Writing Black Life in Mountains

Race and Representation in the American Wilderness

Résumé

In this article, I discuss the dearth of writings about Black Americans in rural mountain settings, claiming that such underrepresentation fosters the false perception that Black people do not belong in mountains. I begin by considering the colonial/racists roots of Black people’s fraught relationship with the wilderness, and how it influences notions of Black authenticity. By examining three post-Civil Rights books by Black authors—David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident, Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s Colored People,  and Crystal Wilkerson’s Birds of Opulence—I then argue that this growing body of literature not only unsettles limited perspectives on who Black Americans are, but also challenges the flawed idea that US mountain settings are exclusively white.