Birds, Dogs, and Racism: Conflicts over Care in New York’s Central Park

Abstract

In May 2020, Christian Cooper, a Black man and avid birder in New York City’s Central Park, was reported to the police by Amy Cooper, a White woman enraged at his request that she leash her dog. His cell phone recording of the encounter generated immediate national outcry and she faced misdemeanor charges—later dropped—for making a false report. On one level, the event is a depressingly familiar story, one of many devastatingly common incidents in which White women’s vulnerability is weaponized and wielded against Black people in public space to potentially lethal ends. It also serves as a stark reminder of the ways that racism continues to shape and structure relationships with urban park space in the United States, through practices of social control ranging from official policing and permits to informal surveillance. On another level, however, the incident also raises novel questions about what it might mean to theorize parks—as sites of refuge, recreation, protest, and surveillance—in terms of a more-than-human ethic of care and caring relations. Through a rereading of this incident, we argue for conceptualizing parks both as spaces of social control and as spaces of care, and we show how racism fundamentally shapes conflicts over caring practices and the rules that govern them.