The New Yorker:

Rae Wynn-Grant, the host of “Wild Kingdom” and author of “Wild Life,” recounts the times she nearly died.

By Mark Yarm

The large-carnivore ecologist Rae Wynn-Grant has had her share of nerve-racking experiences in the field. There was the time, on a college study-abroad program in southern Kenya, that she saw the silhouette of a lioness nosing around her tent. During the resulting long, sleepless night, Wynn-Grant (a nonreligious sort) prayed to God to spare her life. Several years later, in the Lake Tahoe Basin, she was chased by a black bear and managed to hightail her way to a waiting all-terrain vehicle. An intern sped them to safety.

The other day, Wynn-Grant, who is thirty-eight and lives in Santa Barbara, was experiencing a more relatable case of nerves. She was visiting an old and, in her description, “toxic” workplace: the American Museum of Natural History, where she’d been a postdoctoral fellow (studying the movements of black bears in Nevada) for three years before she quit, in 2018. “I’m trying to tell myself it’s a normal anxiety,” she said as she walked down a second-floor hallway. She wore a rust-colored knit cap and a khaki jumpsuit, and she took a seat on a marble bench in a quiet corner. “I love this museum, I hate this museum,” she said. “I definitely experienced a lot of racism here.” In 2017, Wynn-Grant spoke to several news organizations about diversity issues at the institution. (At the time, she said, she and the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson were the only full-time Black scientists there.) “I got in soooo much trouble,” she said. “They viewed the truth about the lack of diversity as slander.”

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