Idk it’s probably cultural. Most non white people in the US have very little experience with stuff like camping and bonfires(there will of course always be exceptions). So usually if you are at a fire and there’s a mixed race group hanging out, 90% of the time the guy fiddling with the fire will be white.
You’re right. It’s a known issue. It’s predominantly white people going out and enjoying nature, for multiple reasons.
Public forests offer a variety of outdoor recreation activities that enhance participants’ well-being, yet participation remains low among ethnic minorities in the United States. These groups face multiple barriers, including limited information, transportation and financial constraints, safety concerns, fear of discrimination, and wildlife-related anxieties, which are often shaped by broader structural and cultural contexts.
Thanks for sharing. I think it’s funny that anecdotes of my lived experience as a brown person gets downvotes, but you sharing an academic paper supporting my lived experience gets up votes.
I wonder if we’re primed to be less likely to interpret statements about people of colour to be personal experiences, because most of the voices we hear are white.
That’s actually a great question. Here I was thinking I made a mistake not announcing myself as a brown man, but why do we assume all speakers are white unless otherwise specified?
I think the Americans who know most about campfires should be Native Americans. It’s not fair that white people are getting to spend more time with the land they stole.
Use of campfires should be solely informed by personal interest and cultural ties to use of fire. If there were no systemic barriers, it would be down to cultural factors.
It should be like with tacos. Tacos are cheap and easy to make, so nearly everyone can enjoy tacos. With the barriers removed, tacos are most eaten by Mexican people, because tacos are Mexican culture. That’s fair.
Couldn’t you light a fire in a garden, park or beach? Even those shitty disposable BBQs are a form of fire, though I would recommend using almost anything else if possible.
I think this post is just observing stereotypes about camping overall that are really just a reflection of the historical cultural imagination about who camping is for. It’s not really as true as we think it is, because this tendency has been present among black folks and hispanic folks, and asian folks and women and everyone else who have been camping all along, they’re just not featured in film and TV often.
Nothing in the modern context, but 10000 years ago. If you were a black African and your fire went out, your food might not het cooked or that predator might take a chance to grab one of the kids.
If you were a white person in northern europe, your fire going out meant that everyone froze solid overnight.
Fire was just more essential in climates that developed white skins. Socially and genetically, that has an impact on behaviour.
That shit is way too niche to have evolved at a stronger pressure than random genetic drift. If you could isolate cultural factors and analyse the genetic correlation, I bet your R^2 would be miniscule
Genetic behavioural changes is a fascinating topic and the more studies that come out on it, the faster it seems to be able to act to have an effect
Just look at how quickly agriculture changes human societies living in the right conditions to practice it.
We are talking thousands of years, not even tens of thousands of years, or hundreds of thousands.
Given any factor that is core to survival, there seems to be a genetic impact much more quickly than previously thought. It does have its limits of course, we are not talking something with a measurable effect over 3 or 4 generations, but 30-40 generations seems to be possible in some cases.
Maybe the village fire keeper was a lot more reproductively popular that we previously thought.
What’s skin colour got to do with it?
Americans…
Nothing.
The black men who do this know they are the white guys of their family.
What’s skin colour got to do with it?
Idk it’s probably cultural. Most non white people in the US have very little experience with stuff like camping and bonfires(there will of course always be exceptions). So usually if you are at a fire and there’s a mixed race group hanging out, 90% of the time the guy fiddling with the fire will be white.
You’re right. It’s a known issue. It’s predominantly white people going out and enjoying nature, for multiple reasons.
Source
Thanks for sharing. I think it’s funny that anecdotes of my lived experience as a brown person gets downvotes, but you sharing an academic paper supporting my lived experience gets up votes.
Your comment didn’t read like own experience fyi, it reads like some random claim
Not that comments explicit about experiences don’t get downvoted still
I wonder if we’re primed to be less likely to interpret statements about people of colour to be personal experiences, because most of the voices we hear are white.
That’s a good idea for a psychology experiment…
That’s actually a great question. Here I was thinking I made a mistake not announcing myself as a brown man, but why do we assume all speakers are white unless otherwise specified?
I think the Americans who know most about campfires should be Native Americans. It’s not fair that white people are getting to spend more time with the land they stole.
Use of campfires should be solely informed by personal interest and cultural ties to use of fire. If there were no systemic barriers, it would be down to cultural factors.
It should be like with tacos. Tacos are cheap and easy to make, so nearly everyone can enjoy tacos. With the barriers removed, tacos are most eaten by Mexican people, because tacos are Mexican culture. That’s fair.
Couldn’t you light a fire in a garden, park or beach? Even those shitty disposable BBQs are a form of fire, though I would recommend using almost anything else if possible.
n a t i v e a m e r i c a n s … o. O
Americans make everything racially charged.
I think this post is just observing stereotypes about camping overall that are really just a reflection of the historical cultural imagination about who camping is for. It’s not really as true as we think it is, because this tendency has been present among black folks and hispanic folks, and asian folks and women and everyone else who have been camping all along, they’re just not featured in film and TV often.
We northern ethnics relied on fire probably a bit more due to colder climate, shorter days in winter.
Nothing in the modern context, but 10000 years ago. If you were a black African and your fire went out, your food might not het cooked or that predator might take a chance to grab one of the kids.
If you were a white person in northern europe, your fire going out meant that everyone froze solid overnight.
Fire was just more essential in climates that developed white skins. Socially and genetically, that has an impact on behaviour.
That shit is way too niche to have evolved at a stronger pressure than random genetic drift. If you could isolate cultural factors and analyse the genetic correlation, I bet your R^2 would be miniscule
Genetic behavioural changes is a fascinating topic and the more studies that come out on it, the faster it seems to be able to act to have an effect
Just look at how quickly agriculture changes human societies living in the right conditions to practice it.
We are talking thousands of years, not even tens of thousands of years, or hundreds of thousands.
Given any factor that is core to survival, there seems to be a genetic impact much more quickly than previously thought. It does have its limits of course, we are not talking something with a measurable effect over 3 or 4 generations, but 30-40 generations seems to be possible in some cases.
Maybe the village fire keeper was a lot more reproductively popular that we previously thought.