Larry Harvey on Burning Man's diversity gap: 'Black folks don't like to camp as much as white folks'
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I think youāre confusing āneedā with āhave.ā We donāt āneedā to have race but we certainly have it, culturally and politically.
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Based on an extremely small sample size (Iām white and my wife is black so I really only know her family and a few other black folks.) Iād say the statement sounds true.
My wife (who is not a camper) has always joked that her people had to struggle too long and hard to get out of the fields to want to go back into them for the weekend.
On the other hand, itās always seemed that any given group of people dislikes when someone from outside that group makes sweeping generalizations about their group.
A lot of it seems to be that BM is a romantic ideal of society that is based on the ideals and feelings of identity that many white people have, and is based on an assumption that people will treat you well and be egalitarian if you take away a lot of the restricting forces of society. This is a narrative that has been directly contradicted many times throughout black history, up to and including the experiences of modern African Americans. Even those who preached equality often meant equality for other people, not them. So is a POC safe in BM? What could be acceptable for a white person as an expression of sexual freedom could be read as sexual aggression for a black person. Taking drugs can destroy black peopleās lives easier than it can with white people.
Thereās also a big difference between people who talk romantically about living in harmony with nature (as rich urban folk have done for centuries) and those whose history gives them this image of plantations rather than this one. A burning man is a very vivid image which is not likely to attract black people, given the historical associations with lynching that it could bring up.
Ultimately though, what can BM do to change this? A lot of this has to do with cultural associations with the principles and activities of BM, rather than problems with the group itself. Certainly people should be aware of the connotations for different people, but it looks like a lot of the problems are external to Burning Man, and have a lot to do with the continuing stratification of society. In the UK, free guided walks in the Lake District were almost cancelled because they predominantly attracted white middle class people. While it is worth looking at the reasons and finding ways to increase inclusiveness (including recognising less than egalitarian principles where they exist), there is a case for saying that certain activities are generally not as attractive to certain groups for different reasons, and thatās OK (or at least itās a wider cultural issue that individual organisations canāt hope to change by themselves). You can remove barriers and hopefully increase the diversity, but there are good things about many activities even if they arenāt universally popular.
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Nowhere is more white and middle class than the Lake District. Though itās the only place I know where you can still score for a proper pork chop with a slice of kidney still on it, so thereās that (Ambleside, if youāre interested).
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I sometimes think along those lines too, but then I think, 1) why do the white folks who make up just about any largely white activity have so much trouble seeing it AS a white activity? and 2) the whole point of the fiction that is whiteness has been dominance, exclusion, and resource extraction ā how could it be āokayā for anything to be overwhelmingly white?
And then I think that #2 goes a long way toward answering #1.
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This certainly wasnāt the case when I went there (every year it was on for a decade or more), I havenāt gone in recent years though so maybe it has changed (I stopped going mostly because the music has become increasingly commercial). The increase in ticket prices, and security changes, in particular not letting most of the crusties in any more, was skewing the demographic towards the middle class in the last few years I was there, but there were still plenty of black people.
Define āplenty,ā please.
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Surprisingly, I wasnāt keeping detailed notes. But it was certainly an over-representation compared to the demographics of the UK as a whole (only around 2-3%).
I think #1 is because white folk, in general, tend not to think very much about their own race in relation to other people, period (which is a big part of white privilege, the fact that white folks donāt generally HAVE to think about race if they donāt want to).
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I think the question of just why they donāt is more interesting, and important (so I would delete that period). Sure, itās a result of being a member of a majority, but thereās more to it. Willful amnesia, for starters.
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plentyā¦over-representationā¦ might there be better word choices available here?
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no, Iām happy with what I wrote.
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These are good points - Iām not really sure what would be a better way to look at it though. BM is something that white people like, and others seem to like less. On one level, thatās OK - not everything has to have universal appeal, and I donāt see BM as a universal good. I donāt think Iād be willing to spend much to go, although Iām glad itās around for other people. As for camping, the great outdoors is something that has been emphasised as a value in majority white cultures for some time, often to a greater extent than in other cultures where people donāt have the illusion of a benevolent nature (i.e. interaction with nature has a definite cultural and philosophical element). In the UK, public access to the countryside and knowledge of it was promoted both by the privileged and by workers, and has had a definite benefit for people of all classes. While inequalities need to be fought, I donāt want to see an empowering force eroded because not everyone takes advantage of it.
I guess rather than seeing it as a white activity, I would bear in mind that BM is not a microcosm of US society and generally only attracts a non-random subset of it. It was founded by white people, so it wouldnāt be that surprising if it became popular among social groups that do not represent the diversity of US society. The fact that US society is still often structured along ethnic lines is problematic, but it isnāt necessarily problematic that a group grew organically in a pre-existing social circle that is mostly white. Iād say it can be valid if black people are not going because it doesnāt appeal to them rather than because theyāre excluded; white people make cultural contributions too and they donāt necessarily need validation through uniform participation. Humility about the scope of your movement can be good; you can have high ideals about inclusiveness without thinking that you are the model for society and POC should drop whatever black things that theyāre doing and join you. While āwhitenessā has been an oppressive concept, white people come from various cultural backgrounds and are not the default - so they shouldnāt necessarily expect the things they do to be taken up by POC.
Where I do agree with you is that majority white activities are much more likely to be exclusionary and privileged, even if they claim otherwise. Our societies often have built-in biases, so itās easy to exclude people even with the best of intentions and certain barriers will have a greater effect on some groups than others.
Willful amnesia on the part of some people, sure. Straight up obliviousness on the part of (many?) others, though.
Sure, but the latter is the result of a collective effort that took the form of the former.
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The history of anthropology in the last 100 years has been largely defined by rooting out the white people who like to explain brown people without bothering to listen to them first. So, yeah, anthropology has had issues.
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And in the US, it still very much has those issues:
Anthropology departments collectively enact mainstream forms of race avoidance by not seeing racism, and by refusing to acknowledge that race matters in its practices. White anthropologists think their departments and universities are serious and effective in racial diversity efforts; that grievance procedures work; that their departments and schools took advantage of diversity incentives for minority students and that the overall racial climate is good. Racialized minorities disagree on all counts. The survey also asked two similar, multi-part questions about fairness in departmental relations. One question made no reference to race; the other asked explicitly about racial equity. We did the same thing with multipart questions about departmental support for advancement and promotion. On the general questions white faculty and students saw more fairness than did racialized minorities. And when the questions were phrased as about racial fairness, those differences were even sharper.
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Yes. Itās a white thing. A blithely white thing thatās actually problematic at its deeper core, which includes romanticizing of peopleās decimated at the hands of white supremacy. While at the same time overlooking those who originally occupied and now sentimentally represent the ānatureā such white people now miss and try to get back in touch with.
Not sure if youād disagree with me here, but my experienced understanding is that just about any gathering that attracts almost exclusively white people has at its core something less than innocent. Including the common white tendency to look for explanations in a way that actually presumes and pursues innocence, rather than that which is much more likely ā malevolence.
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