You think that the confederate flags that you brought along to fly might have had anything to do with minorities not wishing to participate in your activities?
Side note: Its surprising how many events and activities seem like nearly all white people including cosplay events, woodworking events, maker events, Renaissance festivals. and craft fairs. Classic cars and auto restoration events have a lot of Hispanics but few AAs.
If this (PDF, page 11) is correct, white people might just travel a lot more than black or Hispanic people in the same income brackets. That’s specifically travel by car, so maybe it’s more even if you look at travel by other means, but outdoorsy travel is probably disproportionately car-heavy.
Depends on the TYPE of classic cars. There are a lot of car shows put on by and attended by African Americans. It’s just the STYLE of cars that’s different.
White car fanciers may like cars from the 1920s. White AND Mexican car enthusiasts may be into early 60s muscle cars. Mexican AND black car fanciers like huge gas guzzling American cars of the 70s (a Chevy Impala or Monte Carlo, e.g.)… but while a Mexican may turn a 1972 Impala into a low rider, a black guy may turn it into a “donk” or high riser.
Reported.
For?
You say that you go to these trips, and that they feel more like KKK rallies than a caving get together because of all the confederate flags that are being waved about.
If I were the one claiming that you were taking confederate flags, then I could see that as insulting. If I were the one saying it seemed more like a KKK rally than a caving trip, then that may be out of line on my part.
I simply took you at your word based on your observations, and asked a simple question.
My question to you, doesn’t it seem that minorities would avoid those types of circumstances?
You missed the ‘used to’ and you accused him of either being I or being in sympathy with the Klan.
But you said I was waving them around.
And for that matter, how is what you posted contributing to the conversation.
You IMO just wanted to pull a drive by insult.
Actually, you ARE the one claiming that he was taking confederate flags, since there isn’t any place in his statement where he says that. So drop the allegation.
Thank you Asimovian.
Alright, apologies, I didn’t know that it would be taken that way. I do see how in using “you”, I personalized it in saying that he was actually responsible for bringing the confederate flags, rather than just being at an event where confederate flags were present, that was not my intent. The “you” was meant as the group he was with, not for him personally, but I can certainly see how it can be taken that way.
I completely reformulate my question, because I was not intending to be insulting, but was actually interested in the answer.
Given the presence of the confederate flags, do you think that that might have anything to do with the lack of minorities at these events?
It’s hardly k9bfriender’s fault SAE merged the singular and plural second person pronouns. This is a bad mod note.
nm.
Swimming is something you have to learn. If your parents and friends don’t know how to swim, they can’t teach you. Even if you’re a really adventurous kid who is willing to try going out in the water and figuring it out, you’re going to be dissuaded by those around who know that they can’t come to your rescue. All the nearby water in the world probably isn’t going to help.
Many (most?) non-swimmers are at least somewhat afraid of the water (with good reason. If you can’t swim, drowning is a distinct possibility).
Very few people learn to swim as adults. I went to an international conference last year, and there were several adults (who had not grown up with nearby bodies of water suitable for swimming) who were learning to swim in the pool, helped and encouraged by many other attendees. Things I noticed:
- It was hard for them to put themselves out there and publicly flail around in the pool.
- It was really hard for them to get to the point where they could put their faces in the water and trust that they were ok.
Most black people I know don’t have a problem with outdoor recreational activities like BBQing on the back deck or laying out on the beach or fishing off the side of a bridge. Most of the anglers I see around town are black. And black folks love hanging out on front porches, stoops, and public parks–including public pools. These certainly count as “outdoor recreational activities”.
But wilderness camping is different. Being out in the middle of nowhere is scary for many people, but it is especially scary if you are a black person. This is due to the stereotype of rural whites not looking kindly on people of other races. (You can say this stereotype is wrong and baseless…as long as I can say the same thing about the stereotypes of urban inner city black youth.) At the very least, we need to admit that rural xenophobia is a reality. Yeah, a black person can have a negative run-in with some judgmental white person in the city. But at least if some shit goes down, there will be witnesses and nearby hospitals.
There are also animals out in the wild. It has been my experience that black people are more wary of animals in general than white people. I don’t know why this might be, but I’m guessing the history of animals being sicced on black people is involved somehow.
Also, if you’ve spent your whole life in the city, the woods can be an overwhelming place with too many unfamiliar dangers. One weekend when I was a kid, my father’s friend let us stay at his cabin in the mountains. It was a beautiful place. But my father practically lost his mind when my sister went wandering off and we couldn’t find her. Everything was fine once we found her, but we never went back. I think all the “what ifs?” were too much for my father to handle.
It has been a while since I have worn the field biologist hat. But when I wore it, I would sometimes get some odd looks from fellow black people when they’d asked what I did for a living. Just like I got some odd looks when I was in college and I told people I wanted to be an ecologist instead of the more socially acceptable engineer or physician. It is not like anyone explicitly told me that Black People Don’t Do That Kind of Stuff. It’s just something that seemed foreign.
(When I go hiking in the woods, I pretend that I’m Harriet Tubman leading invisible slaves to freedom.)
I don’t know there’s much else to say. The Confederate flag is the flag first of slavery and then of Jim Crow. If the arms are welcoming but the flags are hostile, you have at best mixed messages going on, and folks are gonna see the flags before the arms. If you’re genuinely interested in helping future groups be welcoming to nonwhites, you might want to push back against anything that makes it look like a Klan rally.
On a similar line, I was given an assignment to see why recent immigrants, specifically from Somalia and that region, weren’t joining the local scouting troops. The answer I was given surprised me and was totally logical: “As refugees we have spent plenty of time sleeping out of doors, so doing that now seems like a step backwards. In addition, we tend to shun people in uniform, such as scout leaders, as it has associations with the police-state and oppressive army personnel.”
To this date, ten years later, there are still no Somalian scout troops in the area. It may take a generation for the memories of fleeing as refugees fades.
I like to go camping and participate in outdoor activities becuase my father took me camping as a child, and I was in boy scouts, and did a bunch of camping there too.
My father took me camping and encouraged me in outdoor activities because his father took him camping and encouraged him in outdoor activities. His father went camping because his father took him camping and encouraged in outdoor activities. His father went camping because that’s just pretty much how they lived at that time.
It’s definitely a generational thing, something that you pass on to your kids. Some kids that are never exposed will still enjoy it, and others brought up being outdoorsy may end up resenting it, but for the most part, we do what we were raised to do.
There are really two main aspects to camping to me, that make it enjoyable. The first is being away from everything. It allows you to decompress. I have been bringing a cell for emergencies more recently, but I leave it off to conserve power, and enjoy being unreachable. When I’ve been out for a few hours, and I hear a car driving on a road a few miles out, I realize that it’s the first car I’ve heard in hours. Just being out and away from everyone and everything and all the responsibilities and obligations of living in society lets me relax a bit.
The other nice thing about camping is that it reminds you how nice civilization is. After spending a week living out of my backpack and sleeping on rocks, just the simple act of using a flushing toilet, taking a shower, and laying down on a real bed is amazing. I can certainly understand, however, that it is a first world problem that we have to deprive ourselves of the niceties of civilization in order to appreciate them, and that’s not really for everyone.
A couple of data points.
First, I have seen African-American people fishing, in urban areas.
Second, I live in an area where people come for recreational canoeing. In fact, I’m about 20 miles from Steelville, the Floating Capital of Missouri. Any African American person would be a fool to come to that town unless accompanied by a white person. Sundown Towns still exist, and should a black tourist turn up at the town liquor store to buy beer for the weekend, while it may not be 1950’s Mississippi levels of hostility, he is most certainly going to be made to feel unwelcome.
I wonder what the racial makeup of Burning man is?