May 25, 2020: White Sight in Central Park
It’s three years today since the present arc of white sight was revealed on May 25, 2020. In the morning, Amy Cooper, a white Canadian financial analyst, called police in a panic because she had been spoken to by a Black birdwatcher, Christian Cooper (no relation), in Central Park, NYC. She combined a learned emotional response with the use of material infrastructure.
The physical, not to say violent, response she expected from police materialized in lethal form with the murder of George Floyd later that day in Minneapolis. Cooper had prefigured that violence, not in its particular form but in its general characteristics. Unexpectedly, participant cell-phone videos alerted the world to what had happened. May 25 accelerated the general crisis of whiteness, which continues today.
Here, I’ll reflect on the outcomes of the Central Park birdwatching incident. Next time, I’ll think about the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. All these posts—not to mention the book that sparked them—come in the wake of May 25, 2020. The different outcomes for all the protagonists—including the birds—continue to make visible the intersection of racial capitalism, law, violence, and visual media that is the United States.
May 25, 2020—Amy Cooper
In the past week, birds have returned to New York. I’m no birder but the chorus of cardinals, crows, jays, robins and sparrows can hardly be missed. No doubt it was the same three years ago, sending board member of the New York City chapter of the Audubon Society, Christian Cooper, into Central Park.
Seeing Amy Cooper, he reminded her that dogs can never be off-leash in the Ramble, where they both were, a 36-acre space designated as “Forever Wild” by New York City. Amy Cooper could not accept being instructed by a Black person. She called 911, claiming “There is an African American man—I am in Central Park—he is recording me and threatening myself and my dog. Please, send the cops immediately!” Thanks to Christian Cooper’s cell-phone video, the incident instead became a means to see elite white racism.
What the world saw on Christian Cooper’s video of the incident was white sight in action. Amy Cooper saw a Black man in what she later called “a wooded area,” Central Park. She perceived the moment via the Jim Crow stereotype of the danger presented by Black men to white women.
Watching Amy Cooper’s panic, you can see how past and present mix to create what may feel like instinctive reaction but is very much a learned response. Just as the video of George Floyd’s murder later that same day persuaded millions of the need to make systemic change, so did the Central Park incident reveal a systemic white way of seeing.
Amy Cooper at once called the police, assuming they would support any white person like her against any Black person. Perhaps she made associations with the 1989 Central Park jogger case, then back in the news due to Donald Trump’s involvement. Where she stood could be triangulated with the nearby (now-removed) racist statue of Theodore Roosevelt outside the American Museum of Natural History and the Columbus monument a few blocks to the south. Cooper felt she had both communication and material infrastructures, not to mention law enforcement, on her side.
Having worked for a trifecta of 2008 financial crash companies—Lehman Brothers, AIG Insurance, and Citigroup—Amy Cooper was in 2020 head of insurance portfolio management at Franklin Templeton, a hedge fund managing $1.5 trillion in assets. For perspective, that’s more than the budget of the British government.
As a wealthy white person working in finance, living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in an apartment facing the Hudson, with an MBA from the University of Chicago, walking her rescue cocker spaniel, Cooper had every reason to think reality shaped itself as she wanted.
Even though she was denounced by her firm on the night of the incident and fired the day after—no doubt due to the reaction to the murder of George Floyd—Amy Cooper did not give up her ground. Rather, she sued for wrongful dismissal on grounds of gender and race discrimination. Her case was rejected out of hand on September 23, 2022, despite revealing some striking practices at Franklin Templeton, like one board member’s conviction for domestic violence.
Cooper’s apparently bizarre attempt to sue for discrimination despite her own visible prejudice strikes me as being a harbinger of today’s ubiquitous white grievance and complaint. The difference now is that many armed white people take to violence, rather than law, to try and make reality conform to their way of seeing it.
Christian Cooper’s Senses
Meanwhile, on the other side of this encounter, Christian Cooper was accustomed to meeting dog owners with off-leash dogs in the park. He always carried dog treats. Knowing that his words would not be enough, he saved himself from arrest by making his own cell-phone video of Amy Cooper using her phone to report him. His calm demeanor contrasted so notably with her loss of control that the racial hierarchy Amy Cooper imagined to be in effect was overturned, albeit briefly.
In his forthcoming memoir Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World, Cooper argues that his “sharpened senses” as a birder prepared him for the challenges of being a Black, gay man in the US. Perhaps those challenges led him not to press charges against Amy Cooper, so as not to take his chances with New York juries that had seen no crime in the death of Eric Garner.
Instead, Christian Cooper drew on his experience in Central Park in leading the movement to remove the name of racist slave-owner Jean-Jacques Audubon from the bird preservation society of that name. Such names are racist monuments too. It was long known that Audubon had grown up on a slave labor camp (plantation) in Sainte-Domingue (subsequently Haiti) and later owned nine enslaved people.
It was in selling the last two persons of his human property that Audubon was inspired to become an ornithologist, as they rowed him down the Mississippi to the New Orleans slave market. In the new moment of accountability since 2020, much more has come to light. Audubon invented fake birds, raided Indigenous graves and collected skulls of Mexican soldiers for race scientist Samuel Morton.
In a Washington Post op-ed, Christian Cooper nonetheless directed his attention to the future not the past. He argued that changing the name of the Audubon Society would save more birds: “if concern for the welfare of our wild birds is perceived as something for ‘Whites only’ — then only a dwindling group of Americans will fight for the birds.” Here he drew on the population projections that are at the heart of white replacement panic, showing that “white” people will soon be a minority in the US.
Other numbers can be used to tell the story. Bird populations have declined by 30% since 1970, a loss of three billion birds. 1970 is used as a benchmark because it was only then that bird populations had recovered from the effects of the pesticide DDT chronicled by Rachel Carson. While 45 million people in the US participate in birdwatching, 82% identify as white, and only 6% are African American.
Birdwatching became a hobby because it’s hard to spot birds now. In the 19th century and before, flocks of thousands were not easy to miss. As soon as the American Ornithological Union was founded in 1886, it warned about the “wholesale destruction of bird-life in the United States,” often caused by nothing more than “the mere desire to kill something.” In New York, seabirds had experienced a “war of extermination” to use their plumage for women’s hats (see below).
It’s the same white settlers who killed the birds that now want to see them. That’s white sight in action. Amy Cooper literally couldn’t see Christian Cooper as part of it. The result is a Black Birders Week organized each year on the anniversary of the Central Park incident by the activist group “Black AF in Stem.” Seemingly without shame, Audubon is now sending its entire organization emails about this event.
Led by New York, only a few chapters were persuaded by such arguments to remove Audubon’s name in March 2023. The Audubon Society as a whole kept his name, equivocating that Audubon had “a complicated history.” Three board members resigned in protest. The Society pledged to spend money on the usual DEI initiatives, while noting elsewhere that 15% of all expenditures are devoted to fundraising. So we will be asked to give money to make them less racist.
“Telling It to the Birds”: An Excursus
Despite all this, there’s a counter to white sight to be found by thinking with and about birds. I’m not thinking here of apex predators in the modern literary tradition that runs from The Goshawk (1951) to H Is For Hawk. In a much older practice, beginning with Attar’s The Conference of The Birds (c.1177) and Chaucer’s The Parliament of Fowls (c. 1382), ordinary birds, too, play a key role in imagining democracy, equality and love. Like Marx’s “old mole”—the revolution—this avian democracy appears and disappears over time, rather than being a constant.
Take the common starling. There’s a persistent but probably inaccurate legend that starlings were deliberately introduced to the US in Central Park. The American Museum of Natural History immediately killed one of those released birds, so it did happen but starlings were probably here already. Be that as it may, they became successful immigrants in the US, thriving in cities to reach a national population of 166 million by 1970—albeit now reduced to 81 million, largely due to climate change. Like all other immigrants, white supremacy has seen them as a threat then and now. Starlings were called pests and a danger to native birds—for which there is scant evidence.
In the murmurations formed by thousands of starlings, as they fly together in ephemeral and wildly beautiful fractal patterns, I find a different way of seeing—the conference of the birds. Each bird in the murmuration chooses either to fly toward the light or to the dark created by another bird’s body. It’s democracy in action, a three-dimensional way to draw. It counters static white sight with what I call “the murmuration of stares,” using the old name for starling.
Seen in this light, humans have long created their own murmurations, from the Peasants’ Revolt that set the context to Chaucer’s Parliament to 2020’s largest protest movement in US history. In his three-screen projection Five Murmurations (2021), British-Ghanaian artist John Akomfrah placed murmurations between moments from Black Lives Matter, Renaissance painting, and the pandemic. It was the first gallery show I saw since the lockdown and it felt prophetic. There are those like Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten who feel the murmurations as a way to know community in movement.
As murmurations, the 2020 protests both repelled predators in the form of police and created another world(s). The movement made a new commons, a place to freely be together. Again, it was to be expected. In his 1856 account of slavery, Frederick Law Olmsted, the architect of Central Park, used “murmur” to mean conspire or revolt. Seen through the lens of Central Park, its birds and its human encounters, a murmuration is the revolution, the parliament and conference of equals, the practice of freedom.