So given that the first of the festival’s 10 principles is “radical inclusion”, what does it mean that the festival’s vision of a utopian society is 90% white?
How about not a damn thing? “Inclusion” can be all kinds of things besides code speak for making sure you have the right ethnic balance in the audience.
When asked by the Guardian reporter to explain his outrage-generating quote, Harvey replied:
Maybe the real issue isn’t the “outrage” but that non people “can’t” say anything about in the current climate of sensitivity to everything imaginable and unimaginable?
Jews no longer count as a separate race. Thanks to the success of assimilation, people think we are “white”. Even lots of Jews are under this impression.
I suspect historically the fact that we’ve been a population that self concentrates due to the specific needs of our traditional lifestyle has lots to do with why we don’t have much of a camping tradition. Hard to make a minyan in the wilderness for example.
I can’t help but wonder, given the demographic of BM, if the Native American percentage isn’t bumped up by a lot “great-grandma was a Cherokee princess” types.
What about the forty years in the wilderness? Was there a Hilton I missed reading about?
Thank you for your spot-on observation. Larry Harvey was mansplaining, except that instead of being condescending to women, he was spouting off some simple minded cliches as if they constituted a obvious explanation for a complicated web of relationships between & among “black people”, which apparently he regards as a homogenous blob, easily understood.
It isn’t like he’s “racist” or “not racist”. Irrelevant. That kind of binary thinking ignores the fractured complexity of our culture. Culture has an enormous momentum that sustains racial segregation - this will not disappear because we just pretend to ignore race.
& to make this an argument between “quotas” & “no quotas” is just stupid stupid stupid.
Correlation ain’t causation, but this data shows that camping is disproportionately involving the wealthier and more college-educated, which would inflate your white folk numbers significantly. It may be more true that camping is a luxury for those who can afford to take a vacation, and that more white people can afford that than black people (which would dovetail with overall economic trends).
If Larry Harvey wants to get more black people to Burning Man, the solution suggested by this data isn’t a race quota, it’s enhancing the education and income level of black people! He should get on that.
I think this honestly is the root cause. So many times in any situation we see people go off on some halfcocked idea that ends up biting them in the ass rather than say the truth of “I don’t know”.
Imagine how the article would sound, if reported on at all, if he had just said “Thats a good point, I really don’t know why, but it may be interesting to find out more about that”.
Yea, far less click bait so no one would have noticed it = less outrage at an unformulated thought/idea, not to mention more work behind the scenes perhaps to actually look into that and maybe, just maybe address it without making headlines or the offense train being run over everything.
Many years ago I attended a startup meeting for a group that a local lady was creating that she called a “Bluestocking Circle.” Her ad was supremely vague - basically, it’s going to be a group of women who get together to do something. She had a bit of buzz in the community from some other activities she’d done, so about 25 people showed up for the first meeting. As we went around the circle sharing what we wanted our new group to be, I’d say about 80% of the group said they wanted this to be a diverse group. The only issue is, it wasn’t a diverse group. It was a bunch of white ladies.
I’ve gone through this before with yoga, which is also a very white group in general, even to the point that a lot of Indian people don’t feel very welcome in the yoga world - something that is observed with a lot of handwringing these days.
First off, I thought, “We’re a bunch of white ladies, maybe we should just say we want to hang out with some other white ladies or whoever is game to show up and discuss our lady topics. Why are we so keen to say we want diversity when apparently no one of color is interested in this particular idea?”
I feel like a lot of white people need to accept that some of the things we are into isn’t going to appeal to people of color and either we have to figure out a way to do more to make our ideas attractive to everyone, or we have to get comfortable with being involved in non-diverse activities.
The “quotas” reference is the buried lede here. He comes back to it a few times.
In an interview with the Guardian, Harvey vowed that “we’re not going to set racial quotas”,
Who asked you to?! He tells a story about some easily infuriated black lesbian “diversity consultant” he was made to listen to, and accuses her of wanting to “check boxes,” but that’s about it.
Then he goes on to play a game of Blacker Than Thou with her, his biracial stepson giving him superior blackness to hers because he’s only ever seen her around white people in the nonprofit world. (I.e., he’s only ever encountered her at her workplace.) “She didn’t really represent the black community.”
But if he’s going to personally look at the role of the super-wealthy, how aggressively to address race and Burning Man? Harvey said an attempt to conjure appropriate amount of racial diversity involving quotas “in itself would be an act of condescension, wouldn’t it?”
“Hey there neighbor. Say, I couldn’t help but notice your dog has been peeing on my lawn. Would you mind doing something about that?”
“So you’re saying I need to shoot my dog. Wow. I can’t believe that’s your solution. Guess what, it’s a fact that dogs pee, but I guess you don’t see anything wrong with murder as a solution to that.”
“No, that’s not what I–”
“I accept your apology, but I won’t be doing anything about the pee issue, since you seem to think it’s either murder or nothing, and I’m not a murderer.”
Lots of people in the world are OK with non-diverse activities. Sometimes its good to get different views but “diversity for diversity’s sake” seems kind of silly. At my current employer “diversity” simply means more career track jobs for women. This is a French company and I work at one of their offices in Japan. You can’t even have the “regular” diversity here, its a monoculture and as for the “more career jobs for women” version, the jury seems to be out amongst local women if they want to kill themselves like the men do with career track jobs or not.
Yeh, well, it depends who you ask right? If Jews can be assimilated (even if they are Ethiopian, or Indian, or Chinese?) then presumably, anyone can be. So why not? Why don’t we just call everyone ‘white’ and be done with it? It’s pretty arbitrary labeling, after all.
ITT: A lot of white, privileged people debating the points they and the white, privileged writer made about black culture.
Yaaaay! I’d love to comment on it, but this white, privileged person finds Burning Man to be outside his budget even if we’re discussing the “low income” tickets. When I was in college, that was somethign the “rich kids” did to be weird and unique. Me, I worked in the summer.
And I have to wonder why the interviewer brought it up. Maybe they knew something about his attitudes and thought they’d come up with the ultimate “gotcha”; they have to know that Burning Man skews affluent and white.
Yeah, but it’s just easier to throw up tar-coated straw-men and theorize that certain groups don’t come because of some sort of genetic-cultural thang. That way we can all get back to figuring out to better monetize the plug-n-play camps.
I worked recently on updating a website for blind-accessibility.
The freelancer website we worked through was accessible – until it came time to give me feedback. He had to find a sighted person to click that one button.
I have a burning man story for you. As with any other such story, it may make no sense at all.
A few years ago, I went to a smaller local burn. There were workshops scheduled during the day, and I thought the one showing us how to work with EL wire would be fun. But it turns out the tent for this was located at the main camp, where the main dance area was, and the midday background music was too loud to hear the instructer. No one was dancing, the music was mostly being ignored, but it proved impossible to get the sound people to turn it down, then, or at any other time during the event.
I heard a lot of technical rationalization about sound quality and DB levels, but at the end of the day there is a sizable group who don’t believe that modulating sound levels is ever desirable or necessary, and the event is really for them to showcase their talent, spoken word be damned.
Tldr: litter and moop are well understood to be pollution, but too much noise simply is not possible at an outdoor event. And if you agree with this, then Burning man’s radical inclusion certainly includes you.
Electronic music is arguably more diverse than rock, jazz, blues and a host of others. Here in Europe it’s been going since Jean Michelle Jarre and Kraftwerk in the 70s.
Yes, yes, I’ll get off your lawn.
Diversity has at least two meanings. There’s diversity of action, where a lot of people who look the same, get together and do wildly different things together. That’s the burning man ethic. Racial diversity is a completely different idea. For one thing, if you include people from a bunch of different backgrounds, the suddenly it’s going to be much more complicated and much less fun, to do a lot of different kinds of things together. You can all get together and do a lot of the same thing together, and you’ll probably be fine. But then, that’s not everyone’s cup of tea, and you’ll only get a certain kind of person to be interested in that, no matter what their background.
