While America roils in plagues of politics, viruses, and a persistent reckoning with its racist past and present, few have paid attention to the perceived progressive bastion of environmentalism. If the Muir revelation might be likened to one of the giant redwoods he worshipped, rife with heart rot, falling hard in a forest where we can all see and hear it, then John James Audubon’s racism is the albatross rotting around the necks of those who would hold him in reverence. It is past smelling foul and beginning to reek.
Audubon enslaved people. He bought and sold humans like horses. That is evidence enough to recast the hero into a different role. The organizations bearing Audubon’s name must press forward in this new light and decide who and what they want to be. Most of their members are white people with enough disposable income to dump into the coffers of overwhelmingly white-led organizations who have no need or desire for John James to be anyone other than the myth. No one willingly pays memberships for discomfort, but if “progress” is the end goal, then it’s a likely partner.
Why muddy the ornithological water with race? Because racism pervades everything—even our love of birds. To see it blatantly codified in black and white is sad proof of a deeply ingrained bias. South Carolina Audubon Society reports from the early 1900s blame Black people for the decline in songbirds and waterfowl. Arthur T. Wayne, a luminary among South Carolina ornithologists, placed “negroes” among a litany of agents (alongside raccoons and house cats) deleterious to bobwhite quail in the book Birds of South Carolina. Racism even found its way into later ornithological texts. Sprunt and Chamberlain’s seminal book South Carolina Birdlife, published in 1949, cites the colloquial name of Double-crested Cormorants as “niggergeese”—a name for a bird perceived as deceptive and useless that’s still being thrown around in duck blinds today. Perspective matters, and there is every reason to be concerned if institutions insist on not changing for the sake of tradition or donors easily offended.
Audubon may have passed as white, but most importantly, he passed on the chance to be a better human being. That is weight that should bear heaviest on all the preconceived notions, and I for one will have to tear down any monuments I’ve erected to him. Race and racism are immutable facts of my life. I am proudly a Black man. I am consistently punished for that identity, even among birders. I hold all these thoughts as I hold on to my Audubon books and prints. I won’t burn them, but I’ll see the Carolina Parakeets and every other bird or animal he painted in a different kind of slanting light.