Gaskins is the assistant director of health programs for the Center for Community Investment at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and in  Room to Roam, she writes, “People are noticing that black and brown communities are not only at greater risk from COVID-19, but also frequently excluded from the very health benefits parks provide.”

Many African Americans report feeling excluded, uncomfortable and unwelcomed when they try to enjoy outdoor activities, according to OPB’s Racism in the Great Outdoors.

Encounters can be tinged with subtle racism or blanketed with overt racism. Chad Brown, a Black fly fisher and founder of Soul River, reported having his tires slashed and his life being threatened on several occasions. 

“The sad thing about it is that, if that day presented itself, and I have to protect myself, or protect my dog out of ignorance, the bottom line is two things are going to happen to me,” he said. “Either I’m going to go six feet under or I’m going to get hauled off and go to jail.” 

These sorts of experiences and feelings discourage black people from enjoying outdoor recreational activities, said Rue Mapp, CEO and Founder of Outdoor Afro, which focuses on empowering, connecting, and celebrating Black people in nature.

“There is a history in our public lands where Black people were segregated and not welcomed,” Mapp said. “We have to really remember our history when we’re talking about Black people and the outdoors and not forget that there’s people — like a living generational memory of people who experienced terror and all kinds of signs and symbols of unwelcoming.”

Jim Crow laws that segregated restrooms, drinking fountains, restaurants and movie theaters also applied to parks and beaches, pointed out Carolyn Finney, author of Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors, see The Heat Is On.

“For black people, navigating both city streets and hiking trails can be charged: at worst, they are fraught terrains where we are at the mercy of someone else’s interpretation of our presence,” Finney wrote in a 2020 opinion piece in The Guardian. “Too often, by default, Black people are perceived as threats to white people’s physical safety. And as a consequence, it is our physical safety that is compromised.”

According to the Trust for Public Land’s Parks and the Pandemic report:

·     100 million people lack safe and easy access to parks within a ½ mile of home or about 28 percent of the US population, including 28 million children. 

·     In the nation’s 10 largest cities, 11.2 million people lack easy access to a park. 

·     For all those people to have a park nearby would require adding 8,300 parks to the 23,000 that exist. 

“Low-income neighborhoods populated by minorities and recent immigrants are especially short of park space,” reads the executive summary of The Benefits of Parks: Why America Needs More City Parks and Open Space.

 “From an equity standpoint, there is a strong need to redress this imbalance. In Los Angeles, white neighborhoods enjoy 31.8 acres of park space for every 1,000, compared with 1.7 acres in African American neighborhoods and 0.06 acres in Latino neighborhoods. This inequitable distribution of park space harms the residents of these communities and creates substantial costs for the nation as a whole.”

Communities of color and those in poverty have historically been dislocated to paved-over, industrialized areas with few public amenities.  Lacking places for recreation, these populations are significantly less to exercise or be physically active than their whiter more affluent neighbors. 

Adults with incomes below the poverty level are three times as likely as high-income adults to never be physically active. By race, in the U.S. 22.7% of Hispanic adults, and 25.4% of non-Hispanic black adults are likely to engage in regular leisure-time physical activity in comparison to white adults who are 34.9% more likely to. 

Even where the government or voters have allocated new money for park acquisition, wealthier and better-organized districts get more park land than their counterparts. The Los Angeles neighborhood of South Central, with the city’s second-highest poverty rate, highest share of children, and lowest access to nearby park space received only about half as much per-child parks funding as affluent West Los Angeles from Proposition K between 1998 and 2000.

In the United States, parks serving primarily nonwhite populations are half the size of parks that serve majority white populations and five times more crowded, according to a 2020 Trust for Public Lands study called The Heat Is On quoted in Room to Roam. 

Parks serving majority low-income households are on average a quarter the size of parks serving majority high-income households, four times more crowded, the study concluded.

Equitable Park planning requires input from communities to get their vision for what they want parks to be, whether that’s a new park or a revamped existing space, said Gaskins. 

Proximity and access are key, “but it’s also the quality of the park and whether people feel welcomed and safe,” both in the park and around it, so traveling to and from the park doesn’t feel dangerous. According to The Heat Is On, by the Trust for Public Land, experts on discrimination say minorities don’t always feel comfortable in parks, particularly those that serve a majority white-population.  

Cities need a variety of parks to provide different groups access to the types of activities they need for differing health needs, according to How Cities Use Parks to Improve Public Health. 

A neighborhood park may be a hub for social interaction, physical activity and getting in touch with nature, but people from different age, ethnic and socioeconomic groups may have different traditions in physical activity and even attitudes toward natural settings.

For example, one study quoted in How Cities Use Parks to Improve Public Health found that African Americans were more likely to use facility-based urban recreational parks while whites were more likely to use wildland parks for activities such as camping and hiking.