You shouldn't need a Harvard degree to survive birdwatching while black
By Samuel Getachew
Samuel Getachew is the 2019 Oakland youth poet laureate and a three-time Youth Speaks Teen Poetry Slam champion. He will attend Yale University in the fall.
By now you’ve probably seen it: video of a white woman, later identified as Amy Cooper, threatening to call the police in response to a black man, Christian Cooper, for, apparently, asking her to leash her dog in the Ramble, a birdwatching area of New York’s Central Park — a place where leashes are required. Cooper adopts an increasingly dramatized tone as she tells him that she’s “calling the cops” and says, “I’m going to tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life.” Thankfully, a police encounter never occurs. Amy Cooper later apologized.
The next day, a tweet went viral with a video of Christian Cooper discussing his passion for birdwatching:
Link to tweet
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As more information began to be shared about his background, people began to fawn. “Harvard grad. Biomedical editor. Former editor at Marvel Comics. Avid birder. Christian Cooper is not a threat to anyone,” read one tweet with more than 6,000 likes. “He’s beautiful and clearly brilliant,” read another. Even celebrity Chrissy Teigen weighed in, retweeting the video with her own sarcastic caption, “Well I for one am TERRIFIED.”
Slowly, parts of the narrative started to shift away from Amy Cooper’s heinous actions and toward Christian Cooper’s merits, suggesting just how outrageous it was that a man with his education, demeanor and appearance be threatened. It’s a cycle that repeats itself over and over: Often, when a black person is harassed, or worse, well-meaning people try to illustrate their humanity and harmlessness by highlighting a résumé, trying to draw out evidence of the black person’s innocence by noting their education and talent, rather than emphasizing that simply being human should be enough.
Christian Cooper could have been walking through the park sagging his pants, with tattoos covering his face and neck, with flashy jewelry, and with no knowledge of birding and no college degree. He could have fit every racial stereotype, and he still wouldn’t have deserved to be threatened. He would have had just as much right to ask Amy Cooper to leash her dog, and her actions would have been equally unjustifiable. But when we emphasize how nonthreatening some black people appear, we inadvertently wind up ratifying fears of about other black people. When we put certain black people — Ivy League-educated, urbane and attractive — on a pedestal, we’re suggesting a hierarchy that says black people have to be exceptional just to be allowed to live.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/05/28/christian-cooper-harvard-birdwatching/
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