People of color enjoying outdoor activities such as skiing, hiking, and camping are an exception rather than the rule, and this has troubled a University of Toronto doctoral researcher.
According to the National Post, Jacqueline Scott calls this disparity an “adventure gap,” and she is investigating it for her doctorate in — you guessed it — social justice education.
“There is a sense that the outdoors is a white space, that people of colour don’t belong in that space,” Scott said in an interview. “People of colour want to do it, but they need a bridge to get them there.”
A lover of the outdoors herself, Scott says this “adventure gap” goes beyond just economics and logistics (like the cost of skiing and getting to a good locale); there’s also “somehow” a cultural element:
“In the ski world blacks are as rare as a unicorn,” she writes in a paper for the Congress [of the Humanities and Social Sciences in Regina]. “Traditional theories of constraints, that explain black under- representation in outdoor leisure activities, are only part of the answer when applied to skiing. One needs to look at how skiing is racialized as a white space where black people are out of place. And as skiing takes place outdoors, in winter, the season and the landscape are also racialized. Thus, black women who ski face a triple racialization due to the perceptions of race, the landscape and the activity.”
Though non-whites can easily access the wooded ravines surrounding Toronto, Scott says “there’s something about [them] where they get a consistent message that we don’t belong there.”
Apparently the only “message” is that … there’s a lot of white people there!
If we were talking about the country to the south, Scott might better understand this feeling. After all, she says, blacks there were lynched in wooded areas in the United States. But in Canada?
She sees the problem as one of marketing, which she dubs (and is sure to make her social justice education professors extremely proud) “visual apartheid.”
“People of colour, we’re 50% of the city’s population. But you take a look at any outdoor advertising, you don’t see us,” she said. “Look in the outdoor catalogue, you don’t see us. Look at outdoor recreation in general, you don’t see us. So for me, it’s like, what is it about that outside, that space, that says that people of colour do not come.”
Perhaps Scott could call this being “a prisoner of marketing inertia.”
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