After some unexpected adversity, we still win.
Black birdwatcher Christian Cooper, who gained national attention in 2020 after a confrontation with a white woman in Central Park, has won his first Emmy,, according to independent.co.uk.
Cooper, 61, launched the National Geographic show, Extraordinary Birder with Christian Cooper in 2023 after his surprise rise to viral fame due to the incident.
The presenter won the “Outstanding Daytime Personality – Non-Daily” award at the Daytime Emmys.
Cooper in the acceptance speech said all of this was a surprise.
“This is an unexpected journey from being a closeted queer kid in the 1970s and a Black kid in the almost totally then-all-white field of birding, which makes this all the more thrilling,” he said.
“World has changed, happily” and that “no matter what anybody says or does we are not going back. We will only move forward together.”
It was announced that Extraordinary Birder with Christian Cooper was in the works, and when this happened, National Geographic said the show would “take viewers into the wild, wonderful and unpredictable world of birds.”
“Whether braving stormy seas in Alaska for puffins, trekking into rainforests in Puerto Rico for parrots, or scaling a bridge in Manhattan for a peregrine falcon,” the statement continued. “He does whatever it takes to learn about these extraordinary feathered creatures and show us the remarkable world in the sky above.”
Cooper first came on to the international scene in May 2020 when he asked a white woman to leash her dog “in a protected area of New York’s biggest park, where he was bird watching and where dog-leashing is required.”
So, it was Amy Cooper, no relation, who was dubbed “Central Park Keren” following being filmed pleading with a 911 operator to “send the cops” because she falsely claimed an African American man was “threatening her life.” The scene ended up being viewed 45 million times on social media. She was later charged with filing a false police report before the charges were dropped the very next year.
“I don’t think there’s an African American person in America who hasn’t experienced something like this at some point,” Christian Cooper told The Washington Post at the time.
