Well, this is a new one on me. It's still the same old race-hustling b.s. cloaked in phony scholarship, but a new twist nevertheless. Makes me want to spend more time in forests.

Yeah, one thing you can be sure of is that anyplace that makes a white person feel comfortable and safe will be anathema to urban blacks.

Forty-five years ago I worked as a hospital aide outside Chicago. One of my co-workers had grown up on the (looked like Beirut) West Side, and had categorically never seen Lake Michigan. There was a "retreat" weekend for staff training held in a very nice and relaxing wooded conference center, and her anxiety levels were just through the roof - this despite living and having lived her life virtually surrounded by gunfire.

And of course all the white folks Felt Her Pain, and congratulated themselves on their collective higher consciousness.

Snakes.

It's snakes, you know. That is fear central for colored folk.

Harriet Tubman's success at escape and evasion was due in part to her skill in guiding people through woods and swamps. Arboreal, wild areas were safe; it was urban and farm areas that were dangerous.

So yeah, this would seem to be yet another attempt by rich urban people to shame rural black people, or at least to pretend that they no longer exist and don't count.

But of course, the Left knows better. It knows whether Native Americans are offended by the term "redskin," which is of course a direct translation of a Native American idiom for Native Americans and therefore offensive. Duh.

I taught in Santa Ana and Lynwood, CA for over 28 years before I retired due to burnout. Not *one* non-white student (and there were precious few of them) had ever seen snow or could even identify a pine tree.

After a few years of this I ceased to be amazed.