SEGREGATED CAMPING
Ogged [Umm, actually, it was Bob. –ed.] went camping in Colorado and was struck by an eerie realization: He was the only non-white person out there.
I know Denver’s somewhat diverse, but Colorado in general isn’t. I flew back from Denver via Atlanta, and my layover felt almost exactly like my layover at Heathrow when I flew back to the States from Copenhagen (also my layover in Paris when I flew back from Vienna): the sudden visual rush of skin colors, accents, and clothing styles brought home how powerful a force the air-travel industry is in mixing worlds together into new worlds. (For the opposite effect, fly from San Francisco through Salt Lake to Chicago.)
My question: why are camping and hiking such white-person activities? At visitor centers and short, paved trails, I saw many people of color. Not so on the longer or rougher trails. And I’d bet money I was the only nonwhite person in our large campground.
For years, there has been a running joke among many African American comics that you only see white people in horror movies because, well, black people would simply move at the first sign of a homicidal ghost. Maybe it just doesn’t occur to black people who have worked hard to afford a home and a car that, “Hey, wouldn’t it be fun to trek out to the boonies and walk a long way and then sleep out in the rain among the snakes and bugs!”
Thanks for the link, but it was Bob, not me, who went camping.
D’oh.
The last time I went to the movies there was a preview for an Eddie Murphy haunted house flick (it may be comic horror, it was hard to tell). But it reminded me that his first(?) record had a bit on it about how Amyityville Horror would have been a really short movie if blacks had bought the house because they’d have skedaddled right out for good at the first ghostly voice saying, “Get out!” I found it amusing that he, of all people, was making a movie about a family of blacks who clearly don’t do so.
Amusing. I wasn’t even aware that such a movie existed, although I do indeed remember that old bit. Variations of that theme have been used by many comics since, and perhaps before.
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