some of this was that there’s no absolution for me. I’m still trying to figure out how to answer some of these questions and I’m still grasping with these things, but here’s what I know to be true. Here are the risks and here’s why I think it’s worth it. You have to make the rest of those decisions on your own. This is what I’ve lived, this is what I documented, and these are the things that I know. There were a hundred footnotes for this essay [laughs] and it's only 6000 words! But yeah, so, it’s one of those that I needed to make sure that the facts were really facts. Even when I’m alluding to something, I need everything to be so truth-laden that you can’t pull…It’s not like Jenga, you can't pull one and make the whole thing fall down. So I tried to figure out how to give someone what I know in order to help them survive.
Jessica: I really want to encourage everyone listening to go read one of these essays…You should read everything that you write, because you’re one of the most beautiful writers that I know. But I hope that people supplement this interview by actually reading all thousands of those words that you have written. I did wanna ask about one specific thing at the end of Out There. You list the names of some organizations that you wrote, quote, “have our backs.” Will you tell us about one or two of those?
Latria: So, one that everyone is familiar with at least sort of organizationally is Outdoor Afro, but what people don’t understand is they often do meetups so that you can have people to hike with and you don’t have to be on your own all the time. I tend to be a solo traveller just because 1) I’m on the road 4-6 months out of the year for work, and so if I’m passing a national park I’m like, ooh, I have to go there and I have to go there today and that means I’m going by myself, you know? But I know not everybody’s comfortable with that, not everybody’s taken the leave no trace and all of that sort of stuff. But that very much gives you a community to go out with. Brown Girls Climb, I can’t remember if I mentioned that one but they have Color the Crag which is a whole festival about learning how to climb and being supported by other people of color. That one is not just specifically for Black people but that’s another major one that does some fantastic work and I’ve learned from them.
I don’t climb but I always learn something from them when they talk about climbing routes, there are a lot of them that are racist, [laughs] for lack of a better word. So there are a couple out there that really need to be changed. They also taught me a lot about land acknowledgements and the idea that these spaces belonged to Indigenous people before they were recreational spaces and how to honor those places and really understand the land that you’re living on, working on, and how to be better stewards of it. Black Outside Inc is another one, primarily based I believe in the midwest, that is really having some of these conversations, particularly with youth, about how to get outdoors. So every one is a little bit different, and they all have merit to me. Right now I’m learning from José González and Latino Outdoors, and it's blowing my mind. I think a lot about language and accessibility and what it’s like…You know, I don’t speak Spanish, and when I do I do a little bit of work with immigrant families together and I was using Google Translate and that’s the only way that I could communicate.
I want to do this with the digital magazine that I work with and have the whole thing be in Spanish and have a person have to try to click to find that English button to try to figure out how to translate, because we always think that English is the primary, should be the primary, right? It cuts participation in my opinion way down. It doesn’t give us any empathy for what it’s like to be in the unknown or in something different. So yeah, I’m learning from everybody. I am by no means perfect whenever it comes to this. Some people just have resources and answers and have thought about different things, adjacent things, for longer than I’ve had the opportunity to do that. So I like to cite their work and support their work and, again, I’m not a group person, I find them slightly overwhelming. But those are very important for people, especially for newbies, right? It’s a gift. So I really do feel like those people and organizations should be supported and they definitely deserve a shoutout.
Jessica: So, before I let you go I have to ask: what is next for you? Are you working on something that you can tell us about?
Latria: So, like any good freelancer I’m working on what feels like a kajillion things. I’m working on a longform piece for The New Republic right now about Bubba Wallace and NASCAR, and back in 2016 he was leaving Xfinity and would eventually move up to the Cup Series and I was like the only Black woman reporter on that beat at the time at Charlotte Motor Speedway. So it’s talking about a lot of the racial issues and tensions in NASCAR, what it was like for me, what it seems to be like for time. That’s gonna be out early next year. I actually just finished in Montgomery, Alabama. I’m not sure where this piece goes yet, but I spent a couple of days in the slave warehouses where people, once they made their transatlantic voyage…I went to the area of the Alabama River where they got off of those ships and then walked to the slave warehouses where they were placed until they were walked to the center of town/the square where they were sold. So I’ve done that twice in Mobile and Montgomery, and once in Savannah.
So, walking in those historical footsteps and talking about terror and what it means in this moment. The first time I did it was in 2018; what it means to do it again in 2020. Same thing for the Equal Justice Initiative lynching memorial. I was there the day after it opened in 2018 and I spent several days there to talk about terror and horror and unseen things. So I’m still sitting with that to figure out what it need to be. You have to wait for the noise to clear, because you never…As a freelancer you’re always worried about being a has-been or, like, can I top myself, or whatever. You have to just let that go and let this piece…Just like I did with the other one, it has to be able to read and speak to what it’s gonna be.
Then I’m also doing a riff on Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark, about whiteness and wilderness and the fact that there are no Black people in outdoor literature until 5-10 years ago and what that means and sort of how we’re forced to step into someone else’s footsteps but people are not able to access ours for the most part. I do a lot of book criticism for the Atlanta Journal Constitution and so this idea of playing with language and identity and empathy is something that’s been on my mind. So that one may be a little bit more academic. Obviously Bubba Wallace is probably more exciting to a lot of people, especially to sports folks. But yeah, speaking about some of the big things, right, and what that means, especially ahead of November. I know we’re all biting our fingernails. So, I’m gonna finish those things, take a little bit of a break, and be ready to write it all down right before the election starts. So I’m gonna take a break and then I will be ready to come back swinging.
Jessica: That all sounds amazing. How can our listeners find you and your work so they don’t miss any of this when it comes out?
Latria: I love Instagram, for whatever reason. It’s visual, it just…Yeah. I follow your baking, like, YES, my girl came out with something new! [laughs] I’m not even eating it but it makes me so happy. But there are also some really interesting discussions happening there. So, @mslatriagraham is the way to find me on Instagram. Occasionally I tweet, not as often. It feels like talking to an empty room in some ways and I’m not very good at that. And I’m not very funny, like, I’m not witty, I’m not quick on the draw. [laughs] Two fun things about me: I’m not very funny and I don’t know how to use a combination lock. We all have our things. [laughs] So I don’t tweet as often. But then my website stays fairly frequently updated and that’s latriagraham.com. So yeah, I’m really accessible on all the things for the most part.
Jessica: I love that the way you told me you’re not funny made me laugh really hard, so I’m not sure that I believe you. But Latria, this has been such an honor for me, I’m a huge fan of yours. Thank you so much for coming on Burn It All Down and talking about this with me.
Latria: Yeah, of course, thank you. I have been fans of y’alls for a long time and you know this. This is very much like, “I’ve reached it! I’ve peaked! I don’t know where we can go from here!” [laughs]
Jessica: Oh, you’re gonna keep climbing. I’m not even worried about it.
Latria: Thank you for the vote of confidence and thank you again for having me.