Aug 11 2008
Race on the Road: Where is the Diversity?
Bernie Mac and Isaac Hayes both died over the weekend. I liked Hayes in South Park, but I’ll be honest, I thought Bernie Mac’s comedy was irritating. Nonetheless, both did well in bringing more black faces to the small screen– the television industry’s chronic tokenization was embraced by both, then ruthlessly used to give them greater exposure and celebrity.
That’s one thing about living in an RV: most of the people we encounter at the parks are white. This probably has something to do with the longstanding (and not altogether untrue) belief among African Americans that there’s something inherently foolish about deliberately sleeping out of doors.
No matter where we’ve gone, from Arizona to Atlanta to Florida, the faces around us are predominantly white. I wonder if the lack of diversity is a function of the parks we’ve been to, or of the lifestyle itself. Certainly, we’re not in the urban centers, although we did stay terrifying close to Camden, New Jersey in June.
I suspect it’s due to the company, really. While our neighbors are friendly and helpful to us, I’ve found myself gritting my teeth and trying to think of a polite way to hold someone’s head underwater to get them to stop using “the n word” in a hot tub conversation. If I were contemplating going camping or even living the full-timer lifestyle, I would certainly think twice about uprooting myself from my own support network if I experienced that kind of welcome.
It does not speak well for the future fate of this nation when my overwhelming impression of our country is that too many people are too quick to judge others based on the colors of their skins. In addition to the “n word” guy, I’ve been told by some otherwise seemingly intelligent people that “the Cubans are all crooks, and you can’t understand them” (to which a quietly spoken “we speak Spanish” was enough to inform that, perhaps, we are not the people she mistook us for).
It may simply be an aspect of camping mostly in the South, as well, but I doubt it. We encountered “n word” guy, after all, in our own home town of Santa Cruz, California– a bastion of liberalism and tolerance (which is why I didn’t hold his head underwater in the hot tub).
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