Dear Outdoor Sport Communities: Institutional Racism Exists Here, Too

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Anthony Taylor didn’t start working for justice last month, when Minneapolis exploded in response to the murder of George Floyd. Sure, he, his wife, his 15-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter were fixtures at protests throughout the following weeks, but the business consultant, youth educator-activist, and Parks and Open Space Commissioner for the Twin Cities’ Metropolitan Council has pursued justice for years in a less expected context: the great outdoors.

Taylor, 61, first learned outdoor mentorship as a counselor at a Boys & Girls Clubs overnight camp his parents sent him to each summer to counterbalance a largely urban upbringing in Milwaukee. Today, Taylor is an avid mountain biker, paddler, fisherman, snowboarder and cross-country skier, as well as an accomplished cyclist who helped found the Major Taylor Bicycling Club of Minnesota and serves on the League of American Bicyclists’ Equity Advisory Board as well as the board of the National Brotherhood of Skiers.

In Minneapolis, Taylor advocates and develops programming that delivers the city’s world-class outdoor opportunities to underserved youth. He is the co-founder of Cool Meets Cause, an outreach program that teaches girls from North Minneapolis to snowboard in one of the country’s largest urban parks, Theodore Wirth. The park’s trails and programs are managed by the Loppet Foundation, where Taylor served as the Adventure Director.

Taylor has experienced first-hand the power of outdoor sports as a tool for youth development; he’s also experienced first-hand the institutional racism that is found in outdoor communities as much as anywhere else in the U.S. He has a clear-eyed view of how segregation designed to “control Black bodies in public spaces” persists in a legacy of disparity between who has access to the outdoors, and who may reap its benefits free from the fear that pervades much of the Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) experience in our country today.

An engineer by training, Taylor approaches the twin challenges of racial justice and equal access to the outdoors as a series of inputs leading to outcomes. Sometimes those outcomes are etched into the collective consciousness, like when a Black man suspected of a petty crime is killed in broad daylight by unchecked police brutality. Sometimes, the outcomes are more insidious, like when he and his daughter returned to their campsite to find a noose hanging over the tent. Progress is found in identifying and fixing the inputs that lead to such oppressive outcomes.

With the protest movement that was born on the streets of Minneapolis settling into a steady demand for change across the nation, we caught up with Taylor to learn how this moment is impacting the work he began years ago.

Taylor outside the new Trailhead building at Theodore Wirth Park, designed as a year-round hub of social and adventure sports and diversity, attracting residents from the immediately adjacent lower income and historically African American sections of North Minneapolis.Aaron Black-Schmidt

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