Wikidworld (#168) / Racial Dynamics in America (#4): The Unbearable Whiteness of Skiing
"Asian girl, white guy, not so different anymore. Your privilege is on the rise." (Kim's Convenience, Season 3, Episode 5).
In 1996, Annie Gilbert – at that time a doctoral student in history at the University of Colorado – wrote an award-winning article with the memorable title, “The Unbearable Whiteness of Skiing. The piece chronicled the transformation of American skiing and ski resorts after World War II into consumer emblems of class, ethnicity, wealth, and fame where “only white people have found a welcome.”
Exclusion and Belonging
Nearly thirty years later, articles about the whiteness of the ski slopes remain a minor cottage industry within academic publishing, with an emphasis on the how the ski industry has “weaponized whiteness” to systematically exclude non-white minorities.
Most of this literature has focused on the cultural and economic complexities of access to the ski slopes for black Americans. As one scholar, Anthony Kwame Harrison, wrote in an article published in the Northwestern Journal of Sports and Society in 2013, “skiing offers a valuable site for considering the ongoing and overlooked saliencies of race and racial segregation in America.”
However, even Olympic-class Asian-American snow sports athletes have felt the sting of exclusion and of never truly belonging, “this idea that we’re all ‘American’ only when it comes to us being excellent and winning medals for the country.” The unbearable whiteness of skiing has thus served as a basis for affirming narratives of white supremacy that require outdoor and winter sports to remain “as white as snow.”
In the 2022-23 ski season, according to the demographic report of the National Ski Areas Association, whites accounted for 88.1% of skier visits, Asian or Pacific Islanders 6.5%, Hispanic or Latino 5.6%, black or African American 1.5%, and Native American or Alaskan 0.8%.
Which begs some questions. What explains the preponderance of Asian skiers at Snoqualmie on the soggy weekday in early February that I spent there with my son? And what, if anything, does this preponderance tell us about racial dynamics in America that we don’t already know?
Technology Has Deepened Inequality
Imagine a gate that some people with a magic key can open to cross into a walled garden. In this garden, one finds a place of prosperity, with comforts, freedoms, choices, and security unavailable to those without this magic key, who remain outside the wall.
If possession of the magic key is the outcome of chance, of a lottery, then all will possess the same odds of access to the walled garden, this place of prosperity. Inequality will not be systemic. However, if entire populations, by virtue of their race or ethnicity, do not possess the magic key, then systemic factors are invariably in play. What are these factors?
Income and wealth inequalities have deepened in the past five decades as a result of neoliberal policy outcomes — globalization, deregulation, privatization, tax reductions, and the evisceration of organized labor. However, a consensus has emerged that the most significant driver of structural wealth and income inequality has been technology.
Transformative technologies in the 21st century include automation and robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence, digital platforms and ecommerce, financial technology, and biotechnology and precision medicine. The rapid spread of these new technologies has disproportionately benefited highly skilled workers in the STEM professions, accelerating dramatically their productivity and earnings, while leaving most everyone else in the dust.
The benefits of these technologies, and the wealth they have produced, have not flowed evenly. Factors such as income, education, and geographic location influence access and capacities to leverage new technologies. One-third of adults in the United States possess only basic digital literacy skills, which places the nation just 29th out of 100 countires for the digital fluency of its workforce.
These less-skilled workers have experienced wage stagnation or wage decline as technology has automated routine tasks. The jobs replacing them are less secure and offer less opportunity for advancement. For these people, new technologies have made life more precarious. These realities disproportionately affect black, Hispanic, and less educated members of the workforce.
The scaling properties of digital platforms also have produced winner-take-all outcomes, leading to monopolistic or oligopolistic market structures that favor capital over labor and where a small number of companies capture a disproportionate share of the profits and wealth — for their owners and senior managers, in particular, but also for their skilled employees.
The vast majority of these skilled employees in large technology companies that have benefited from winner-take-all outcomes are white and Asian – predominantly Chinese and Indian – with professional degrees in science and engineering. The tensions and conundrums inherent in these demographic dynamics are the subject of my next article in this series.