I have been using processing for many years and there are many different ways people get into the language: 1) through artists and their works, think Casey Reas, Aaron Koblin and the tutorials by Daniel Shiffman. 2) through specific use cases like, I want to hook up my kinect and do x. 3) it is taught in may experimental arts and datavis classes / tutorials. and 4) lore, I have heard from many people "processing seems like a good fit for x" 5) an so on.
I think where processing excels or has exceled in the past is being able to quickly pick up more experimental bits of code and libraries in Java / C++ and put a simpler syntax in front of them. People often say, processing is really just java. And to be specfic, it is just a preprocessor and an api/library (core.jar) for Java. The processing IDE is okay for beginners but most people that get serious with it move to an external text editor or IDE like Eclipse.
In my opinion it is not the simplified Java syntax that makes it great to work with it is the philosophy that drives the api. It is very easy to start drawing shapes in just one line of code. They create duplicate methods so you can pass in ints, floats or another datatype without resorting to casting.
There are also a bunch of offshoots, processing.js, ruby processing, etc. which are pretty exciting. Often the way the api is ported is not the best fit for the new host language. I have played with a bunch of these and they are fun but they seem to not get the kind of traction the main processing project does.
I think if you are wanting to advocate racket more effectively you should look at the historical linage of processing (design by numbers, data visualization by ben fry, etc.) and you will see why so many of the learning/documentation focuses on things that interest designers and artists. If you want to do the same for Racket, get some artists to do some awesome work. Then have them document it, break it apart and share it. I think this is how such a large community has sprung up around processing and why so many projects continue to use it today.
The other project that works really well with processing/js is toxiclibs/js. You should consider porting it if you want to draw in some of the newer crowd.