I itch all over when looking at that dataset. So many potential causes of error. And uneven error. Estimation methods may cause much larger error for some groups than others. Etc.
Is there any better way to try and see if this is a problem? It’s kind of tricky - any questionnaire could itself be questioned. The obvious problem that comes to mind would be spurious nonsense entered by people annoyed by the question being raised, but I’d think the bigger and more significant bias might be from minorities feeling disinclined to participate, e.g. from feeling singled out.
All that said, it’s a good question what BoingBoing can do to be more inclusive. One might however wonder if perhaps an added utility of the question might be to derail the discussion…
For many years at this event, it was a point of faith that since nothing grew on the playa, it was impossible to cause burn damage. And it took a while for that to change. Then there had to be a discussion about what was and wasn’t litter. So they stopped calling it litter and called it matter out of place. One time I went, some idiot was shining an industrial laser at a disco mirror ball, and the Rangers shrugged it off. It took the blinding of a ranger 10 years later for that to be officially addressed.
Hushville and the AEZ are perfectly.clear about noise pollution, inside their city block, no amplified music is allowed. So if you think noise pollution is impossible once you’ve bought a ticket, I’m not the only one who’d disagree with you.
Yeah, but then you have to splain all the different splaining types to all the various splainers, which if done too quickly can give you splain-freeze.
Indeed, the very name “Burning Man” might say “neo-pagan festival” to white people, but not to everyone else. “Hey, I have relatives from Louisiana to whom the words ‘burning man’ says something very different. We don’t talk about it much, but they make sure we’re all aware. That’s not a good image.”
(the ‘not wanting to camp’ perception is common in the comments in that thread too)
Thanks, a good article that manages to get at several of the reasons for lack of minority participation. It’s not so much that BM is directly exclusionary; it’s more that its culture is basically a white one, even if its participants don’t realize that (which is no surprise, given how clueless most whites are about how whiteness works in their own lives). This part also made a lot of sense:
Minority rebellion in the 60s saw itself as engaged in a project of claiming and reclaiming recognition as persons and as a People,” another minority non-burner said. “White rebellion didn’t need to do that: whites already had that recognition. They were concerned with expressing their individuality. It’s completely different.”
You can see it in the slogans. A civil rights slogan of the 60s: “I am a Man.”
The flower power slogan of the 60s: “Let your freak flag fly!”
It’s obvious how Burning Man resembles the second one; it’s not clear to me how it descends from the first.
Bit of a cart before the horse. Yes the purpose of the Reform movement in the 19th century was to act like the Christian majority in Germany and then the same later in the US. However assimilation into mainstream society was result 1 and being treated as white in the US is result 2.
In most of the rest of the world we are not “white” in the sense that it means in the US, we are still Jews. Of course in Germany and the rest of Europe in the first half of the 20th century we weren’t white either. In large part in Europe we still arent.
In the end, even the most assimilated Jew in the US is still regarded as a Jew at home or abroad. Assimilation worked but it also failed.
Sure, but the point is, why do we need race at all? It only serves to divide people for no reason; that’s why the concept exists. To have another way to say ‘us’ and ‘them’. We need more ways to say ‘us’ and less ‘them’.
You know I can do more than just post gifs, right?
Also…
Ask white people? Whites constructed race in the first place, and for many minorities, it became a defensive position that created a sense of community and safety in a world that was otherwise hostile to them. If you can figure out of a way of tearing down these walls that many people, on all sides of the issue still find useful for a number of reasons, we’re all ears… I honestly have nothing productive, because we can’t start to do that until we actually, finally work through the trauma the construction of race created in the first place.
“Saying that I’m obsessed with race and racism in America is like saying that I’m obsessed with swimming while I’m drowning. It’s absurd. I’m not the one who’s obsessed, this country is obsessed.”
Oh please. He was answering a question about demographics, which are by definition generalizations. Cultures are generalizations. Populations are generalizations. When talking about commonalities of experience it’s derailing to insist on constantly shifting focus to edge cases. Think of Confederate apologists saying “But some slaves were very well-treated!”
So much for sociology. I guess anthropologists ought to pack it in, too.
