

White People Love Hiking. Minorities Don't. Here's Why. - coloneltcb
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114621/national-parks-popular-white-people-not-minorities-why

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jinushaun
As a minority, and especially as a minority that hikes, I hate these kinds of
articles because I feel like their intent is to perpetuate White Guilt.
Inequality and racism is bad, but you shouldn't feel guilty about not being
poor. (These kinds of articles also conveniently love to forget about poor
Whites and instead assume everyone who is White is affluent)

Like most articles, they fail to mention Asians. Once again, it's always
Blacks and Latinos… Asians make up 4.8% of the US population, yet make up 8%
of hikers. If you're Asian, you're nearly twice as likely to go hiking!

Blacks make up 12.6% of US population and 11% of hiking population. Latinos
make up 16.4% of general population, but only 7% of hikers. Lastly, Whites are
63.7% and 70% respectively.

I don't know about you, but these numbers seem to follow general demographic
percentages. So why was this article even written?

Every time I use a public city/county park, I always see giant groups of
Hispanics and Asians. In fact, I always comment on how it seems like only
first generation minorities like to take advantage of these services. (Which
is a shame because local parks are awesome) I suspect that second generation
minorities are enjoying their large house and fancy grill in the suburbs
instead.

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sksk
Shouldn't they be normalizing the percentages? i.e.,they should be looking at
percentage of non-whites who camp (denominator total number of non-whites) as
opposed to percentage of people who camp who happened to be non-white.

If a minority represents only 0.01% of the entire population, odds of finding
them camping is going to be very low unless that said activity is something
very, very common amongst that ethnic group.

Having said that, I somehow do not see a lot of African Americans when I
hike/camp.

~~~
clarkm
While this article is just a rewrite of a similar one from today's NYT
([http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/national-parks-try-
to-a...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/national-parks-try-to-appeal-to-
minorities.html)), I appreciate that it contains some additional data, even
though it doesn't relate specifically to National Park visits.

The NYT article only states that "about one in five visitors to a national
park site is nonwhite... and only about 1 in 10 is Hispanic", which definitely
points to Hispanics being underrepresented, since they make up 16.3% of the
general population. But they don't include any more specifics, which makes me
think the discrepancy couldn't be _that_ big.

~~~
georgeoliver
Keeping in mind that non-Hispanic/Latino whites are about 60% of the US
population, when this article notes that "the Outdoor Industry Association
[...] own nonprofit organization, [the] Outdoor Foundation, shows
underwhelming diversity. Its 2013 outdoor participation report notes that last
year, 70 percent of participants were white.", it's hard for me to take the
rest of this article seriously.

