Yonit Yogev

It’s complicated to begin talking about what sparked the Black Lives Matter movement this past summer of 2020, because the murder of George Floyd that rocked society was sadly nothing new. The only thing which was new was the video footage that captured his brutal arrest and how it was broadcast to the world. It’s clear to see how the aftermath changed the national perspective on systematic racism, and how since then there has been a societal push to become antiracists, or to finally confront one’s own privilege.

It can be a difficult thing to do, to realize and come to terms with the fact that society has treated you differently because of the color of your skin, sometimes resulting in privilege and other times discrimination. This is something that Yonit Yogev, as a white woman, has been doing for a large portion of her life.

Yogev, 59, is now the volunteer coordinator at Mount Rainier National Park, but the journey to her position was unclear and winding.

Growing up her family wasn’t one to recreate outdoors, she says she was the “weird one in the family” because she took every opportunity she had to spend time in nature. She met her partner and after living in Israel for some time they came back to the states, where they began to explore the national parks together, ticking them off their list one by one. Yogev fell in love with Mount Rainier, it pulled her in and they would keep coming back together to the park, exploring more hikes and always talking to the rangers about their job.

Yogev was always interested in a ranger position but thought at her age it would be difficult to do. After 25 years of being a nurse and then retiring, she decided it was time to follow through with her ambition and began volunteering at the park.

During her time as a nurse she did transcultural nursing, or nursing with a primary focus on care that is culturally sensitive and inclusive, and she thinks it was this job that allowed her to see the world through different lenses and be more empathetic. That’s why she was immediately shocked as a volunteer at the lack of diversity in the visitors and employees of the park.

“The first year that I was volunteering it was stark to me, I was like, ‘wow this is a really white space’,” Yogev says. “I asked myself why and started to dig a little bit.”

Yogev started an environmental studies Master’s program at Evergreen State College just after beginning her first year as a volunteer at Mount Rainier, and the question on her mind about unequal representation in the parks was her main focus.

“The more I dug into it the more I realized how incredibly complex and multilayered this whole thing is,” she said. “It was pretty much this deep dive into the horror world of systemic racism and oppression.”

The topic devoured her, she made it her master’s thesis and spent her time researching, conducting interviews and coming to terms with her privilege and the atrocities that made the national parks what they are today.

“It wasn't that I hadn't ever dealt with my privilege, but this was a deep dive; it was researched but it was a personal deep dive as well,” Yogev said. “How was I supposed to balance this aspect of me loving these places, but abhorring how they came to be? I was grappling with that and the whole idea of it for a long time.”

Her research began with interviews, she approached it all from a critical race perspective, which is an approach which states that systemic racism is built into everything and is essentially the root of all our institutions. She wasn’t sure when she was beginning if there was even a space for her, as a white woman, to talk about the issue. Part of her interviews were talking about that to participants and they overwhelmingly encouraged her to continue. “They said there was definitely a place for a white perspective, especially talking to other white people about it,” Yogev said. “And of course amplifying voices who might otherwise not have the same opportunities.”

More than anything Yogev wanted to make her research participatory, so that the voices and ideas of those excluded folks could be shared. She interviewed around 40 participants for her thesis and ultimately came back with many different ideas and perspectives.


The main points her interviews brought up were as follows;

1. Systemic racism is built into every aspect of life in the United States and the Park Service is no exception. Working to dismantle that takes time, effort and a whole lot of failure.
   
2. The typical “underrepresented folk are poor and don’t have a good income or access to vehicles” excuse, is unacceptable and frankly inaccurate.
   
3. People felt unwelcome and unsafe in park spaces because nobody there looked like them.
   
4. The park service had known about the underrepresentation for at least 20 years, and what they attempted to do to fix things, wasn’t helping.
   
5. Environmental education and the hiring process for people to become involved in the Parks Service needed to change.
   

“The work has to go beyond saying, ‘hey you're welcome here’ because it's been over 100 years of the exact opposite,” Yogev says.

Immigrants were pushed out of the Central Park area in New York City in order to make the park, so that the affluent white folks could have some space to recreate outdoors. Native Americans were forced from their lands where the U.S. government then created national parks. And black folks were enslaved, then went through Jim Crow, a period in time when it was unsafe to be outdoors, when the woods were a place where people were murdered.

So how do you begin to dismantle that? To re-teach something different and make the outdoors and nature accessible to all?

The Park Service is changing, slowly yes, but still. The efforts are being made and grassroot organizations have had a big impact on what is being done. The Park Service recently created the Relevancy, Equity and Inclusion office, the REI for short, and each month the different offices from parks around the country get together in a group call to discuss way to help bridge the gap of what the population’s diversity looks like in the U.S. to what that looks like in the parks. But goals are not achieved by just talking amongst themselves, and Yogev believes that in order to enact real change, there needs to be a collaborative effort between the park service and the grassroots efforts working to dismantle the holds of systemic racism from the ground, for themselves and their immediate communities.