Black Skiing, Everyday Racism, and the Racial Spatiality of Whiteness

Journal of Sport and Social Issues37(4) 315 –339

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Focus: Everyday Racism

Black Skiing, Everyday Racism, and the Racial Spatiality of Whiteness

Anthony Kwame Harrison1

AbstractThis article examines how structural and symbolic forces combine to produce racialized discourses of belonging and geographies of exclusion in and around downhill skiing. Drawing from literatures in Whiteness studies, sports sociology, leisure studies, and environmental history, I advance the concept of racial spatiality to illustrate how processes of everyday racism work to secure skiing’s social spaces as predominantly White, thereby restricting the participation and representation of Black skiers. Skiing’s hegemony of Whiteness is discussed in relation to parallel integration strategies of Black ski organizations, racialized representations of extreme skiing and snowboarding, and exclusionary residential development tactics. As a provisional effort to promote research on racism and leisure–sports–tourism, I argue that skiing offers a valuable site for considering the ongoing and overlooked saliencies of race and racial segregation in America.

Keywordsskiing, everyday racism, Whiteness, racial spatiality

Introduction

More than 30 years ago, in a wonderful and still remarkably relevant article on African Americans’ participation in sports, sociologist Harry Edwards (1979) explained that the high visibility of Black athletes in a handful of popular sports had obscured “the fact that virtually all other American sports remain largely segregated and lily white” (p. 117). Since that time, of course, Tiger Woods has become the most well-known athlete in the traditionally White-dominated world of golf; Venus and Serena Williams

1Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, USA

Corresponding Author:Anthony Kwame Harrison, Department of Sociology, Virginia Tech, 560 McBryde Hall (0137), Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA. Email: [email protected]

498607 JSS37410.1177/0193723513498607Journal of Sport and Social IssuesHarrisonresearch-article2013

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have reached comparable acclaim in the majority-White sport of tennis; and, at a less spectacular level, Black athletes like Lewis Hamilton and Bill Lester in motor racing, and Grant Fuhr and Jarome Iginla in ice hockey have made inroads into other previ-ously “all-White” sports. These achievements deserve celebration, especially if one subscribes to the belief that such success and visibility in historically White sports reflects African Americans’ improving racial status. Yet a critical inspection of those athletic fields which have remained, for all intents and purposes, “closed” to Black people reveals new avenues to understanding and appreciating the ongoing salience of race, everyday racism, and exclusionary geographies in American society.

This article examines one such arena. In 2002, former SKI Magazine editor Hal Clifford (2002) described downhill skiing as the “whitest and least integrated popular sport in America” (p. 20). This characterization endures despite five decades in which African American ski organizations like the National Brotherhood of Skiers (NBS)—an umbrella group for more than 80 local Black ski clubs throughout the United States—have poured considerable energies toward promoting Black people skiing. A survey of articles published in Skiing magazine between 1993 and 2010 failed to pro-duce a single piece dedicated to African American skiing, despite having articles deal-ing with: disabled skiing (see, for example, D. White, 1994; Danziger, 1994), gay skiing (Taylor, 2000), skiing in Africa (Finkel, 1995), and skiing in Detroit (Glass, 2001)—sometimes described as “America’s Blackest city”—and “Puerto Rico’s Fastest Skier” (Tuff, 2003). The closest qualifiers include a 2009 piece on Jamaica’s first-ever ski team which, although mentioning that each of the two (non-Jamaican) skiers had one Jamaican parent, made no reference to race (Bastone, 2009); and a 2007 “journal of the absurd” report describing how U.S. ski coaches locked Ghanaian Olympic ski team hopefuls in freezers as part of a training regiment (“Welcome to our sport,” 2007). In the 2000 book Snow Business, where Simon Hudson (2000) explains that the North American ski industry is attempting to “tap into the 35 million [people] whose demographic profiles make them potential skiers” (p. 151), he limits his skier “consumer profile” to the sociological categories of gender, age, income, education, occupation, and other interests (p. 65; see also Williams & Basford, 1992). The ques-tion of the potential skier’s race is never considered.

Here I argue that, in addition to specific structural constraints typically used to explain Black underrepresentation in skiing, there are powerful symbolic forces which work to define and maintain skiing and its associated social spaces as essentially White. As an arena of both sports and leisure tourism (Hinch, Jackson, Hudson, & Walker, 2005), the discourses surrounding skiing’s all-White imagery range from residual scientific racialism regarding body types and essential differences to exclu-sionary tactics utilized in managing residential communities. This article examines several of these racializing discourses as an initial effort to encourage and promote research on the nexus of skiing, racism, and leisure tourism. By spotlighting the every-day mechanisms of racial exclusion that sustain skiing’s Whiteness, I illustrate the ways in which social power and, by extension, social inequality get exercised through familiar and routine practices of defining and defending social space.

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Examining the racialized construction of skiing illuminates the less-formal, less-direct, and less-obvious ways in which discourses surrounding race and, what I am calling, racial spatiality shape society in general and restrict the options available to African Americans and other racially marginalized groups in particular. My focus on alpine skiing follows from prior research on race and leisure activities (e.g., Harrison, Lee, & Belcher, 1999; Shinew & Floyd, 2005; Washburne, 1978; Woodard, 1988). Racial spatiality is founded on the perception that certain racialized bodies are expected to occupy certain social spaces and, complimentarily, that the presence of other bodies creates social disruption, moral unbalance, and/or demands explanation (Carter, 2008). Because such perceptions exist at the level of ideology, and not social structure, their exclusionary functions are especially hidden and enduring. As such, power remains cloaked behind what Charles Mills (1997) refers to as an epistemology of ignorance—that is, a pervasive, evasive, and self-deceptive (mis)understanding of social phenom-ena that allows for the cognitive and moral delusions necessary for rationalizing historical and contemporary subjugation (p. 19); or, perhaps, the recognition of inequal-ity gets subsumed under a sense of ideological cynicism (Zizek, 1989) where people have some awareness of what’s going on but only acknowledge it in exceptional instances, choosing to otherwise participate in it uncritically (Harris, 2013, p. 12).

My conception of racial spatiality draws on David Sibley’s (1995) ideas regarding geographies of exclusion. Starting from the premise that many contemporary “social problems can be profitably spatialized” (xv), Sibley proposes examining the “assump-tions about inclusion and exclusion which are implicit in the design of spaces and places” (x). His focus, which incorporates cultural symbols, patterns of everyday life, and prevailing myths, effectively exposes how power is exercised and epistemic igno-rance is marshaled in the defense of social space. In the case of skiing, sociospatial exclusions function to maintain a prevailing, yet shrinking, core American Whiteness.

The lack of attention to racial diversity in skiing is notable considering the integra-tionist efforts of Black ski clubs (G. Lee, 2006) and the logic that attracting more ski-ers of any race would seem to make good business sense. Since reaching a peak in popularity during the seventies and eighties, numbers of skiers steadily decreased through the nineties and beyond. Common explanations for skiing’s decline include the emergence of snowboarding (Cravatta, 1997; Makens, 2001), the rise of other leisure-time pursuits (Clifford, 2002), and global warming (Hudson, 2003). As a mul-tibillion-dollar industry, skiing’s downward slide is taken seriously and often dis-cussed (see, for example, Clifford, 2002; Fry, 2006; Hudson, 2000).

Skiing participation is regulated by economic factors and cultural recreational preferences—both of which are affected by and have implications for notions of racial difference. In 1957, Gary Becker (1957/1971) famously proposed that a “taste for discrimination” was unprofitable. Becker’s hypothesis that “discrimination . . . should be less in competitive industries” (p. 159) would seem applicable to popular team sports where most coaches, owners, and general managers long ago learned that integration produces better teams. Similarly, one might ask why a struggling busi-nessperson, intent on staying in business, would turn away the potential revenues


from a specific class of consumers. Of course, we know this takes place. Even in the post-Civil Rights era there are countless reports of, for instance, Black customers being treated badly when shopping outside of Black neighborhoods (Austin, 1994; J. Lee, 2000). The arena of downhill skiing offers a revealing comparison to retail in that the failure of Black people to participate in skiing in any great numbers would (initially at least) appear to have more to do with cultural preference than unfavorable treatment. As a result, accounts of racial discrimination in skiing are compara-tively rare.

Whiteness and the Sociology of Sports

My examination of racial spatiality in skiing draws from developments in the aca-demic literature on Whiteness and the sociology of sports. Whiteness studies emerged at the close of the 20th century through a constellation of historical, sociological, and critical scholarship which sought to locate the normative White subject and experience along axes of social power. This occurred in the context of demographic concerns about the United States becoming a majority-minority nation (Chideya, 1999), which spotlighted “white” as a distinct racial category, and third wave-feminist challenges over the exclusion of perspectives from women of color (Collins, 1990). Indeed, sev-eral of the earliest recognized efforts in Whiteness studies came from feminist scholars (see, for example, Frankenberg, 1993; McIntosh, 1988). In addition to feminism, some of the main tributaries feeding this interdisciplinary stream included historical and legal studies exposing the construction and maintenance of Whiteness, most notably in the project of American nation-building (Allen, 1994; Jacobson, 1998; López, 1996; Roediger, 1991); sociological work demonstrating the existence of White racial atti-tudes and continuations of race-based privileges (Bonilla-Silva, 2003; Lipsitz, 1998); and scholarship targeting how Whiteness is performed, malleable, and intersects with other identity loci (Hartigan, 1999; Hughey, 2012; Kincheloe & Steinberg, 1998).

Melissa D. Hargrove (2009) identifies Whiteness as “the foundational support sys-tem for the origins and longevity of the political economy of racism” (p. 95) and the systematic management of a collective advantage framed through race. Indeed, a cru-cial component of accessing the privileges of Whiteness, as Dianne Harris (2013) astutely points out, is the “desire to assimilate and blend—to become white” (p. 18). Illustrating what he referred to as the alchemy of race, Matthew Fry Jacobson (1998) outlined the processes by which many one-time non-White groups, through different historical periods, were able to win their way to Whiteness. Group-specific case stud-ies have focused on the Irish (Ignatiev, 2008), Italians (Alba, 1990), Jews (Brodkin, 1998), and even Mississippi Chinese (Loewen, 1988). Jonathan W. Warren and France Winddance Twine (1997) persuasively show the extent to which aligning with Whiteness concurrently involved an aversion to Blackness. Whether through socio-economic gains and/or by adopting mainstream American values and practices, an investment in Whiteness functioned as an adhesive that symbolically bound one-time ethnic “others” to institutional and structural arrangements that sought to maintain social and cultural privilege. Yet, Whiteness, according to George Lipsitz (2011), “is

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not so much a color as a condition” (p. 3), which is also affected by class, gender, sexuality, and place of origin (Low, 2009). White people alone do not command all the resources and privileges associated with Whiteness; however, their gate-keeping func-tions to determine the manner in which non-White people will get to share in them (Page & Thomas, 1994).

By drawing attention to the nexus of Whiteness and privilege, critical race scholars unsettle normative understandings of White racial identity as neutral and advance the perspective that Whiteness operates as a force in actualizing and extending social inequality through everyday modes of exclusion. Philenoma Essed (1991) introduced the concept of everyday racism to describe

the integration of racism into everyday situations through practices . . . that activate underlying power relations . . . [and become] part of the expected, of the unquestionable, and of what is seen as normal by the dominant group. (p. 50)

Accordingly, Mills (1997) observes that “[r]acism and racially structured discrimina-tion have not been deviations from the norm; they have been the norm” (p. 93, empha-sis original).

Whereas sports is commonly upheld as a meritocratic social arena in which other-wise disadvantaged groups can excel, sports sociologists have focused on stratified access to particular sports activities and the degree to which sports is characterized by the same racist social relations which dominate other aspects of society. Sportscapes exist as key sites where struggles over racial identity and national consciousness take place. Pierre Bourdieu’s (1978) notion of cultural capital has influenced sports soci-ologists to consider the distinct histories, meanings, and conscious and unconscious orientations which draw particular groups toward certain sports activities. Bourdieu-an approaches have been used to examine sports participation through lenses of gender (Kay & Laberge, 2004; Mennesson, 2002), class (Wacquant, 2004; Wilson, 2002), and race (Andrews, Pitter, Zwick, & Ambrose, 1997).

Within the context of Whiteness studies’ arrival, as well as increasing anxieties over the disappearing White athlete (Kusz, 2001), sociological research on race and sports began expanding beyond a focus on Black athletes and racially marked “others” to include more emphasis on the role of White privilege in shaping sports fields (Long & Hylton, 2002). The realization that examining Whiteness, in its many forms, was integral to understanding racism in sports signaled an important shift in sports sociol-ogy from viewing race as a static identity classification to treating it as a product of complex processes of social identification (see Brayton, 2005; Spencer, 2004). Recently, scholars have turned their attention to White power—conceptualized as “a constellation of ideologies, a series of sociohistorical formations, an ordering princi-ple, and a specific set of structures”—as a means to more explicitly target the political nature of racial authority and inequality in sports (King, Leonard, & Kusz, 2007).

Sports sociologists have also returned to the theories of cultural geographers like Henri Lefebvre (1991) and John Bale (1994) to address how social relations enacted through sports are spatially practiced and represented (Fusco, 2005; van Ingen,


2003). Some of these works argue that sports and leisure fields should be read as dynamic spaces of resistance (Carrington, 1998; van Ingen, 2004); others focus on the production and maintenance of ongoing power relations. Drawing on Bale’s (1994) ideas regarding the imposition of gendered, classed, and racialized order onto physical landscapes, Caroline Fusco (2005) emphasized the confluences of architec-tural principles and racism in generating recreational sports spaces in which other-ness could be easily identified and evicted (pp. 286, 304). Comparatively, Kyle Kusz’s (2004) research on extreme lifestyle sports highlights how the mythologized and racialized construction of the American frontier (see DeLuca & Demo, 2001) provides White males with a refuge from multicultural politics and accusations of privilege.

The extreme edge of skiing (as discussed below) fits within Kusz’s model as a risk-seeking response to the crisis of White masculinity (see also Stoddart, 2012), yet the leisure-tourist appeal of skiing is also defined by Whiteness. Sibley (1995) reminds us that, even in the daily routines of life, “most people are not conscious of domination and [accordingly] the sociospatial system is reproduced with little challenge” (p. 76). The virtual absence of racial diversity within skiing’s perceived and/or conceived spaces of practice leave little opportunity for challenges to its predominant “white spatial imaginary” as a controlled environment of capital accumulation and individual escape (Lipsitz, 2011). Yet, in agreement with Harris (2013), I maintain that the absence of racially diverse representations in a field often “speaks remarkably loudly, once we begin to look and read more carefully” (p. 15).

Explaining Black Participation in Skiing

African American participation in skiing is affected by structural and symbolic forces. Although everyday rationalizations for why few Black people ski tend to priv-ilege the former (social structure), my attention to how power operates in shaping skiing’s racial spatiality emphasizes the complimentarity of social institutions, pat-terned behaviors, and the meanings associated with skiing’s rural recreational setting. A common explanation for why Black people do not ski in greater numbers posits that the cost of skiing (including ski equipment, lift tickets, getting to the mountain, and staying at the resort) is too expensive for the majority of Black Americans who, according to virtually all measures, on the whole remain an economically subordinate racial group (McArdle, 2009). The average income level of contemporary skiers var-ies depending on who’s doing the reporting (for differing examples, see Clifford, 2002; Cravatta, 1997; Hudson, 2000). Nevertheless, skiing has been and continues to be thought of as an elite, upper to upper-middle class sport. In his comprehensive study of past skiing consumer research, Hudson (2000) concludes that the perception of skiing as expensive has been a major factor in discouraging many nonskiers from taking up the sport (see also Williams & Basford, 1992). John Fry (2006) explains that during the sixties “[b]eing a skier was a badge proudly worn . . . by the rich and powerful”—including statesman, ambassadors, and politicians who routinely shared ski stories (p. 34). Although it is likely that the cost of skiing, as well as the

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perception of what it costs, skews its participation along axes of race, research on race and tourist expenditures complicates this picture by finding that there are no statistically significant differences in spending between Black and White vacationers (Agarwal & Yochum, 1999).

Within the leisure studies scholarship comparing Black and White involvement in recreational activities (such as skiing), explanations that target the prohibitive costs of participation collectively fall under what is known as the “marginality thesis”—the implicit assumption being that if socioeconomic barriers were not there Black people would participate in proportionately equivalent numbers to White people (Elmendorf, Willits, & Sasidharan, 2005). An alternative explanation for why few African Americans ski considers culturally based recreational preferences—this is commonly referred to as the “ethnicity (or subcultural variation) thesis.” In his pioneering study of race and leisure, Randel F. Washburne’s (1978) argued that Black people collec-tively engaged in self-schema away from perceived “white” activities. To the extent that certain leisure pursuits are thought of as “White” and “Black,” historical patterns of segregation are reproduced. The premise underlying this position is that Black peo-ple, as compared with White people, have a fundamentally different set of interests and inclinations regarding how to spend their leisure and tourist time (Harrison et al., 1999). Such reasoning has been critiqued for being rooted in culturally essentialist arguments (Carter, 2008), that have the capacity to revive pseudoscientific beliefs regarding the natural endowments and limitations of Black bodies.

A corresponding (culture-based) explanation specifically points to the structure of recruitment into the sport. Skiing is often generationally passed down from parents to children. Studies have shown that family skiers in particular engage in skiing largely for social reasons (Williams & Basford, 1992). A 1995 Canadian survey found that exposure to skiing as a child and informal encouragement to ski from friends were the two most salient factors in developing longtime skiers (Williams & Dossa, 1995). With neither a family history of participation in the sport nor friends who regularly ski, the logic goes, the likelihood of most African Americans picking up skiing is slim. Patterned behaviors are generationally reproduced within a context of already racial-ized social space. Thus, without some form of intervention or rupture, racialized struc-tures are slow to change.

Whereas marginality versus ethnicity debates have dominated the leisure studies literature on racial participation, a handful of researchers have called for more dynamic approaches that productively outline their interrelationship and give greater attention to processes of racial discrimination (Carter, 2008; Floyd, 1998; Philipp, 2000). Accordingly, here I underscore the significance of racism as a sociohistorical force affecting African American collective memory and patterns of leisure; and with spe-cific regard to skiing, outline how these processes have been accentuated by important shifts in the sport’s tourist geography.

Most ski areas in America are found in the mountains of the Northeast, the Rockies, and the West Coast. The millions of African Americans who migrated from the Southeastern United States to these regions around the period of both World Wars did so in pursuit of the greater economic opportunities offered within cities. African


Americans are the least integrated racial group in the United States; and non-Southern African American communities continue to be primarily urban (McArdle, 2009). Outside of the South, where for obvious climatic reasons skiing is sparse, sizable pop-ulations of Black people do not reside in the rural mountainous areas where skiing flourishes.

The geography of skiing has constricted over the last 40 years. Historically through-out the Northeast many cities had small ski mountains surrounding them. Just 12 min-utes outside of Boston, a golf course in Quincy Massachusetts was home to Heavenly Hill (Conniff & Allen, 2006); and Mount Tom—located in the city of Holyoke Massachusetts—was just 10 miles outside of Springfield, the state’s third largest met-ropolitan area. Heavenly Hill closed in the early seventies and Mount Tom did the same in the late nineties. Across America, more than 1,000 documented ski areas have closed (Pennington, 2008). The ski resorts which survived tended to feature large mountains, in geographically isolated regions, which have the infrastructure to offer relatively easy access as well as activities for nonskiers. In this respect, skiing has changed from a wintertime way of life that was at the center of many small communi-ties’ economies and local cultures, into a full-service tourist industry complete with standardized options for shopping, entertainment, and night-life (Fry, 2006). Destination ski resorts have become larger and more prominently featured on the ski-ing topography (Coleman, 2004). In 2003, Vail ski resort operated six hotels, 72 res-taurants, 40 shops, and more than 13,000 condominiums (Hudson, 2003).

The shift to skiing-as-tourism increases the potential for specific (racialized) repre-sentations of skiing to influence the sport’s consumer profile. A ski vacation, as opposed to an afternoon outing, is typically intentional, requiring planning and greater economic investments. Thus, more than ever before, skiing participation is based on a tourist attraction system (Leiper, 1990) that relies on the perceived attributes of the activity and/or destination as its chief draw; and the ability of media representations—such as magazines, videos, and even the Weather Channel—to shape the market in ways that attract some subsegments of the population while discouraging others is perhaps unprecedented. In short, skiing’s new economy—based on tourism and real estate—is sustained through the cultivation of specific recreational preferences, which tend to require larger time and monetary commitments.

Recent attention to race and racism within the field of environmental history is use-ful to understanding the development and maintenance of Black recreational prefer-ences. One major branch of this research focuses on how Black people in America have historically been linked to land primarily through the involuntary and abusive institutions of chattel slavery and postemancipation sharecropping and tenant farming (Merchant, 2003; see also Meeker, 1973); similarly, remote, back-country environ-ments were typically sites where lynchings occurred (Johnson, 1998; see also W. White, 1929). For these reasons, it is argued, Black people developed a particular relationship to forest wildlands that is distinct from the typical (White) American attachment to them as sites of exploration, refuge, and escape. Through collective memory—that is, common knowledge of meaningful past events circulated within a group (via stories and the media) to the point where they are salient even to individuals

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with no firsthand experience with them—such legacies of discrimination manifest as generationally persistent “wildland aversions” (Johnson, Horan, & Pepper, 1997, p. 105). These memories, in conjunction with stereotyped portrayals of Black people as primitive or closer to nature, have contributed to what Cassandra Y. Johnson and Josh McDaniel (2006) describe as an “African American quest for modernization” involving conscious distancing from anything associated with rural life or the wilder-ness (p. 62; see also Meeker, 1973). Although the aforementioned studies have mostly focused on wildland recreational practices, they can quite straightforwardly be extended to the “mountainous sublime” through which the skiing experience and land-scape is customarily represented (Stoddart, 2012).

A second, highly relevant, focus of race-related environmental history recounts the discriminatory and, at times, violent competition for access to green spaces within industrialized urban landscapes. Viewed in this context, Black people’s seeming dis-interest in national/global environmentalism has been explained through the more pressing concerns of dealing with and getting away from the pollution and inadequate sanitation of their home environment (Hurley, 1995). In addition, many of the race riots that occurred in industrial centers like Chicago and Detroit following both World Wars were precipitated by conflicts over the use of recreational space (Fisher, 2006; West, 1989). Thus, another facet of Black collective memory is the legacy of racial hostilities attached to the pursuit of recreational happiness (Philipp, 2000). Citing these “racial risk aversions” to outdoor recreation sites, Perry L. Carter (2008) points out that African Americans, compared with Whites, are more apt to visit travel desti-nations that are recommended to them and/or that involve a degree of familiarity (pp. 265-266). Through the impact of historical memory and interpersonal experi-ences with subtle and not-so-subtle forms of discrimination, he sees many of today’s leisure preferences as continuations of practices developed during the Jim Crow era that are sustained through geographies of exclusion.

Structural explanations tell us a good deal about why African Americans do not ski at a comparable rate with other Americans, but they do not tell the whole story. Similarly, ethnicity-based arguments that emphasize choice and agency often ignore the role of discrimination—past and present—in shaping recreational preferences. Bourdieu calls attention to the “hidden entry requirements,” such as obligatory social codes and behaviors, which serve as barriers to select sports participation (Bourdieu, 1978, p. 838). In presenting several “travelling while Black” narratives, Carter (2008) spotlights boundary marking measures—including “critical White gazes,” being forced to show photo-identification, and even being given an orange wristband (which the traveler tellingly equated with a “scarlet letter”)—experienced by Black vacation-ers at Southern beach resorts (p. 280). Through material and symbolic practices, such leisure-recreation spaces are defined as White and non-White access to them is care-fully managed. A 2003 report stated that African Americans made up only 2% of the American skiing market—considerably less than Asian Americans and Latinos (Redd, 2003). Furthermore, many Black skiers participate primarily through Black skiing organizations, which encourage periodic Black skiing events rather than a regular and sustained presence on the mountain. Thus, on an average (non-Black ski event) ski


day, the ratio of Black to non-Black skiers is often less than 2 out of every 100. What seems most apparent is that outside of the occasional Black ski event, African Americans have not made significant inroads into skiing’s historically rooted Whiteness.

Skiing and Whiteness

Historical and sociological literature on skiing presents its sportscape as largely mas-culine and overwhelmingly White (Coleman, 1996, 2004; Fry, 2006; Harrison et al., 1999; Stoddart, 2012). In making this case, skiing scholars like Annie Gilbert Coleman (1996) and Mark C. J. Stoddart (2012) utilize Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony as a means to unpacking skiing’s gendered and racialized geographies and representa-tions. Hegemony, according to Gramsci, describes a fluid and continuous process through which the interests of other groups are coordinated with those of the dominant group. As a mode of ideological assimilation, the hegemonic apparatus prioritizes spontaneous consent over physical coercion in the interest of normalizing the exercise of power (Gramsci, 1971). Examining skiing through a hegemonic framework reveals the extent to which, even in the absence of overt discrimination, the policing of racial-ized space occurs primarily through symbolic means with structural arrangements standing in support.

In one of the few scholarly pieces dedicated specifically to the issue of race and skiing, Coleman (1996) traces the development of Western ski tourism around the conspicuous deployment and manipulation of European-centered language and ico-nography. The rise in popularity of downhill skiing in America followed from a European archetype. The industry’s post-war “Boom!” was fueled by the interests of returning soldiers who had spent time on and around the slopes of Europe. Starting in the 1940s, the majority of American ski schools boasted of teaching the “French,” “Swiss,” or “Austrian method,” with the popularity between these fluctuating based on the successes and failures of each nation’s ski team (Rothafel, 1978, p. 38; see also Fry, 2006). When the Vail Village Inn hired Ed Kilby—“a local construction crew cook who . . . specialized in chicken fried steak”—the owners announced it as the arrival of “French chef Pierre Kilbeaux” and his famous filet de boeuf au poulet frit (Simonton, 1987, p. 72, quoted in Coleman, 1996). Coleman highlights the ways in which European imagery historically affected the construction and naming of ski-resort accommodations, where descriptions of Bavarian style villages with alpine names are still common. In the late 1950s, Colorado launched a ski campaign that billed its mountains as “The ‘other’ Alps” (Coleman, 1996, p. 593). Coleman effec-tively shows how rather than focusing on specific national identities, in much the same manner that European ethnic groups assimilated into a single White race (see Jacobson, 1998), the ski industry compiled and blended different aspects of national symbolism—such as the sale of German and Italian ski clothing within Scandinavian ski shops—to create one pan-European experience.

The pervasive Whiteness in skiing and ski imagery is notable given the diversity of many local populations—particularly in the Taos area of northern New Mexico which

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is home to large Native American and Mexican immigrant communities. If one looks behind the front stage of European-based ski tourism, this diversity can be seen throughout ski-resort service and manual labor workforces (Coleman, 1996; see also Stoddart, 2012). It is notable that such racial administration of roles within white spaces is not remarkably different from what occurred with the largely invisible Black workforce that served Jim Crow society.

Leisure activities are often thought to be arenas in which people can challenge existing power relations, yet they can also be spaces where unequal access to power and resources is reproduced and legitimized (Shinew & Floyd, 2005). Steven Philipp (2000) contends that some leisure spaces are among the most racially segregated spaces in the United States. Skiing’s hegemony of Whiteness obscures its profound racial dynamics. Thus, within the ski sportscape and leisure-scape a preponderance of White people is viewed as normal and Whiteness remains unmarked (Frankenberg, 1993). Stoddart (2012) explains that “when ethnicity explicitly enters the ski dis-course, it comes as a surprise” (p. 144).

African American Inroads

Undoubtedly, there were Black skiers prior to the Civil Rights Movement. Yet the impetus for the appearance of Black ski organizations like the NBS (founded in 1973) is connected to the newly found and newly imagined freedoms of the late sixties and early seventies, which inspired African Americans to explore activities and social are-nas previously considered closed to them. This early generation of Black skiers should be thought of as pioneers of integration. Since their time, the African American expe-rience with skiing has been principally through what Kimberly J. Shinew and Myron F. Floyd (2005) refer to as a parallel integration strategy—that is, a form of negotiat-ing leisure constraint barriers that involves “corresponding activities” undertaken exclusively within one’s own race (p. 45). Such a strategy, which extend the Jim Crow era principle of turning segregation into congregation (Lipsitz, 2011), is predicated on the diffusion of a cultural practice or activity rather than on the mixing of people.

Few published reports document the structural and interpersonal barriers early African American skiers experienced. Still, the formation and growth of Black ski clubs as an alternative to being so visible and outnumbered while entering this terra incognita suggests that there were difficulties. The following testimony was posted on a prominent online skiing forum:

I go back to the late 60s when I was the only “brother” on the mountain . . . Was I a little self-conscious, the only black face skiing with a group of white friends from the Hartford area? Yeah, more than a little, actually . . . Those of you of a certain age will remember the severity of the social stresses in the late 60s. Certainly not all of them had a racial origin, but it was not always easy to be the only black face on the hill. (Joe, 2006)

Jennifer Lee (2000) explains how the everyday racism experienced by African Americans when venturing alone or in small groups into social spaces which are


racially constructed around normative Whiteness, influences them to (a) avoid such places and (b) appreciate the absence of overt racial consciousness found within pre-dominantly Black social settings. The latter point is supported by Joseph W. Meeker’s (1973) observation that, unlike White people’s pursuit of sanctuary through privacy and “pastoral retreat,” Black people are likely to seek refuge “among other black peo-ple where they can expect to find understanding and human compassion” (p. 5; see also Elmendorf et al., 2005; Johnson et al., 1997). According to past NBS President Rose Thomas Pickrum, the negative experiences of early Black skiers led to the devel-opment of Black ski clubs (G. Lee, 2006). African American skiers have collectively chosen fellowship and support over isolation and the potential for overt racism. In 1998, the NBS’s “summit”—which for many years has brought thousands of Black skiers to select resort destinations—was recognized by the ski industry as the largest ski convention gathering in the Unites States (“African-American skiers,” 1998). That same year a group of Black friends and families claimed they were rudely ordered off the premises of the Snowcrest ski resort in Southern California. According to one of the members of the group, following an incident of alleged mischief on the part of some of their children, the lodge keeper kicked them out saying, “you’re not welcome here anyway. You have no business even being here”; as the group went to leave, they noticed that a number of people had congregated and were reportedly staring at them “like they[’d] never seen black people before” (Anderson, 1998).

At a time when Black ski organizations were among the most sought after specialty markets in the skiing industry (Norment, 1989), Black people remained virtually invis-ible within the imagery and discourses surrounding popular skiing. Certainly part of this lack of visibility was connected to the way in which Black skiing, at the Black ski organizational level, has been contained as a circumstance that falls outside the experi-ence of normal skiing. “Black ski week” was and continues to be an extraordinary event worthy of its own designation. Despite their successes, Black skiing organiza-tions have thus far failed to redefine the relationship between Whiteness and skiing.

Belonging Bodies: From Extreme Skiers to Snowboarders

Ski resorts endure as profoundly White spaces despite the diversity of sports and lei-sure activities taking place at them. Parallel integration through Black ski clubs, which involves large numbers of people with varying levels of skiing competence and enthusiasm, cultivates non-skiing leisurely pursuits as perhaps the most meaningful aspect of the overall ski-resort experience. Yet, even the activities taking place exclu-sively on the slopes encompass a range of practices (from snowboarding to several varieties of skiing, including alpine, telemark, freestyle, cross-country, back-country, and extreme) which shape and are influenced by prevailing racial symbolism. Examining alpine skiing in relation to two other prominent on-the-slopes practices—namely, extreme skiing and snowboarding—further illustrates how racialized dis-courses shape conceptions of who belongs and who does not belong on the skiing sportscape.

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Beyond theorizing how cultural capital influences skiing participation in general, I consider how a form of skiing-specific capital—or what Sarah Thornton (1995) might call subcultural capital within the field of skiing—is implicated in generating and maintaining a hierarchy of appropriate skiing bodies. Although several studies have examined these issues with specific attention to gender (Anderson, 1999; Coleman, 2003; Stoddart, 2010; Thorpe, 2008), I extend these discussions to also include con-siderations of race. My approach is anchored in a conception of skiing as embodied performance that can potentially contest and/or affirm existing cultural meanings and relations of power.

The distinction between alpine (or general downhill) skiing and extreme skiing can be mapped on to the physical landscape as either within or outside the constructed boundaries of ski-resort property. Yet, more typically, extreme skiing is defined by its degree of risk-taking and emphases on speed and the negotiation of natural obstacles. Fry (2006) observes that in extreme skiing “risk itself became the goal—deliberately leaping off cliffs, attempting to ski in an avalanche, skiing in places where a fall meant certain death” (p. 205). Such places are sufficiently removed from the manicured envi-ronments of everyday skiing leisure tourism. At the very least, these areas are “out of bounds”; thus, (in theory) excusing resorts from liabilities related to injuries, deaths, or the costs of rescue (Oliver, 2011). In addition, extreme skiing often takes place on hard to reach terrain that can only be accessed by hiking or helicopter. Indeed, many of the earliest extreme skiers were foremost mountain climbers who utilized skiing as a means of descent (Fry, 2006). Alpine skiing, on the other hand, although sometimes thought of as dangerous by nonskiers (Gilbert & Hudson, 2000), as a leisure–sport–tourism activity aspires to eliminate barriers to participation by branding itself as safe, healthy, and “riskless” family fun (see Stoddart, 2012, p. 18).

Instead of identifying and directly comparing extreme skiers (whose numbers pale by comparison) with general alpine skiers, extreme-sport skiing and leisure-tourist skiing should be viewed as differing orientations along a skiing continuum. As direc-tional ideals on the skiing horizon, few if any skiers are solely extreme or leisure-tourists; and through the act of skiing a double black diamond (extremely difficult) trail and subsequently joining one’s children on the “bunny” (beginner) hill, a single skier can occupy both skiing orientations over the course of consecutive ski runs. Yet, the discourses surrounding skiing align specific gendered and racialized identities with these differing orientations. Thus, perceptions of certain skiing activities and the abilities necessary to undertake them, along with conceptions of who is most likely to have such abilities, get hierarchically arranged, generating corporeal notions of belonging and prestige.

The association between the term bunny slope and skiing novicity reflects a gen-dered history of the sport dating back to the early 20th century. Coleman (2003) recounts how as early as the 1930s women skiers were stereotyped as sensual “Snow Bunnies” whose novice skills and husband-hunting priorities placed them on the most easily accessible spots on the mountain. Represented as fashion-conscious objects of desire who prioritized their appearance ahead of their skiing ability, both the appeal of and appeals to women skiers played a key role in the development of urbanized ski


resorts. Such resort towns offered venues for the consumption of clothes and the con-sumptive practices surrounding après skiing:

Moving from slopes to the bar became common practice; consuming food, drink, and fashion indoors grew inextricably linked to consuming nature outdoors on skis . . . men and women skiers shared stories of their day and relaxed together over drinks in clubhouses, restaurants, and hotels. (Coleman, 2003, p. 200)

The skiing imaginary that emerged following World War II was refracted through a masculine worldview which envisioned the on-the-mountain experience as an exhil-arating adventure in risk-taking and triumph. Male bodies came to be associated with the sporting conquest of wilderness and women; women, by contrast, were mapped onto the classic ski terrain as tame and restrained within the cultivated spaces of the mountain social world. This outlook was institutionalized through the green circle (easy), blue square (more difficult), and black diamond (most difficult) trail system, which segregated skiing sportscapes into leisurely “bunny hills,” “expert only” runs, and more difficult slopes of integration. By the end of the 20th century, as more women skiers openly defied the restrictive Snow Bunny imagery, this gendered divi-sion became reenergized through the rise of extreme skiing.

Kusz (2004) situates the emergence of extreme sports in America within 1990s anxieties over White manhood’s loss of authority. This perceived crisis, he argues, should be viewed within the context of post-1960s global shifts in the industrial econ-omy, national demographic changes, and post-Civil Rights Movement racial politics (Kusz, 2004). The mainstreaming of extreme sports, then, nostalgically looks back to a lost era of American manhood defined by rugged individuals and personal responsi-bility for social progress. This modified version of manifest destiny reimagines the conquest of nature, women, and non-White peoples in the project of American nation-building. In the most celebrated contemporary skiing practices—where extreme skill and risk-taking lead to the greatest skiing prestige—Whiteness continues to operate as the unspoken norm (Kusz, 2004). It should come as little surprise, then, that Black skiers—with their wildland aversions and parallel integration sensibilities and sociabilities—are largely excluded from these privileged spaces. In fact, a history of recreational leisure scholarship suggests that Black people prefer developed recre-ational settings with formal landscape designs (Elmendorf et al., 2005; Johnson et al., 1997). Along the skiing sportscape, this places Black skiers, along with women, within the resort confines.

The racial discourses surrounding snowboarding, as it relates to alpine skiing, are even more pronounced. Snowboarding came of age in the late eighties and nineties as a direct challenge to skiing’s traditional formality and elitism (Coleman, 2003; Heino, 2000). Due to the perception of its short learning curve (Hudson, 2003), the reported exhilaration that accompanies its practice (Gilbert & Hudson, 2000), and its “cool” and rebellious image (Edensor & Richards, 2007), over the course of the nineties snowboarding rapidly grew to rival skiing in popularity, particularly among young people; between 1991 and 2001 the number of snowboarders in the United States

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increased from 1.6 million to 5.3 million, with 2001 snowboarders making up 28% of all ski area visits (Thapa & Graefe, 2004). Thus, since the start of the 21st century, skiers and snowboarders have been battling for space, both symbolic and literal, along skiing’s sportscape (Edensor & Richards, 2007).

During its emergence, snowboarding was heavily influenced by West Coast urban stylings which gave it a distinctly racialized aesthetic. Kristin L. Anderson (1999) described the cultural imagery of snowboarding during this period as a blend of the “skater kid” and the “gangsta” (p. 62; see also Brayton, 2005); likewise, Rebecca Heino (2000) explained its fashion taste as the appropriation of “the hip-hop look” by suburban youth (p. 178). Although snowboarding, like skiing, is overwhelmingly White, its “inner-city” orientations (Fry, 2006, p. 238; see also Edensor & Richards, 2007) signal a different performance of White masculinity—one that rejects notions of professionalism and social responsibility through the ideal of “a rebel who needs nei-ther material comfort or professional aspirations” (Anderson, 1999, p. 66). Whereas snowboarding’s loose-fitting, androgynous fashion-codes often produced contradic-tory discourses around the presentation and performance of gender (see Thorpe, 2008), Anderson (1999) sees its entry into the skiing sportscape as enacting a particular ver-sion of White maleness that, unlike the urban working-class Black and Brown youth it was modeled after, could be performed “without fear of retribution or discrimination” (p. 76).

In spite of this, and as a result of their contestations with skiers over both access to the slopes and conduct on them, some snowboarders conceptualized their alternity through a lens of discrimination or even as “deflected” racism (Edensor & Richards, 2007). Fry (2006) recounts that snowboarders were initially not permitted to ride the lifts at many ski mountains, and as late as 1996 fifteen ski areas would not permit snowboarders on their premises (Thapa & Graefe, 2004). Notably, snowboarding pio-neer Jake Burton Carpenter described this and other early treatment of snowboarders as “bigoted” (Fry, 2006, p. 239).

Several studies have shown that skiers are less tolerant of snowboarders than snow-boarders are of skiers (see, for example, Thapa & Graefe, 2004; Williams, Dossa, & Fulton, 1994). Skiing’s exclusivist sensibilities and emphases on tradition and high-brow sophistication lead many within the sport to view snowboarders as an encroach-ing element and a perceived threat to skiing’s sanctioned spaces. Efforts to segregate snowboarders and skiers through direct restrictions (see Makens, 2001) or divergent appeals (Vaske, Carothers, Donnelly, & Baird, 2000) continue into the 21st century—most notably through terrain parks which aspire to quarantine snowboarding (and free-style skiing) activities within specific areas of the ski mountain. Yet, at all but three ski areas in the United States, the two groups compete for the same spatial resources, which they pursue through different performative norms and codes of civility. Tim Edensor and Sophia Richards (2007) argue that snowboarding’s corporeal aesthetics are an undisciplined challenged to skiing’s disciplined body. Skiing embodies profes-sionalism and uniformity, which gets represented through the precise performance of correct skiing technique; snowboarding, on the other hand, reflects individual exhibi-tion and youthful rebellion (Heino, 2000).


Stoddart (2012) suggests that skiing discourse “may be interpreted as a form of white culture that marginalizes skiers who do not fit the dominant images of normal-ized whiteness” (p. 169). At a time when the most heroic icons of contemporary skiing have migrated to the distinctly White spaces of the “out of bounds” extreme, snow-boarders—as rivals for slope space—embody a racialized “other” that represents a threat to skiing’s leisure-tourist environment of pristine Whiteness.

Racialized Residency Patterns

Lefebvre conceived of the “world of leisure” as a “purely artificial” ideal that devel-oped “outside of daily life” (Lefebvre, 1979, p. 137). Ski-resort communities, then, as sites of leisure, developed in the interest of social, spatial, and cultural insulation from corrupting influences and perceived threats associated with non-Whiteness. Accordingly, they are part of a long tradition of racially segregated leisure resorts in the United States that extends outside the Jim Crow South to Northeast, Midwest, and Western regions (Foster, 1999; Kahrl, 2012). Fry (2006) reports that, as late as the 1950s, African Americans and Jews were not allowed in “restricted” northern (i.e., non-Jim Crow) ski lodges and hotels. Coleman (1996) similarly suggests that during the sixties many White skiers “fled” to racially homogeneous ski resorts to escape the “growing racial tension in American cities” (p. 586). Carolyn Merchant concurs, drawing attention to an all-American (i.e., White) quest for wilderness sanctuary that dates back to the start of 20th century:

In the minds of many Americans, the valence of wilderness had been reversed. The city had become a dark, negatively charged wilderness filled with blacks and southern European immigrants, while mountains, forests, waterfalls, and canyons were viewed as sublime places of white light. (Merchant, 2003, p. 385)

Following these historical precedents, and despite African American inroads into ski-ing, I argue that their parallel integration has, in effect, contributed to the ghettoization of Black skiing into realms of non-visibility and/or extraordinariness, whereas skiing on the whole has remained remarkably and pristinely White.

Setha M. Low (2009) points out that the politics behind Whiteness, which remain “hidden and rarely challenged” (p. 81), are products of ongoing “racially segregated living arrangements” (p. 82). Her research on gated communities has exposed the manner in which grassroots, collective administrative efforts—often on the part of politically progressive people—function to secure social enclaves of White middle class values and practices. Whereas gated communities are erected through concrete restrictive structures, Lior Jacob Strahilevitz (2006) has coined the term exclusionary amenities in reference to a different kind of gate-keeping where communities form around common interests in particular facilities which are selected to promote specific social characteristics among neighbors. To the extent that these characteristics may be racial, such practices should be viewed as efforts, either manifest or latent, to

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circumvent antidiscriminatory housing laws and maintain segregated spaces of Whiteness. Strahilevitz (2006) presents how this works through a hypothetical example:

Say a developer wants to create a residential community within a heterogeneous metropolitan area, where whites and blacks have similar income levels, and each racial group comprises fifty percent of the population. Suppose the developer knows that the only salient difference between blacks and whites is that eighty percent of whites play polo, whereas only twenty percent of blacks play polo. Finally, suppose, consistent with empirical data, that there is substantial market demand for housing developments that are relatively racially homogeneous. The sophisticated developer might build a residential development around a polo ground, and require that all those who purchase homes in the vicinity pay annual assessments to support the upkeep, staffing, and real estate taxes associated with the polo grounds and their affiliated stables. (pp. 447-448)

Exclusionary amenities, then, serve as mechanisms through which people interested in residentially homogeneous living arrangements attempt “to thwart integration using creative substitutes for overt discrimination” (Strahilevitz, 2006, p. 440).

Studies confirm that property values appreciate more rapidly in majority-White neighborhoods as compared with majority Black ones (Kim, 2000; Strahilevitz, 2006). Research also suggests that preferences for homogeneous neighborhood composition and moral and aesthetic veneers of “niceness” increase with income (Dawkins, 2004; Schill, Voicu, & Miller, 2004). Even if, perhaps especially when, these preferences are not race conscious, they illustrate the extent to which racism, tolerated through episte-mological ignorance (Mills, 1997) or ideological cynicism (Zizek, 1989), gets woven into the fabric of everyday American society and inscribed onto the residential spaces and communities in which we live (Harris, 2013). In the localities of skiing, such rac-ism without racists (Bonilla-Silva, 2003) persists through the cover of hegemonic Whiteness.

Low introduces the discursive trope of niceness as an important moral and aesthetic measure that functions to defend social arenas where White racial spatiality prevails. Niceness, according to Low (2009), is code for a constellation of middle class American values and interests such as “cleanliness and orderliness,” and “an underly-ing concern with maintaining one’s home as a financial investment,” which seek “to control the environment to keep unwanted others out” (p. 87). It exerts itself through such things as expectations and rules regarding neighborhood upkeep, hostile disposi-tions toward linguistic divergences from Standard English, anxious responses to the introduction of loud music (such as rap) into the sonic landscape, and rhetorically powerful iconography representing good living (Harris, 2013). Such subtle yet sophis-ticated means of social engineering are products and perpetuators of aspirations for social distance from undesirable elements of society through geographies of exclusion.

During the late 20th century—at a time when once all-White American suburbs were diversifying (Hardwick, 2008)—second homes emerged as a prominent status


symbol among affluent Americans (Blakely, 2006). By the start of the 21st century, second homes had become increasingly affordable-to and aspired-to-by a wider cross-section of middle class society (Timothy, 2004). Citing the centrality of condominium and vacation home sales, Clifford (2002) calls skiing “an adjunct of real estate devel-opment” (p. 17). As with gated communities, the exclusionary spatial tactics surround-ing ski-resort residency isolate these commercial/residential spaces from “[o]bvious signs of economic disparity and poverty . . . [including] panhandlers, street drug deal-ers, or other abject figures of urban life” (Stoddart, 2012, p. 167). Coleman (2004) describes skiing residential patterns as classic reversals of American racialized urban geography with “wealthy white people liv[ing] in the center—albeit an isolated moun-tain town community—while people of color and lower classes live outside” (p. 201). In places like Vail, during the nineties ski property sales increased at nearly 10 times the rate of actual skiing participation (Fry, 2006). As residential ski-resort develop-ment flourishes, members of local workforces find it difficult to afford to live in these expensive and highly taxed mountain municipalities (Clifford, 2002).

Andrew W. Kahrl’s recent history of African American beach resorts offers a tell-ing comparison with the situation surrounding skiing. Kahrl (2012) focuses primarily on the Southern coastal development taking place between the 1930s and 1950s, and how states and municipalities sought to limit Black mobility by “inscrib[ing] clear racial categories onto the land” (p. 12). One of the main strategies involved White acquisition of preferred coastline real estate, which often required the eviction of Black residents through coercive or otherwise dubious measures. In the case of skiing, no such displacement is necessary. However, in contemplating the current state of ski-resort real estate, one could argue that a similar boundary maintaining vigilance is occurring.

Residential spaces are important sites for the production and performance of racial identity (Harris, 2013). Thus, there is good evidence and reason to examine skiing—with its inattention to issues of race and pervasive visual rhetorics of Whiteness (Coleman, 1996)—as a form of contemporary, clandestine White flight. The lack of consideration for race within the sport may have allowed discriminatory real estate practices to continue unchecked. At the very least it has worked to conceal the fact that the sociality of skiing remains marked by Whiteness.

Conclusion

This article represents a provisional effort and starting point for further investigation into issues surrounding everyday racism in the leisure–sports–tourism field of down-hill skiing. The “unbearable whiteness of skiing” (Coleman, 1996), and associated defense of White racial spatiality, discourage African Americans from pursuing the sport with any great frequency or conviction outside of the restricted strategies of par-allel integration. Through its real estate practices and tourism campaigns, the ski industry has been profoundly implicated and heavily invested in curtailing further Black integration into the sport and its associated lifestyle. Those responsible for craft-ing the image of skiing in the popular imagination have, either foolishly or savvily,

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upheld the dogma that keeping skiing White is good for business. And it appears that its clientele—largely hailing from families which decades earlier partook in a more conspicuous variety of white flight—is unwittingly, or at least cynically, complicit.

By examining the racialized construction of downhill skiing, we can better under-stand the processes through which exclusionary geographies are secured outside of urban areas as well as within them—for it can reasonably be argued that ski resorts seek to reclaim the appeal of the urban experience in all White. Based on the current skiing landscape, we might join Philipp (2000) in pondering the extent to which lei-sure spaces function as mechanisms for preserving, rather than eroding, social segre-gation. The boundaries of Whiteness serve as the chief barrier through which racial stratification has been maintained in U.S. society. As one of the most racially exclu-sive leisure activities in America, skiing offers a spectacular view of the (mountain-ous) spaces where the preservation of Whiteness has been most successful.

In an increasingly diverse America, understanding how race operates in the few remaining racially homogeneous outposts of privilege is essential to the project of dismantling its power. The resilience of the White image of skiing sustains the belief that Black people simply do not belong on its slopes or in its social spaces. This image is preserved through structural barriers which keep non-White people and everyday forms of non-Whiteness at bay. It is additionally promoted through symbolism associ-ated with the production of skiing culture within skiing’s leisure–sports–tourism industries as well as through exclusionary amenity tactics that uphold racially restric-tive social and residential patterns. The most pernicious zones of racism are the spaces where racial segregation continues to go unnoticed and therefore unquestioned. These arenas jeopardize democracy and social cohesion by fostering exclusionary goals and outlooks, and by providing lifestyle pathways through which to attain them. Such enclave consciousness strives to secure skiing spaces as White.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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Author Biography

Anthony Kwame Harrison is Associate Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at Virginia Tech. He is author of Hip Hop Underground: The Integrity and Ethics of Racial Identification (Temple University Press, 2009) and associate editor for The Journal of Popular Music Studies.

Black Skiing, Everyday Racism, and the Racial Spatiality of Whiteness

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