RaceAhead has been enjoying a spate of new readers and subscribers of late, for which we are very grateful. As a result, I've decided to occasionally re-run an updated version of some of our foundational columns, to give everyone a sense of the work and each other. This one about fly-fishing and the hidden racism in everything has become the basis of a longer presentation I've delivered to corporate and other audiences and was repurposed into the lead-in to a spectacular town hall on blind spots at last year's Fortune MPW Next Gen in Laguna Nigel, Calif. It also seemed like a good way to kickoff summer. The man you're about to meet, Madison Grant, was recently covered in an in-depth piece on white nationalism by The Atlantic's Adam Serwer; it filled me with enormous pride that regular raceAhead readers already knew who he was. Many thanks to raceAhead, Broadsheet and Fortune Next Gen super-star Katrina Jones, the first-ever head of diversity and inclusion for Twitch, for prompting me with this tweet lamenting the lack of kids of color in storybooks about nature: "The path to being the lone black woman fly fishing in Montana may start here…"
I came to fly-fishing late in life, and I wish I hadn't. It is joy to me. The purpose of fly-fishing is to trick trout by presenting an imitation of a bug that looks both real and delicious, and is precisely what they want to eat at that moment in time. Now, trout have only one job, and that's to be the most excellent at being a trout as they can be. And the bigger they are, they better they are at it. It's humbling. (Stay with me here, the race part is coming.) Here’s the thing about fly-fishing: It’s a nerd's game and an endless puzzle trying to figure out what the trout are taking and why, how the water temperature and air pressure is affecting their appetites, and if they'll believe that the wind just blew this beautiful grasshopper into their food lane. What's hatching? Do I need to tie on a mayfly nymph and let it hang below the surface to tempt that big brownie out from the depths of the Montana bridge where I know he lives because I've nearly caught him before and I try every year? That's the game. Someday I will trick him and then I'll do what I always do—I'll let him go because it's just such a privilege to be part of something bigger than myself. You learn about knots and water flow and snowmelt and follow the mating habits of bugs like paparazzi chasing Kardashians—and how climate change means bark beetles are surviving the warming winters, killing off unprecedented acres of Ponderosa pine trees across the West. Ponderosa pines smell like vanilla cake. Not just vanilla and not just cake, but vanilla cake. I love knowing that, and I love knowing that you practically have to hug them to smell it. But every year I go back to Montana, I see more dying off and know the world is changing and it makes me sad. This cynical girl from Harlem, USA, didn't grow up with anyone who fished this way. But it has changed my life more than I could have thought possible. It is a transformational experience to stand in a river and join an ecosystem already in progress. But I almost missed it all. Because here's the other thing about fly-fishing. In the now hundreds of days I've spent casting over the years, I've never met a person of color on or associated with the river. Not once. Not in a fly-shop. Not one guide, not a park ranger, nobody who works for a rafting company, nothing. Not even an expert on YouTube where I get most of my pointers. Once, just once, I saw a black man working in a tiny brew pub near a river in rural Montana, we met eyes, and I'm pretty sure we each thought the other was in witness protection. On one level, this is normal to me. I'm used to being the only one or close to it, from family to school to my career. I accept the risks, even defy them, even while standing in a natural environment which is hostile specifically to me. While it's survivable, being the only one is also lonely. But people of color are lonely by design. Let's stick with nature for a second. When you first wake up to the beauty of the American outdoors, the ghost of John Muir, the romantic naturalist and conservation advocate, is the first person you tend to meet. His spirit still animates the Sierra Club, which he founded in 1892. But the National Park system, which turned one hundred in 2016, was also influenced by another person—a conservationist, zoologist and white supremacist named Madison Grant. Grant wrote a book called The Passing of The Great Race, a breathtakingly racist treatise that was immensely popular when it was published in 1916. It armed generations of leaders with enough pseudoscience to justify segregation, eugenics, race war, workplace discrimination, and the violent oppression of "inferior" races – particularly immigrants. Adolph Hitler cherished the slim volume, quoted from it in his speeches and allegedly wrote a letter to Grant calling it "his bible." The Yale and Columbia educated Grant traveled in high-tone circles, and his flattering notions of "Nordic" superiority were embraced by the Manhattan aristocracy, including Teddy Roosevelt, who so loved Grant's work that he wrote a letter that was turned into a blurb for the book. Grant was the real deal. If you like the Bronx Zoo, you can thank him. If you like Yellowstone Park, tip your cap to Grant. And if you suspect that all immigrants are sub-human criminals bringing disease and disorder, then the ghost of Grant may be whispering in your ear. At the time of Grant's greatest influence, Jim Crow was in full swing and along with it, the Great Migration, as desperate black citizens moved North and West looking to escape the caste system of racial segregation. Grant and his cronies envisioned the National Parks as a respite for white men who needed to refresh their spirits in the face of this insidious onslaught; their refreshment also came at the expense of indigenous people whose land was ripped away, destroying treaties along with their lives. A hundred years later, the destination cities of the Great Migration – like Baltimore, Chicago, and St. Louis- are still reckoning with the aftermath of his thinking. And across the country, people of color often still feel unwelcome in even the cultivated outdoors, like the golf courses and tennis clubs where business traditionally has been done. The National Park Service has been working to reckon with their own complicated past, and I admire and thank them for it. Their diversity report is not good. The vast majority of their employees have always been white, as is the Park Foundation board. Park visitors are primarily white, and numerous surveys show that people of color feel uncomfortable in these natural spaces—citing racist treatment from park police and rangers, and in general, feeling unsafe and unwelcome. Part of the work has been an important debate about whether or not to fully acknowledge the influence of Grant, America's racist uncle. "The way we navigate that history is by not flinching," Michael Brune, Sierra Club's executive director told CityLab. "It is true that there were a lot of individuals who were white supremacists or eugenicists or who were making racist comments who were part of the beginning of the conservation movement, or who fought successfully to create national parks. So it's important to understand our history as a movement, and, as a country, learn from it." Grant and his ilk are part of the reason why there isn't a legacy of park rangers of color, or for that matter, conservationists, fly shop owners, hiking guides, and people of every hue refreshing their spirits and enjoying the trout the Lord made. That nobody in subsequent leadership sought to excise his influence made it systemic. There's your pipeline problem, and we need to talk about it. And then go fishing. Tight lines, good people. | 
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