Maybe black people have heard about global warming and they’re not that interested in exacerbating it. If only the remaining 1.3% can be convinced to boycott the event until the burning becomes metaphorical.
It is indeed decadent to burn stuff for entertainment.
I would say that in the very long view "white culture"and “black culture” are malleable, we just forget that. In 1961 if you went to a B.B. King or Muddy Waters show in the US there would be nary a white face in the audience, ten years later it was almost all white faces (and the performers didn’t care who was partaking of “the culture.”) We are thinking about right now, and maybe right now doesn’t really matter. It could be that a few years from now there will be large numbers of black “burners” and the debate will be moot.
My impression is that American underground culture (including Burning Man) is all-inclusive, and nobody is really being excluded, the issue is that some people are part of a different subculture, and in effect exclude themselves, and all this arises out of other socioeconomic factors; if you’re poor then Burning Man is a luxury way off your radar, and blacks still make up the largest percentage of the population below the poverty line. The representation of blacks at Burning Man is a symptom of a larger issue, so wringing our hands and furrowing our brows about Burning Man is pointless: it ain’t Burning Man’s fault.
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I was at the DPW propane burn-off on Monday night, and one nice lady explained it thusly: “Would you rather have that propane burned to make someone’s RV cool for a couple days, or in a huge fireball that entertains all of us?”
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Exactly this. There are only 2 races in America.
It’s fun. That’s all it needs.
I for one love fire.
More decadence for me, please. Perhaps turn it beyond eleven. Dodecadence FTW!
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It’s easy to not care what race people are when they are almost all white.
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I think that’s a reasonable article and more useful and constructive than some of the other things I’ve read on the subject. Rather than focussing on the absent black people and thus being unable to really investigate what’s going on (since you can’t easily ask a person who isn’t there why they don’t attend), they’ve picked the people who are there despite the general trend, and explored the experience with them. And they get some good answers - you start to pick out the themes and tendencies and formulate a sensible idea of what’s going on, instead of “It’s obviously because the terrible white people scare them all off” or “Black people can’t camp! Everyone knows that. It’s something about canvas.”
statement was made by someone who isn’t white.
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Yes, every time black people write about the racial experiences of other black people, they must write also about the racial experiences of all other non-white people. :-/
Meanwhile, white people continue ignoring almost always their experiences AS white people.
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Thanks.
I knew that house came first from black gay clubs, but I know that someone will try claiming that it somehow doesn’t count.
I’ll watch that video later, I love this kind of thing. I was going to write about the history of hardcore and gabber when I was reading working class history at Ruskin college ten years ago, but I became too ill to finish the course after the first term.
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Yeah, sure - I was just reflecting that it’s easy to exhibit tolerance in a monoculture or from a position of almost complete cultural dominance.
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It’s also a position from which you cannot win.
Not exhibit tolerance, wrong.
Exhibit tolerance, weirdly, also wrong.
Somebody will always be unhappy.
That’s apparently the basic premise of the Cultural Wars.
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It would appear so.
OH!!! I didn’t think to look at the percentages… I think the rest is Asian and Hispanic (I think I remember that from the guys other article). Sorry, duh…
But as @milliefink says above:
So, the author is talking about a specific group of people, not all people of color.
Well, that wasn’t my position. I just don’t think it’s particularly praiseworthy. It’s easy to be tolerant when there are only one or two individuals from an outgroup living within the community. Once their numbers increase to a point where they represent more than a mere novelty; tolerance at that point is where it really counts, in my opinion. I still don’t consider it particularly praiseworthy, either; as far as I’m concerned it’s the bare minimum. But it does seem to be the point at which a critical number of people struggle to treat their neighbours in a civilised way.
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Oh boy I’m glad you came here to teach us about “reverse racism”.
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more discussion/context: Racial Diversity at Burning Man: http://www.burn.life/blog/racial-diversity-at-burning-man
