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Evelyn White and Lucille Clifton both explore the relationship between black women and nature in the US albeit taking different approaches. In her essay “Black Woman and the Wilderness”, Evelyn White discusses how her identity as a black woman has bound her from enjoying herself in the natural environment despite her love for it. In contrast, Lucille Clifton’s poem “the earth is a living thing” explores blackness and femininity as an inherent identity of the natural environment empowering the role of black women in nature.

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The way nature is perceived is a product of epistemology; individual background informs the knowledge of what nature is and how one understands it. Evelyn White and Lucille Clifton both share the identity of being a black woman in the US. Therefore, their epistemological standpoint of nature is informed by their experiences as black women. As such, a black woman’s understanding of nature vastly differs from that of a white man, or those who experience more privilege in society. This is highlighted by White. Unlike her white peers, she describes feeling more hesitant venturing out into the uninhabited wilderness due to her perceived vulnerability as a black woman (377-378). On the latter, Clifton addresses this vulnerability by using her poem to affirm the place of black women in the natural environment (lines 9-14).

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Ecology Paradigm and Wilderness Paradigm and the Nature /Culture Dualism

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Ecology Paradigm and Wilderness Paradigm and the Nature /Culture Dualism

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Evelyn White and Lucille Clifton explore their relationship to nature through two different paradigms: The wilderness paradigm and the ecology paradigm. Each paradigm differs by the level of divide it imposes between nature and human culture. Within the wilderness paradigm, wilderness is nature in itself drawing a hard conceptual vision between civilization and nature. In contrast, the ecology paradigm recognizes the role humans play in nature and their interconnectedness with the environment permeating the divide between nature and culture that wilderness enforces. White enforces the wilderness paradigm enforcing wilderness as nature, whereas Clifton uses the ecology paradigm by interconnecting human identity with the environment as nature. Despite employing two different paradigms in representing nature, both authors share a common goal in expressing their epistemological standpoint of nature as black women.

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The relationship between having a black identity and enjoying nature is complicated by slavery in the US. Slavery violently and unjustly aligned black Americans with nature. Black slaves were often forced to work the American natural landscape in agriculture. Furthermore, the time of slavery was associated with slaves escaping into the wilderness away from their exploiters, where they would often be hunted down in retaliation. Thus, the slave narrative became an anti-nature narrative (Menrisky). Slavery is a painful reminder to black Americans which embeds a negative connotation to nature as part of their cultural background. White and Clifton as black Americans address the slavery past by challenging the anti-nature narrative in their literary works both directly and indirectly.

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Segregated Facilities at National Park (NPS)

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The strain on the relationship between black Americans and nature is furthered by Jim Crow Era segregation and violent racism occurring within green spaces. National Parks and parks as places of nature were previously segregated, leaving the best views and experiences for white Americans limiting black Americans from enjoying nature, and enforcing white supremacy within natural spaces. Additionally, violent racism such as lynchings, despite being a product of human culture, often occurred in seemingly natural areas including rural towns, forests, and parks (Menrisky). Segregation coupled with violent racism outside of slavery further enforced to black Americans that those with black skin are not wanted in nature, and are not welcome in it.

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In addition to their racial identity, Evelyn White and Lucille Clifton also simultaneously explore their identity as women in relation to nature. From an epistemological standpoint, White and Clifton are elaborating a position that both confront the narratives enforced by the systems of patriarchy and white supremacy that manifest in nature writing. Nature writers like John Muir and Henry David Thoreau enforced a wilderness concept that only left room for the white man to explore the realm of nature while perpetuating sexism. Wilderness has historically been framed in gendered terms that coupled the pursuit of wilderness and exploration of nature with masculinity and describing the natural landscape as female to justify ecological abuse (Menrisky). For a black woman, this likely further reinforces a level of alienation from nature outside of the realm of race. However, addressing nature from a female perspective allows White and Clifton to fully assert their power within nature, and reframe their identity once intermixed with the oppression of land and a lower social status.

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Lucille Clifton and Evelyn C. White (Afro American Newspapers and Writers Federation of Nova Scotia)

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Analyzing nature through the lens of black women's narratives gives the reader a more nuanced understanding of nature and how culture perpetuates understanding it. As black woman voices in nature, Lucille Clifton and Evelyn White share their epistemological standpoints on nature to challenge what is commonly known about it due to embedded structures of the patriarchy and white supremacy. Lucille Clifton was “a distinguished American poet whose work trained lenses wide and narrow on the experience of being black and female in the 20th century, exploring vast subjects like the indignities of history and intimate ones like the indignities of the body" (Fox). Her poem “the earth is a living thing’ was just one of her many poems about her working through her identity as a black woman and the trauma that it came with; it is likely as much of a poem about herself and justifying her identities, as it is about the environment. Evelyn White is a legal advocate for black women and author (376): “always she has tried to write clearly and compassionately about the concerns of black women, too often overlooked in the majority press” (377). She is an outspoken advocate for the struggles black women face in the face of the dominant white male narrative. Her essay, “Black Woman and the Wilderness” works through her struggles as a black woman, confronting slavery and violent racism to readdress her relationship with nature.

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Evelyn White: The Black Woman’s Nature Dilemma

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Evelyn White: The Black Woman’s Nature Dilemma

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Despite Evelyn White’s desire to enjoy the natural environment, it is apparent that she has deep fears holding her back from enjoying it. She claims, “While the rivers roar gave me a certain comfort and my heart warmed if when I gazed at the sun-dappled trees out of a classroom window, I didn’t want to get closer. I was certain that if I ventured outside to admire a meadow or feel the cool ripples in a stream, I’d be taunted attacked raped maybe even murdered because of the color of my skin (378). White’s visible identity as a black woman is holding her back from what she wants: to find peace with nature and utilize what it has to offer her. However, the fear of violence against her because of her skin color has bound her to the classroom. As such, she separates herself from nature in the form of wilderness outside, associating it with danger, and the indoors with safety.

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Evelyn White: The Legacy of Slavery in Nature

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Evelyn White: The Legacy of Slavery in Nature

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The legacy of slavery has enforced Evelyn White’s fears of being out in nature. She states, “My genetic memory of ancestors hunted down and preyed upon in rural setting counters my fervent hopes of finding peace in the wilderness. Instead of the solace and comfort I seek, I imagine myself in the country as my forebears were exposed vulnerable and unprotected a target of cruelty and hate” (378). The roots of slavery run deep within the cultural backgrounds of black Americans leaving behind generational trauma.  White emphasizes that an understanding of being kin of those who were once bought and sold as property where their skin color was used to justify their exploitation and brutalization greatly limits black people in doing what white people do. This includes enjoying nature.

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Evelyn White: Nature as a Place of Violence

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Evelyn White: Nature as a Place of Violence

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In addition to the trauma slavery imposes on limiting involvement in nature, White emphasizes how violent racism haunts her psyche outdoors further perpetuating her hesitance.

Emmett [Till’s] murder cast a nightmarish pall over my youth. In his pummeled and contorted face, I saw a reflection of myself and the blood-chilling violence that would greet me if I ever dared to venture into the wilderness. I grew up. I went to college, I traveled abroad. Still, thoughts of Emmett Till could leave me speechless and paralyzed with heart-stopping fear that swept over me as when I crossed paths with loggers near the McKenzie River or whenever I visited the outdoors. (380-381)

As a child growing up during the civil rights movement, White witnessed and empathized with horrific hate crimes that occurred towards black children such as the circumstances of fifteen-year-old Emmitt Till's Murder. In viewing photos of Till’s assaulted corpse, the reality of the horrors that black Americans face struck her with immense fear and anxiety even as an adult. The loggers posed as a grim reminder that rural towns, out in nature can be unsafe for those that are black. If rural white men, can brutally beat and lynch a black child out in nature, then they can do the same to an adult black woman.

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Lucille Clifton: Black is Natural and Black is Valuable

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Lucille Clifton: Black is Natural and Black is Valuable

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Unlike White’s attention on the negative connotation nature holds for those with black identities, Lucille Clifton explicitly associates nature with the positive characteristics of blackness. She emphasizes that blackness is valuable in her stanza reading, “Is a fish black blind in the belly of water/ Is a diamond blind in the black belly of coal” (lines 7-8). She separates this claim from her previous two stanzas as it has fewer lines and most repetition of words; Each line contains the descriptor of black and blind, belly. She is trying to emphasize an important point with her conciseness and pattern in this claim. She acknowledges that blackness holds what is valuable to society such as fish and diamonds, yet it is not apparent. She is using a metaphor for what occurs in nature to highlight one's black identity—society may not know the value of blackness, but it is natural and it is there.

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Lucille Clifton: Nature is Inherently Black and Feminine

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Lucille Clifton: Nature is Inherently Black and Feminine

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Lucille Clifton empowers the role of black woman in nature:

[the earth] Is a black and living thing
Is a favorite child
Of the universe
Feel her rolling her hand
in its kinky hair
feel her brushing it clean (lines 9-14)

Unlike the previous three stanzas, the last stanza doesn’t have a distinguishable pattern or repetition, as if it can stand alone as its own poem. Yet in this stanza, she brings together what she has claimed about the blackness of nature throughout her poem: The earth is black and living despite what narratives otherwise say, and it is loved by the mother universe; feminine energy embraces the earth enforcing the Mother Earth narrative. This narrative may have once perpetuated ecological degradation and sexism but is interpreted as empowering here from the epistemological standpoint of a black woman. This mother earth favors her black child and she is cleaning earth from the stigma that blackness may hold. With this, she reclaims blackness and femininity as an identity that is favored and one that is inherent to the earth aligning human identity with all that is natural. Subsequently, affirming the role that black women hold in nature.

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Afro American Newspapers. Lucille Clifton, 1995. 12 Jan. 2022. Lucille Clifton and the Task of Remembering, The Nation., https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/lucille-clifton-generations/. Accessed 13 Oct. 2023.

Author spotlight: Evelyn C. White. 2023. The Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia, https://writers.ns.ca/author-spotlights/author-spotlight-evelyn-c-white/. Accessed 13 Oct. 2023.

“black woman, tree hair, mother earth, nature, animals, forests, rivers, Gaia” prompt. Magic Media, Canva, 13 Oct. 2023,  https://www.canva.com/magic/#ai-apps

Clifton, Lucille. “The Earth Is a Living Thing.” The EcoPoetry Anthology, Trinity University Press, San Antonio, TX, 2020.

Lewis Mountain Entrance Sign. 12 Oct. 2018. National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/media/photo/gallery.htm?pg=5994917&id=20B61590-155D-451F-6786CFBCF8DF232B. Accessed 13 Oct. 2023.

Menrisky, Alexander. ENGL 2635E Lecture, 11 Sept. 2023

Menrisky, Alexander. ENGL 2635E Lecture, 13 Sept. 2023

Menrisky, Alexander. ENGL 2635E Lecture, 20 Sept. 2023

Menrisky, Alexander. ENGL 2635E Lecture, 10 Oct. 2023

Moran, Thomas. “Slave Hunt.” The Courage of a People Enslaved, Audobon South Carolina, 13 Feb. 2018, https://sc.audubon.org/news/courage-people-enslaved. Accessed 13 Oct. 2023.

White, Evelyn C. “Black Woman and the Wilderness.” The Stories That Shape Us, W W Norton & Co Inc, New York, NY, 1995, pp. 376–383.