Kind: captions
Language: en
[Music]
birds
don't care what color you are and the
thing i always say is that
the birds belong to all of us no matter
what color you are no matter what your
sexual orientation
is no matter what your gender identity
is the birds belong to all of us
they use the same primary senses as we
do their eyes and their ears
so that's why we find them so
spectacularly beautiful
why we can enjoy their songs but also
there's the romance of birds because
they can fly
and that just symbolizes the ultimate in
freedom
when i'm out in the field and i have my
binoculars a lot of times
i feel like i'm particularly suspect
that someone thinks i'm up to no good
there are places where i would love to
see the birds because they're great
birding spots
but i hesitate to go there because i
again am afraid of the reception i will
receive
as a black man as a gay man as
a man who is not a christian
[Music]
in central park i was birding in the
ramble the ramble is a protected area
because there's so much wildlife there
and dogs and the ramblers supposed to be
on the leash at all times
and ended up in a verbal conflict with
the woman whose dog was off the leash
and i was pretty adamant that i was
going to record until the dog was on the
leash
and she didn't like that so she said if
you don't stop recording me
i'm going to call the police and tell
them an african-american man is
threatening my life
this is a woman who used the politically
correct term
and she still went to that dark place
and tried to tap
into an expectation that if the police
heard
african-american man threatening my life
they would come whistling down on my
head with special vengeance
she was tapping into this deep vein of
racial bias it is not new it is
centuries old
that leads to people getting dead um
that's how george floyd died because
a guy was black this white cop decided
it was okay for him to keep his knee on
his neck for eight minutes and 46
seconds until he was dead
it's what led some white suburban
homeowners
to chase down a man going for a jog
and shoot him dead and then say it was
self-defense
i don't think there's a black person in
america alive
who hasn't encountered racial bias at
some point
in their lives burning alone
your suspect if someone's going to be
shot as
a potential prowler with a gun in the
ramble it's not going to be a white
person doing
exactly the same thing under exactly the
same circumstances
it's going to be me so uh that's always
in the back of my head
i've been trying to get kids in
underserved areas
um exposed to birding and birds and the
outdoors
because a lot of these kids they don't
think that that's accessible to them
and i like to get them out there and
show them hey look
this is yours too and it's here in your
backyard so
you can broaden the inclusion uh
reaching out to kids and then the kids
bring the families
i think the most important thing is make
them feel welcome make sure they know
that they
belong here we all have to have a hand
in fixing
because black people can't fix this we
can't do it it's not something we can
fix
it's something that white people have to
face up to and address and try to fix
and hopefully it looks like at this
moment in history maybe that's happening
maybe we're finally starting
to address that i hope so we're not
going to solve it
i'm not that naive but maybe we can make
some progress and that would be
[Music]
awesome
[Music]
you