Calling All Climbers of Color
|
If you're an African-American mountaineer with vertical ice climbing experience I have an opportunity to share. A casting agent is looking for black climbers (18 to 45) to appear in a national television commercial. Please reply to this post if you're interested or know someone who might be for details. |
|
Passing this along to a friend of a friend in CO Springs. |
|
James, nicely penned article! |
|
I agree...good article. Very interesting subject and a premise I never considered before |
|
That's a very good article Mate! |
|
Thanks for posting the link to the Alpinist article. A couple of really good points to think about in there. |
|
James, |
|
Seriously. Great article. You have a fantastic way with words that is both honest and uninviting of criticism or nitpicking. The issues around racial privilege are not ignored by everyone in the climbing community, as some of us have a foot in the social activism community as well. |
|
Great article. Thanks. |
|
Good read, thought provoking. Who in their right mind wants to be out in the freezing cold, screaming barfies, less oxygen, risk of death/dismemberment/etc, sleeping in the cold etc? I find it fun, doesn't mean anyone else does. |
|
"... sailed with Christopher Columbus in 1492 to discover the New World." |
|
The more people make a big deal of their race the more it is a big deal. Who cares what colour your skin is. |
|
50.8% of the population is women. We need more women climbers at the gym, crags and mountains. |
|
So is the main argument of the article that we should encourage folks to climb, even if they don't want to, so that they will help preserve the climbing areas that we enjoy? |
|
I want to thank everyone for their kind and thoughtful consideration of this post. It's remarkable how different the responses and discussion are here compared to the identical post that went up on rockclimbing.com. The anger and hostility I experienced there was disappointing and a bit heart breaking. So I sincerely appreciate the rational discussion we are having here. |
|
James Mills wrote:I want to thank everyone for their kind and thoughtful consideration of this post. It's remarkable how different the responses and discussion are here compared to the identical post that went up on rockclimbing.com. The anger and hostility I experienced there was disappointing and a bit heart breaking. So I sincerely appreciate the rational discussion we are having here.Yeah James, the rc.com thread was miserable from the get-go. Though, perhaps I contributed to it; sorry. As much as I like to make fun of the "don't be a jerk" attitude around here, a simple comparison of this thread on each site speaks for itself. Going further into the conversation on the intersection of race and outdoor rec, I think that one of the most valid points you made in your article was the fact that non-white cultures in America have very different views on the value of outdoor recreation, and going beyond that, wilderness preservation of public lands as a whole. As the last presidential election showed, more pluralistic populations (I hate to use the term "majority minority") are now the norm in US democracy, and it is quite possible that wilderness preservation could take a backseat in future elections. (ok, here's where I'm going to go off the analytical deep end) The problem is that, historically, most outdoor recreation in our nation has been inextricably tied to white privilege and dominance. Our definition of "wilderness" is twofold: "unsettled," and "land as it must have been before settlement and modern development." But both of those definitions only worked historically after white American culture had displaced Indian inhabitants from future "wilderness." (read this essay for more context: tinyurl.com/d699p5) Same with early national parks and federal hunting preserves; Park and forest services went out of their way to remove peripheralized populations (Indians, Hispanos, and poor rural whites) from parks, and to label their means of sustenance as "poaching," while simultaneously securing the legal right of elite whites to hunt on these same lands. (See Karl Jacoby's "Crimes Against Nature" for more info) Going even further, the entire context of outdoor recreation as it came together around the turn of the century under Roosevelt was based upon the larger fear that dominant white culture was becoming too weak and civilized in its modernized state, and that some sort of patronizing reclamation of primitive "barbarian virtues" was essential, whether by way of living like Indians in the wilderness, or by having "splendid little wars" against Mexicans and Filipinos, or even going "slumming" and listening to jazz a few decades later. (see Jacobson, "Barbarian Virtues") Tying it into the modern day, I think that the environmental movement has really dropped the ball lately by not really tying concerns of outdoor recreation and wilderness preservation (largely seen as bastions of upper middle class white culture), and environmental concerns that more directly affect lower class and largely non-white populations (skyrocketing cancer rates among poor blacks living along lower Mississippi River oil refineries, for example). I dunno, fascinating topic. All this historical baggage may be a bit overly abstract, but I think it might shed a bit of light on the issues that your essay lays out. Oh, and one minor addition to your article: when laying out the history of African Americans in early American exploration, you neglected to mention Esteban, who in the 1520s was one of 4 men to walk from Florida to Mexico, the first non-Indians to do so. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estev… (apologies for the lengthy post) |
|
Mike Belu wrote:50.8% of the population is women. We need more women climbers at the gym, crags and mountains.Especially any hotties from Bama |
|
Mike Belu wrote:50.8% of the population is women. We need more women climbers at the gym, crags and mountains.Yes, agree this is my concern, much more than reaching some kind of imaginary racial equality' on the cliffs. Let's get the gender balance going! I personally don't live for playing basketball every day of the week, or ruling over the streets of my neighborhood with some kind of authority. I just see no purpose or interest in it. Thus there may be people who see nothing interesting about climbing a mountain, even if given the opportunity to do so. To each his own....as so many other articles point out, don't over advertise the cliffs to the point of overuse. Access is tough enough, so don't try to increase the numbers by 19% just to reach some ethnic balance in the outdoors. |
|
camhead wrote: The problem is that, historically, most outdoor recreation in our nation has been inextricably tied to white privilege and dominance.Didn't the whole idea of wilderness as beautiful and uplifting start with Ruskin and other white, mostly British, Europeans? |
|
James Mills wrote:I still have to explain to my friends and family back home why I do what do, those crazy things that white people do.Back in the day, all of us had to explain why we do those crazy climbing things we do. |
|
Mark E Dixon wrote: Didn't the whole idea of wilderness as beautiful and uplifting start with Ruskin and other white, mostly British, Europeans?Yeah, a lot of that was Anglo-American in origin (Ruskin, all the transcendentalists, George Catlin, the Hudson River School of art). There was a significant cadre of Teutonic/German nature enthusiasm as well, both from the more scientific perspective (Humboldt), and the more romantic, beautiful perspective (what would a Wagnerian opera be with the Alps?). You could probably trace a lot of this back to forestation projects in the late Middle Ages by folks such as Henry VIII who (once again from a perspective of privilege), wanted wilderness to hunt in. And of course, there is the more scrappy, subversive view of wilderness as a place for more egalitarian camaraderie (Robin Hood) in British culture, too. But, I also think that the southern European perspective of nature reverence has long been under-emphasized, and it arguably had deeper roots in some ways. Rousseau and other later enlightenment views of wilderness as a place for "noble savages," of course. But, if you dig even deeper, you'll find that the southern European Catholic worldview was a bit friendlier to wilderness as a place for spiritual rejuvenation that was not all that different from Muir or Thoreau. Think St. Francis; his view of talking to animals and living in the wilds was very different from later Lutheran and Puritan views of the wilderness as a dark and evil place. Damn, way more I could write on this, but I should probably actually get some real work done today. |