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You and your buddies are planning to go on your annual camping trip. It's something you start looking forward to pretty much the day after you return home from the previous years' camping trip. Campfires, marshmallow s'mores, hiking, kayaking, and sleeping under the stars is on tap for the next four days. You've been becoming good friends with Reggie, the one Black guy in your office. The campsite you're in has room for one more person, so you decide to ask him if he'd like to join. After promptly laughing in your face for five straight minutes, he politely tells you "hell to the no." It is at this point you ask:
Why do Black people never go camping?
I have two theories as to why white people love camping so much. First, white people like the challenge of being one with nature. They've spent so many centuries killing nature and removing themselves from it, that they now want to go back and show they can still coexist with it. My second theory is that camping allows white folks to show their continued dominance over nature: "I conquered you before, I can survive you again."
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On the flip side, ever since your days in Boy Scouts, you've known that Black people generally don't care for camping. Remember when the one Black kid in your troop would participate in every activity *except* camping? And that one time when his Mom raised hell with the Scoutmaster and said "my boy is NOT going out in them woods!"
Black people don't avoid camping because we don't like nature, contrary to popular belief. The reason we don't like to be out in nature is because we're tired of it. Our ancestors worked in the fields all damn day and, while they may not have slept in tents, they did sleep in shacks, often right on the ground. Once we gained our freedom, Black people said, "I's free! I's free! I'ma bilds me uh hahse, n I ain gon neva eva live aht in de naytcha no mo."
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Another thing, cities (major metropolitan areas, that is) are generally inhabited by two kinds of people: Black people and hipsters. In the city, we're used to just a few basic animals, mainly pigeons and squirrels. Anything else (cockroaches and mice not included) is scary and should be fled from or killed on site. I recall seeing an opossum outside my house in West Philly once, and, not knowing what it was, thought "oh my god! kill that thing! kill it!!" My point is, we don't deal well with the random animals that are in the woods. If I saw a fox, I wouldn't know what in the hell to do. A bear? Well, that would pretty much just be the end of me.
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