A charm of finches (to use a not-very-accurate collective noun) lurks in trees near Firehook Bakery where I often start my day. They quickly descend upon any crumb I toss onto the sidewalk.
This morning they were more aggressive than usual. I was sitting with friends, and every so often one of the finches would fly up and hover at the edge of the table, ready to dart in and grab my muffin. You can wave them off, but they persist. Of course it’s my own fault for feeding them.
A group of sparrows is called a host. I suspect the birds outside the bakery are a mix of finches and sparrows. If birder Christian Cooper were here, I would consult him.
Were I a New Yorker, I might well have arisen before dawn some morning and gone to Central Park looking for Mr. Cooper in the Ramble. In addition to his other qualities, he is openly gay. But he is off crisscrossing America for National Geographic, which gave him a TV show.
In her notorious encounter with Christian in the Ramble three years ago, Amy Cooper (no relation), whom he had politely asked to leash her dog in accordance with a nearby sign, decided to weaponize her white womanhood against him. So she called the police and claimed he was attacking her. He had wisely taken out his phone and videotaped the encounter as it heated up. When her bosses at Franklin Templeton saw that, they fired her.
That incident in the Ramble became a happy exception to the familiar trope of a white woman posing as a victim and the black guy she targeted being treated as a thug. Amy was fired, and Christian won a gig with National Geographic.
New York’s recent “Citi Bike Karen” incident, in which Sarah Jane Comrie sought to weaponize her white womanhood against a black 17-year-old to take a bike he was not finished with, shows the persistence of white entitlement. Comments on social media show the racial lens by which some people cherry-pick evidence to label the teenager a criminal. As with the Ramble incident, Comrie’s fake tears and fake cry for help are tactics that deliberately put black lives at risk. When I watch the video, I think of my biracial nephews, who could easily find themselves in similar crosshairs.
Citi Bike’s website advises that you can “avoid extra time fees by docking your bike every 30 minutes.” One person, her mind already made up, accused the 17-year-old of “gaming the system.” That Comrie herself tried to game the system was overlooked because her unmerited skin privilege is taken for granted.
The nickname “Karen” took hold in recent years due to the tactic’s frequent use, as evidenced by phone videos. The exploitation of such base impulses by Republican politicians tears at our social fabric.
A key lesson of the GOP’s constant stoking of social divisions is that we’re never more than a few dozen unscrupulous demagogues away from losing our republic. One tweet cautioned, “We Floridians have learned not to underestimate Gov. DeSantis” despite his uninspired entry into the presidential race.
So what do we do about it? I’m sure the answer is not just hanging out on Twitter sparring with MAGA trolls. But it does no harm to stay in practice. One of my fellow liberal holdouts on that deteriorating platform, longtime Village Voice writer Michael Musto, responded to a story about the Proud Boys planning attacks on Pride celebrations, “This is their sneaky way of getting to attend Pride festivities.” I replied, “I have long suspected that Enrique Tarrio has a Tom of Finland collection.”
Our wisecracks do not mean we take the fascist threat lightly. We laugh to avoid screaming.
Cooper writes, “Even in my beloved Central Park, even before that now-infamous encounter, a part of me was always keenly aware that for me, as a Black man, stalking behind a shrub with a black metal object [binoculars] in my hands would most likely be interpreted far differently … from a white birder doing the very same thing and holding the same pair of binoculars.”
Birding nonetheless opened up for Cooper a connection to the wild world around him that helped him transcend the role the human world had assigned him.
Venturing outside our hermetically sealed bubbles of conviction and quietly observing the wild creatures around us can teach us a lesson that could help save us and our planet: everything is not about you.
Richard J. Rosendall is a writer and activist at [email protected].