White People Love Hiking. Minorities Don't. Here's Why. | Hacker News Reader

White People Love Hiking. Minorities Don't. Here's Why.

newrepublic.com

13 pointscoloneltcb5 comments

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.

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.

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...), 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.

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.

I love how breathlessly the article reports that "40 percent of outdoor participants come from households with incomes of $75,000 or more". If you take a look at some simple income graphs[1], it's fairly obvious why that is: Because nearly 40% of the population makes that much. Their education table is similarly ridiculous[2].

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_Income_Distr... [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_U...

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