Stuff White People Like: Nature

The National Parks Service is having trouble attracting non-whites to America's great outdoors:

Studies and surveys show that visitors to the nation’s 393 national parks — there were 285.5 million of them in 2009 — are overwhelmingly non-Hispanic whites, with blacks the least likely group to visit. That reality has not changed since the 1960s, when it was first identified as an issue. The Park Service now says the problem is linked to the parks’ very survival.

One park ranger at Yosemite took it upon himself to do something about it. Shelton Johnson sent a letter to Oprah pleading for help; she has now devoted to entire shows to the issue. But as Johnson admits, he wasn't surprised to find that Oprah herself had never visited a national park, and never gone camping.

The NPS isn't sure what the problem is, though some suspect that rules about the number of tents permitted at a single site might "clash with the vacation style of extended Latino families." But it is blacks who overwhelmingly avoid the wilderness, with many citing the parks as "uncomfortable places".

Which might be the whole source of the problem. Camping is a ritualized return to pre-modern forms of civilization (which is why there is such contempt amongst serious campers for "car-camping") that involves deliberately abandoning the comforts of the modern world. But the only people who are interested in this form of authenticity-seeking are those who have the luxury of being tired of comfort. Camping, in short, is just another aspect of the recreational slumming that is the dominant form of leisure amongst urbanized whites.

The real question, then, is why the reluctance of other groups to engage in this is seen as a problem.