By Steve Sailer
10/30/2011
From the L.A. Times:
Only about 1% of the nearly 4 million people who visit the national park each year are black, and the park system remains largely the province of whites. So officials were elated earlier this month when two groups of African Americans were touring Yosemite the same day.
By Louis Sahagun, Los Angeles Times
October 30, 2011
Reporting from Yosemite National Park — Their Yosemite Valley tour was nearing its end, and the church ladies and gents from South Los Angeles had heard enough. Almost.
"He’s been telling us stories he thinks we want to hear for two hours," said Ann Hale, 70, heaving a sigh of frustration from the back of the tram.
In fact, guide William Fontana had been regaling his listeners — most of them white — with stories about John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt, about fur trappers and rock climbers.
"We're still waiting for at least a few words about Yosemite’s African American Buffalo Soldiers," Hale grumbled to a fellow passenger.
After filing off the tram, some women from Grace United Methodist Church surrounded Fontana on the sidewalk outside the Yosemite Lodge.
"Questions, ladies?" he asked.
"Yes," Hale said. "We want to know why you left out Yosemite’s African American story."
Fontana seemed puzzled. "I don’t have enough time to talk about Buffalo Soldiers in a two-hour tour," he explained.
Hale nodded politely and walked away.
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.
A few weeks ago, a 300-foot Giant Sequoia fell in the Sierras. Not surprisingly, the only people who saw it fall (and videocammed the last few seconds) were a middle-aged German chemist and his wife. German tourists really like the Sierras. (And yes, a tree falling in the forest does make a sound.)
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.
So officials were elated earlier this month when they learned that two groups of African Americans, the one from Grace United Methodist and one from the Inglewood Senior Center, were touring the park on the same day.
That meant there were more than 65 black Americans on the valley floor on the same day, an event so rare that ranger Shelton Johnson — who is of African American and Native American descent and has worked in Yosemite for 18 years — called it "possibly unprecedented."
Leaving aside the more obvious things that can be said, I like to do compare and contrasts, so I want to compare the positive aversion many blacks feel toward visiting Yosemite, which is the crown jewel of what I might call Northern Californianess, with black attitudes toward playing golf. Over the years, there has been vastly more bias and exclusion in golf than in Yosemite, yet a not insubstantial fraction of black men with the money to play golf are highly enthusiastic about playing the sport. Going back to the early 1970s, I have frequently been grouped in foresomes with black male golfers, most of whom were pretty good at the game, knew the rules, and the etiquette, and were pleasure to play with.
About Yosemite, eh, not so much.
So, what is it about Yosemite that repels blacks? Do they see it as a locus of white hippie-dippie environmentalists?
Or, maybe blacks tend to be more scared of heights than whites, a fear that is not at all unreasonable in Yosemite. Something like a dozen and a half visitors have fallen to their deaths this year in Yosemite Valley alone.
Or do blacks just not like camping?
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.