Here we go again:

For more than 60 years, the National Park Service has been trying to reach out to African Americans and Latinos. But its 395 parks, monuments, waterways, historic places and recreational areas remain largely the province of white Americans and tourists from around the world.

In an interview, Park Service Director Jon Jarvis reiterated an old lament: Parks must attract a more diverse slice of the American public or eventually risk losing taxpayer support. Yet only about 1% of the nearly 4 million people who visit Yosemite each year are African Americans.

Nonsense. If black people and Hispanic people don’t want to go to national parks, so what? I’m as white as they come, and I don’t want to go to a national park. You’d have to drag me there. It’s hot, and that’s where mosquitoes and bears are, and besides, you can’t get ice to refresh your cocktail. I am an avid indoorsman. And yet, I am very pleased that my tax dollars support the national park system, because I think it’s a fine thing that we have them. Does Jon Jarvis really believe that people like me sit around saying, “Thank goodness that the national park system exists so white people have a place to go fart around with animals and breathe the clean air and eat trail mix and stuff”? Please.

I don’t think this is really about the National Park Service being afraid of losing taxpayer support, though I think that’s what the people who run the NPS tell themselves. I think it’s really about cultural anxiety among elites. Why is it impossible for some white people to accept that there are cultural differences, and that that’s okay? That we don’t all have to be the same, to want the same things. Maybe there’s some cultural reason that blacks and Latinos don’t go to national parks as often as whites. Why does it matter that the national park visitors aren’t racially proportionate to the general U.S. population? Seriously, so what? As long as there is no impediment to anyone visiting national parks, why is this a big deal?

This reminds me of when NASCAR’s brass got all nervous because black people weren’t going to stock car races, and it didn’t have enough black or women drivers? Again, I’m a white, Southern-born male, but I couldn’t imagine wanting to go to anything NASCAR-related. It’s just not my thing. So what? I have no idea why NASCAR’s fan base is so heavily white, or why blacks and women don’t really want to be NASCAR drivers, though it surely must have a lot to do with the fact that NASCAR emerged out of the culture of hillbilly moonshiners trying to outrun federal agents during Prohibition. As long as there are no barriers to entry, is this really a problem? Why, exactly, would it be? Is it a problem that the NBA is disproportionately black? I don’t think so. But you don’t see elites wringing their hands over that.

Seriously, who worries about this stuff, aside from a certain sort of anxious educated person?

Is it bad that the neighborhoods in Prince George’s County, Md., are becoming more segregated? Does it matter that these are middle-class black folks who are self-segregating? I don’t think so. I mean, who cares? As long as there are no laws forbidding or discouraging people of all races from moving there, why should anybody wring his or her hands over the fact that PG County doesn’t “look like America”?

(H/T: Steve Sailer.)

UPDATE: Here’s Ta-Nehisi Coates on the PG County news. First he quotes from that WaPo story. Emphases are his own:

“They enjoy interacting with other blacks,” Karyn Lacy, a sociologist at the University of Michigan, wrote in her book “Blue-Chip Black,” for which she interviewed dozens of parents in Prince George’s. “Scholars have focused so much on the burden of blackness that they have devoted scant attention to the possibility that there is something enjoyable about being black and participating in a community of blacks.“

Residential integration is not a goal, particularly for younger black professionals born after the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, said Bart Landry, a sociologist at the University of Maryland who has returned to Prince George’s for an update to his 1987 book, “The New Black Middle Class.”

He said many residents find comfort, after spending the day in a predominantly white workplace, returning to a home where all their neighbors are other professional African Americans. “They’re where they want to be,” Landry said. “They’re not thinking about integration. It’s not on their radar screen. . . . Their goal is to live in a community of like-minded, like-valued people, and these are other middle-class blacks.“