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Are Our National Parks Diverse?

Stuff only white people worry about
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Headline in today’s New York Times: ‘Why Are Our National Parks So White?’. Excerpt:

Michelle Perry lives in an adjoining neighborhood and travels to work on Rainier Avenue South. The looming mountain enchants and beguiles nearly the entire way. She knows she can keep driving south and visit Rainier and the national park that surrounds it. Ms. Perry, 58, an African-American, has an idea about what she’d find up there — mosquitoes, which she hates, and bears, cougars and wolves, which she fears.

“The mountains are beautiful to watch,” she said, pausing for effect, “from a distance.”

As it approaches its centennial on Aug. 25, 2016, the National Park Service says it wants to encourage people like Ms. Perry to visit. It has its work cut out for it.

The national parks attracted a record 292.8 million visitors in 2014, but a vast majority were white and aging. The most recent survey commissioned by the park service on visitation, released in 2011, found that 22 percent of visitors were minorities, though they make up some 37 percent of the population.

This suggests an alarming disconnect.

Alarming to who? Who cares? I am a right-wing white guy who is with Michelle Perry 100 percent. I don’t want to be out there with the mosquitoes and the bears and the Sasquatches either. Why, exactly, is this a problem? Maybe black and Hispanic people don’t care about the outdoors. I know I don’t, except in theory — and that is why I strongly support national parks and environmental causes. Just because one doesn’t feel a natural affinity for something, or personally makes use of it, does not mean that one believes the thing is unimportant to support.

(Side note: How do they figure that almost 300 million people visited a national park in 2014? The entire population of the United States is only something like 300 million. Have we had that many tourists? According to the official government press release, if you go to the Lincoln Memorial, you have visited a national park. Well, I’ve been to the Lincoln Memorial a few times, having lived in Washington for three years. I don’t recall that you had to go through anything that counted visitors. How do they know, then? I’m skeptical.)

Anyway, I congratulate America’s minorities on having the good sense to stay home where it’s warm (or cool), and where there are proper toilets, and no wild animals to ruin your day. I refer you to the Stuff White People Like entry on Camping. Excerpt:

In theory camping should be a very inexpensive activity since you are literally sleeping on the ground. But as with everything in white culture, the more simple it appears the more expensive it actually is.

Camping is a multi-day, multi-step, potentially lethal activity that will cost you a large amount of both time and money. Unless you are in some sort of position where you absolutely need the friendship of a white person, you should avoid camping at all costs.

The first stage of camping always involves a trip to an outdoor equipment store like REI (or in Canada, Mountain Equipment Co-Op). These stores are well known for their abundance of white customers and their extensive inventory of things for white people to buy and only use once. If you are ever tricked into going to one of these stores, you can make white people like you by saying things like “man, this Kayak is only $1200, if I use it 35 times I’ve already saved money over renting.” Note: do not actually buy the kayak.

Next, white people will then take this new equipment and load it into an SUV or Subaru Outback with a Thule or Yakima Roof Rack. Then they will drive for an extended period of time to a national park or campsite where they will pay an entrance fee and begin their journey. It is worth noting that white people are unaware of the irony of using a gas burning car to bring them closer to nature and it is not recommended that you point this out. It will ruin their weekend.

Once in the camp area, white people will walk around for a while, set up a tent, have a horrible night of sleep, walk around some more. Then get in the car and go home. This, of course, is a best case scenario. Worst case scenarios include: getting lost, poisoned, killed by an animal, and encountering an RV. Of these outcomes, the latter is seen by white people as the worst since it involves an encounter with the wrong kind of white people.

Conversely, any camping trip that ends in death at the hands of nature or requires the use of valuable government resources for a rescue is seen as relatively positive in white culture. This is because both situations might eventually lead to a book deal or documentary film about the experience.

It strikes me as ultra-white to worry that not enough black, Asian, and Hispanic people are wasting their time out where there’s no air conditioning or heating, and where they could be eaten or kidnapped and hauled off to be Bigfoot’s sex slave. I wonder what the percentage of transgenders visiting our national parks is? I’ll keep reading the Times, because we’re surely going to find out about this crisis soon.

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