Remember When Hiking Was Racist?
Flashbacks to 2020 while hiking in Hawaii
I’ve been in Hawaii this last week (one of my favorite destinations) ostensibly for a conference but mostly to be in Hawaii. Despite that I’ve been to Hawaii 6 times now, I’d never hiked to a water fall so this time decided to hike to Manoa Falls1, a popular hiking destination.
The Manoa Falls hike itself isn’t bad if you don’t mind walking uphill for about an hour. At the falls itself there’s a second trailhead for ‘Aihualama Trail which was rated as moderate in difficulty. This trail goes for an hour or so over Banyan tree roots, under fallen trunks, on treacherous, muddy ledges, etc. I finished it and the payoff view is amazing, but I did wonder if that was “moderate” what Hawaii considers a “difficult” hiking trail2. Should I expect a troll asking riddles three to allow me to pass?
Anyway, on the way down from the peak3 I happened to pass a gentleman on his way up. We had a brief exchange, which he initiated, as hikers do. It went something like:
Him, “Phew, almost there.”
Me, “Yep, you got it, not far now.”
Totally normal, throw-away pleasant exchange by two strangers enjoying a mutual, challenging activity. Probably we evolved to have these little social exchanges to signal friendliness and lack of aggressive intent. “I’m not invading your territory. It’s a muddy rainforest, you can have it!”
In this case, the gentleman in question happened to be black and I, of course, am Irish/Scottish/English white, though I do joke I’m the world’s tannest Irishman. To a sane person, this observation about our races is meaningless because “race” is dumb, we’re not defined by it, and race had nothing to do with our exchange.
It did remind me though of one of the sillier moments of the 2020+ race panic. For those who have forgotten, and God bless you if you have, some progressive activists (often white themselves) started to see white supremacy in literally everything. Including hiking.
Don’t take my word for it. News articles from the time say it pretty bluntly.
This 2021 article from CNN goes on at length about the “Whiteness” of national parks. A 2023 article by the Green Mountain Club talks about “decentering whiteness” in hiking. Pointing out that, you know…it’s outdoors and anybody could go there led to lectures about “privilege” because apparently all hikers lived pampered childhood lives with plenty of leisure time and money for gear4. And of course there were various videos, some humorous, but others legit complaining about “microaggressions” because white hikers were perceived as “too friendly” for having the exact sort of exchange that was initiated by my black colleague on the trail5.
Oddly enough, this wasn’t my first “reverse cliché” in Hawaii. On my last trip, an Asian woman stranger spontaneously asked me where I was from when we were both climbing Diamond Head. Naturally, I immediately reported her to the microaggression police.
These types of exchanges are absolutely normal and healthy. It’s human beings relating in superficial, sure, but friendly ways. Racism exists, sucks, and should be confronted when it occurs. But trying to turn ordinary, innocuous exchanges into insidious episodes about race was deeply unhealthy and neurotic.
I guess, sure, when someone asks, “Where are you from?” they could be motivated by deep racist instinct and a desire to make you feel unwelcome. Or maybe they’re making obvious small-talk. I have a suspicion which of these two assumptions that people may make are associated with better mental health.
This was always my concern about the 2020 race panic. It probably succeeded in the goal of getting people to think a lot more about race. But rather than bind people together, I suspect the outcome was to drive wedges between people based on really stupid criteria such as the color of their skin, the shape of their genitals, which God they worship, etc. And yes, with those doors opened, some on the right have predictably taken the invitation to talk about race more openly in order to spout disgusting examples of explicit racism (see the absurd case of Shiloh Hendrix).
Thank god the worst of that is behind us (I think6), though it lingers on in corners of the far-left and far-right. Maybe we should figure out how to let those two microgroups enjoy each others’ company and leave the rest of us to interact as human beings, however much melanin God may have given us.
As to my friend on the mountain, I hope you loved those views!
And, yes, I keep wanting to call it Moana Falls.
The AI picture doesn’t do it justice. It was narrower, without rocks underfoot, mainly, with steep drop offs, a lot of rough terrain. Most hikers on that trail didn’t have poles, but I’m also not sure how much they would have helped.
Which is Mount Tantalus, 1643 feet.
I, for one, did not.
It will surprise probably no one to also find articles complaining white hikers aren’t friendly enough.
I say this not because there aren’t both left and right spaces that continue to be hyper-neurotic about identity issues…of course that’s still the case…but the cultural cache of those movements are nowhere near what they were in 2020. Given the peaks of it’s power in 2020-2022, the collapse of the race moral panic has been surprisingly fast.