I can see why there's a push to eliminate Greek life given all the unfortunate events associated with it. But I'm extremely confused this example:
> One such case was the end of Outdoor House, an innocuous haven on the far side of campus for students who liked hiking. The official explanation from Stanford for eliminating the house was that the Outdoor theme “fell short of diversity, equity and inclusion expectations.”
They can't even organize around a common interest unless it passes some bureaucrat's standard of diversity?
I've seen a quiet but persistent thought pattern that outdoor / nature activities- hiking, camping, etc- are endemically white and that any attempt to organize around it without making overt, aggressive attempts to include minorities is a sign of white supremacy.
This is the main thrust of the "anti-racist" movement. If you aren't talking about being inclusive in every aspect of any social interaction you partake in, you are automatically racist. Just wanting to be around other people who like hiking and camping makes you a white supremacist.
Nature activities are "endemically white"? Is this a serious comment?
Even if we buy into the ridiculous naturalistic fallacy here, it's completely ahistorical: our modern history is primarily the history of white countries colonizing and industrializing nonwhite countries and alienating them from nature in the process. Suburban white America is arguably even more alienated from nature than city dwellers, in its redefinition of "nature" to be curated dogwalking trails and monoculture lawns.
This is so ridiculous. I spend a lot of time hiking the mountains around LA. White people are not a majority and I'm not even sure a plurality. I'm not Latino but still somehow wound up in a mostly Latino hiking club. I hear so many different languages on the trail. I see people of every ethnicity.
This really could be as simple as minorities tend to be more working class, and don't have the wherewithal for a big road trip to the national parks. But put hiking trails near their communities, and they utilize the heck out of them.
Some of these are paywalled but I don't see where the ones that aren't support the claim re: hiking that "...any attempt to organize around it without making overt, aggressive attempts to include minorities is a sign of white supremacy"
Observing that, say, parks are being patronized by certain demographics is far from condemning those parkgoers as white supremacist.
The only bits you link about white supremacy seem to be about climate change which has a whole different angle (marginalized communities being first in line for ill effects in many areas) and isn't particularly relevant to the original claim here.
> Observing that, say, parks are being patronized by certain demographics is far from condemning those parkgoers as white supremacist.
I suspect that this is the point GP was trying to make. A criticism of anti-racism I've encountered many times is that most arguments for something (e.g. parks) being racist or white supremacist are unfalsifiable and based solely on a specific demographic outcome (e.g. national park visitors are disproportionately white) while ignoring other factors.
>The URGC also wrote that Outdoor House should pursue “meaningful engagement with faculty and staff in the important areas of equity and inclusion to more fully address the cultural concerns of the previous outdoor house that you included so explicitly in your application.” The house’s theme applicants focused on shifting its framework to address issues inherent in centering a house around outdoor culture — a traditionally white and wealthy space. In a Letter to the Community, Outdoor House community members wrote that “Centered on expensive hobbies, the house has not shown enough regard to the people we exclude, the land we recreate on, or perspectives outside the mainstream interpretation of outdoor recreation.”
> Suburban white America is arguably even more alienated from nature than city dwellers.
I doubt that. Suburban people are more likely to have cars, making it easier to get to get to more natural places.
For nature activities that need equipment I would expect suburban people are more likely to own such equipment because they have bigger houses with more room to keep things. City people are more likely to need to rent such things, adding more hassle to getting away to nature.
Leaving aside the inanity of zdragnar's broad-bush painting of "anti-racism," it's worth noting here that this is somewhat falling victim to some historical propaganda of other races being "inferior" - e.g. "we're bringing civilization to the savages."
There were pretty substantial urban civilizations in Central America and around the Indian Ocean that Europeans (Portugal, first, I believe) waged war on early in the colonial era for reasons like religion, prior to industrialization, and this had a lot to do with shifting the economic center of gravity of the world to Europe from Asia in the first place.
(At a meta-level, this is the sort of thing - pointing out bits of history that often get left out of Euro-centric history lessons in the US - that my understanding of "anti-racist" would include; not stopping attendance in a hiking club... any school administrator who believes a hiking club couldn't be compatible with diversity is wrong... but the existence of wrong people who think they're fighting racism is not the same thing as it being wrong to fight racism.)
You're completely right, which is why I took pains to avoid the word "civilizing." Colonization created an industrial base in its victim countries not as an end in itself, but as a means towards wealth extraction.
Yeah, in that case the nit I'm picking is just that it started a few hundred years prior to industrializing in the name of religious conversion + greed even without any ability to bring meaningful technological quality of life changes.
(It's a fun way to back yourself into being pro-military-spending, this history... the technological advantage of the Europeans was really just in military tech, because the continent had been far more war-ridden than the states involved in the more-recently-quite-peaceful trade around the ocean. And so if you don't have the weapons, you might get screwed by another country that does.)
OP's referring (I think) to how black people in the USA were discouraged from "white" recreational activities like camping, hiking, skiing, and beach-going.
(FWIW, back in high school a black friend of mine explained to me one day that black people don't go skiing, etc., because their lives are so dangerous already that it doesn't make sense to go do dangerous things for entertainment. It kind of blew my mind.)
The financial aspect seems much more plausible. I have to imagine that for skiing in particular, the most likely demographics are going to be whoever happens to grow up near mountains and have very high amounts of disposable income... not just for the equipment, but also to take the financial risk of recovery in the U.S. We could maybe afford some second hand cross-country skis, but we didn't live near mountains either so it didn't seem that interesting.
I forgot to add here that if danger itself was the factor, you probably wouldn't see many black skateboarders, but you do, and causally or not skateboarding isn't on the same level of cost as skiing
Skateboarding too. When I was a kid black skateboarders were hella rare. To the point where today when I see a black kid skating I think, "Hey! We're making progress!"
I just did an image search for "skateboarding" and every skater on the first three pages (that's as fer as I looked) was white, except for one who was a bulldog.
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Not to spell it out, but the "danger" my friend was talking about wasn't just the danger of the sport itself. It was also the danger of getting beaten, robbed, or killed for being black. Black Americans published a guidebook for themselves the Green Book, to help each other avoid violence at the hands of racists.
Ya I maybe didn't consider that last bit in cintext with a different time as much, but if it's logically sound, then more black people in those various disciplines would probably signal some amount of progress.
Idk how much a google search of anything is all that representative of the demographic, or for that matter any media algorithm's results. Except for the bulldog, that's legit, they love skating for some reason. Presumably those results would be informed by a number of factors.
In my local spot, for sure I know a fair number of white people, but there's just as many if not more people of different apparent visual characteristics. Very diverse no natter how you cut it, gender, ethnicity, income level, sexual orientation, skill level, age, fashion sense
Take a skim through this video that includes those spots if you're curious, though admittedly it's somewhat specific to the city
>unless it passes some bureaucrat's standard of diversity?
That is what was said, but not why the school is attacking student organizations. Any student organization presents a liability to the school. An outdoor club, something with the schools name on it where student go out and teach each other how to ski on glaciers or climb rocks? The schools are listening to their lawyers, their insurance schemes. They are against any and all groups that operate without direct school management.
I was a member of the VOC, UBC's outdoor club and an organization that predates the school itself. Every year I am surprised that the school hasn't moved to to shut them down.
The lawyers part... that's a broader issue with how the American legal system is intentionally adversarial.
The parents part... that could be changed more easily, but reducing risk is absolutely what they're pushing for currently.
So, short of not depending on parents' money... which is of course tough at an expensive private school, but also even tough at public schools that are no longer even close to as affordable as they used to be too... what ya gonna do?
I don’t think so. Stanford has several suicides a year. Any theoretical liability from and outdoor accident is a rounding error on their total liability for student deaths, morbid though it is.
The consequences to the university of being labeled a white supremacist institution would be far greater than a few student deaths per year. Stanford’s reputation would never recover, if that label adhered. The university would shrink to nothing and vanish. Not one whiff of a hint of liability to being labeled racist in favor of white people can be tolerated. If that means a total ban on supporting outdoorsmanship, so be it. The university survives.
For that reason, fighting white supremacy is the keys to the kingdom for despot administrators, and the definition of white supremacy is undergoing an accelerating expansion that will soon extend past the edges of the universe.
>They can't even organize around a common interest unless it passes some bureaucrat's standard of diversity?
At what point do we admit that the people who cried slippery slope and said this power would just be used as a cudgel for their bureaucrats to enforce whims they could not otherwise justify were right?
Have the narratives that would permit swinging back completely paralyzed the students who would want to swing back, along with those who are in control? If so, we are probably 2 generations away.
Long-gone graduates mourn the loss, but I think the student body is cloaked in the righteousness of their culture-less confinement.
> They can't even organize around a common interest unless it passes some bureaucrat's standard of diversity?
It depends upon how the members behave, rather than the common interest they are supposedly organized around. I remember student organizations from my days on campus that sensible students wouldn't associate themselves with. The stated interest may have been some form of outdoor activity, but they were better known for their hard partying. Hard partying being an euphemism in this case. They would fall short of diversity, equity, and inclusion since their riskier activities (activities that had nothing to do with their stated purpose) would drive away those who weren't interested, couldn't afford to take the risk, or were the target of the risk.
For those who think it is worse today than it was 25 years ago, I somehow doubt it. Though, perhaps, that doubt is borne from a hope that it isn't any worse. Crimes as extreme as sexual assault were real, and that was at a time when something that should be taken seriously was taken less seriously. Then there was the common stuff such as vandalism and other property crimes. It happened then and it happens now.
The article makes it sound like the university is being far too heavy handed in its treatment of these student organizations. Perhaps they are. On the other hand, the author is ignoring some of the darker aspects of student life.
(I also cringe at the use of student life in this discussion since a good portion of students, if not the vast majority, avoided it because they knew it was wrong.)
> One such case was the end of Outdoor House, an innocuous haven on the far side of campus for students who liked hiking. The official explanation from Stanford for eliminating the house was that the Outdoor theme “fell short of diversity, equity and inclusion expectations.”
They can't even organize around a common interest unless it passes some bureaucrat's standard of diversity?