Through an anecdote-in which she discusses during a speaking engagement the story of an African American activist who the audience assumes is white-and reflections on her personal relationship to the connection between the African American experience and the environment, Finney frames the two focal issues of the book: First, the environment and environmentalism as white space and, second, challenging that simplistic construction through African American environmental narratives.
The preface situates the problematic of race and the environment in the United States imaginary and emphasizes the need to address these issues. The book is made up of a preface, introduction, six chapters, and an epilogue. Through a combination of interviews, content and discourse analysis of media, analysis of artistic forms of expression, and autoethnographic accounts, Finney challenges the dominant positioning of nature and environmentalism as white space and expounds on the complex relationship between African Americans and the environment. A wide array of theoretical lineages are used as interpretive lenses in the book- cultural studies, historical approaches, Critical Race Theory, feminist political ecology-and the analysis is grounded in a diverse set of source material and methodological approaches. Finney asks questions about the construction of nature as white space and the socio-historical imaginaries that have obscured African American experiences with the environment and environmental activism. Carolyn Finney’s Black Faces, White Spaces explores the social relationship between race and the environment.
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