The Los Angeles Times reported today that
[o]nly about 1% of the nearly 4 million people who visit the national park each year are black, and the park system remains largely the province of whites. So officials were elated earlier this month when two groups of African Americans were touring Yosemite the same day.
Although at least one of the South Los Angeles ladies in one of those tour groups was disgruntled that her tour guide regaled them with stories of John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt, ignoring the black “Buffalo Soldiers,” the unusually diverse day at Yosemite seems to have been a success. No wonder park officials, who resemble college admissions officers in their desire for a “diverse” clientele, were elated. But maybe they should try even harder to emulate those diversity engineers on campus.
For more than 60 years, the National Park Service has been trying to reach out to African Americans and Latinos. But its 395 parks, monuments, waterways, historic places and recreational areas remain largely the province of white Americans and tourists from around the world.
In an interview, Park Service Director Jon Jarvis reiterated an old lament: Parks must attract a more diverse slice of the American public or eventually risk losing taxpayer support. Yet only about 1% of the nearly 4 million people who visit Yosemite each year are African Americans.
I would be interested in seeing Director Jarvis’s evidence (if he has any) that American taxpayers will cease to support the national parks if more (how many more?) minority visitors fail to visit them more often. But if he’s really convinced, perhaps he should emulate more than the attitudes and biases of college admissions officers.
For starters, he could lower the “barrier” to the admission of minorities by charging them less than whites (and Asians, unless, as is likely, they are already overrepresented among park visitors). As any random college admissions officers could tell him, colorblind entrance fees have a disproportionate and hence discriminatory impact on minorities — because minorities are disproportionately poor and come from families without a history of park attendance. Perhaps buses from center cities could also be arranged, in the same manner they were once used (and would still be used, but for a conservative majority on the Supreme Court) to provide racial balance diversity to schools in need of it.
If Director Jarvis is as serious about promoting diversity in the national parks as college admissions officials are about promoting it on campus, he’ll have to follow their example more closely and stop treating all park visitors equally.
