Before I start, let’s get a few strawman arguments out of the way. It is correct to say that…

• “The outdoors” is an inanimate construct that cannot actively hold racist views.
• Anyone can get to outdoor recreation areas if provided transportation and directions.
• Most outdoor areas do not contain people who actively bar access to non-white visitors.
• The climbing community is full of kind people who treat others well, regardless of race.
• We have had a Black president, and we did re-elect him.

If you’ve expressed any of these ideas, you are right. Now that we’ve established what’s factually right, I’d like to discuss how nonwhite people might experience climbing.

While this sport can create wonderful experiences, not everyone gets to share in that wonder. Not everyone has a smooth entry point into climbing, and not everyone starts in a friendly, supportive community. To make matters worse, it seems that when Black climbers do speak up about bad experiences, the default response is to explain away their concerns—or disregard them entirely. Case and point: on a recent Instagram post about an article written in this very magazine, wherein Kai Lightner reflected on his own not-so-smooth entry into climbing, the reply he got was, “Maybe you don’t belong.” 

[Related: Kai Lightner Thinks We Can Do Better]

Point of Entry

Whenever any minorities express feeling unsafe in nature, I often hear people push back by saying, “the outdoors can’t be racist.” This reply is a rare triple threat: factually correct, mentally braindead, and morally bereft. Responding this way to genuine fears of racism takes a lack of kindness, critical thought, or a basic understanding of racism—especially the last one. In fact, I think “the outdoors can’t be racist” stems from the misplaced belief that racism is, well, a belief. I don’t have the column space to define racism on an intellectual level, but even if I did, I wouldn’t waste my time. The problem isn’t how we define racism but an overall lack of care for others’ experiences.

I think some of this comes from climbing’s hyperfocus on performance, often in lieu of community health. This is why a friend and I started the American Climbing Project a few years ago: to address climbing culture in ways we wanted climbing media to do so. We chose to address racism in our first season, interviewing dozens of climbers (both nonwhite and white) about their opinions and experiences. Many nonwhite climbers expressed their feelings of anxiety, stress, or flat-out fear when planning a climbing trip outdoors. And as you might expect, none of them mentioned nature as the cause for their discomfort.

“It’s not the physical space,” started one South Asian climber. “It’s the fact that it’s surrounded by inaccessibility, including from the communities we build around it. So is that rock I’m going to racist? No. But are all these things I have to internalize on my way to that space racist? Yes. And does it make me feel safe, or like I can go enjoy that space? No. Absolutely not.”

“If I plan on going to the New in West Virginia, in Fayetteville, I’m not driving by myself,” a Black climber told me. “‘Cause I’m not gonna stop at these gas stations in rural West Virginia and get out of the car, by myself, as a Black woman.”

“If I’m driving through all these fields and rural areas,” an Asian climber started, “and all I see is Trump signs here, Trump signs there, that blue-striped American flag sign… now I’m looking at my car like, ‘am I safe? If my car breaks down, am I gonna be alright?’”

You may be thinking, “not every minority feels this way.” And again, this is factually correct. But fear is not the only thing keeping minorities out of climbing; there’s also a community component to access. Climbing is very community-driven, which can be great for those who find friends and climbing partners upon entry. But strong communities are always a double-edged sword, as that tightness can be perceived as exclusivity to newcomers.

“There’s no situation I can really think of where someone’s gone out of their way to do something discriminatory,” said a Black male climber. “But they’re also not necessarily trying to have an active effort to be inclusive.”

Another climber, an Asian male, echoed this. “It’s groups of white folks, sittin’ around drinking beer… everybody’s got a plaid shirt on, I don’t have a plaid shirt on. I don’t know anybody, I’m kinda walking through, it’s uncomfortable… to me, this feels inaccessible.”

A third climber, a Black woman, expressed frustration with trying to explain this feeling of otherness to fellow climbers. “They’re like, ‘Well, I’ve never experienced racism in climbing.’ Yeah, no shit Chad, you’re white! I know you haven’t experienced racism in climbing; that obviously would not happen for you. It’s that disconnect of ‘if it’s not happening to me, then it must not be happening.’”

Oftentimes, I’ll see climbers respond to these feelings in the same way they responded to Kai Lightner on Instagram: “Well, if you feel like you don’t belong, then maybe you don’t.” Yet climbing is supposed to be a community that, according to another Instagram comment on the same topic, “is the most accepting community—probably of all sports.”

When you enter a community space, you want to feel like you belong or at least feel welcome. But in a sport where people can’t wait to share what they hate about newcomers (like in this Reddit threat), I daresay your welcome can feel worn out upon arrival. It reminds me of a video game called We Happy Few, set in a world where everyone walks around with smiles plastered on their faces. Nonwhite, queer, and neurodivergent people come to this sport that supposedly welcomes all, only to find yet another environment where they have to code-switch, pretend, and do their damndest to fit in.

A History of Exclusion

Let’s also not forget that, historically, minorities were actively exiled from the outdoors—from the John Muirs, who labeled Indigenous people as “dark-haired, half-happy savages,” to the James Brocks, who dumped acid in desegregated pools. Historical violence in the outdoors still affects minorities today—regardless of our community’s personal feelings about racism. The historical connections between designing outdoor recreation and dismantling minority communities can’t be overstated. For example:

• Building Central Park required the destruction and displacement of Seneca Village, which was “the largest community of free African-American property owners in pre–Civil War New York.”
• Pro-nature initiatives of the 20th century were led by people like Gifford Pinchot, who championed outdoor recreation and eugenics simultaneously.
• Parks followed the same segregation laws as the cities—that is if they allowed minorities at all. In the 1950s, for example, Blacks could only visit 12 of the 180 national parks across nine southern states.
• Once desegregation happened, many recreational spaces were so against allowing non-white people that they closed down for good rather than letting minorities participate. As this JSTOR article pointed out, “of all the public pools open in 1961 in Mississippi, for example, nearly half had closed by 1972.”

The outdoors may not care if you’re Black or white, but the creators of outdoor spaces sure did—and it showed in their work.

Climbing did not create our world, but it is still part of that world—and climbing history is outdoor recreation history. We may not have many documented examples of outright, overly obvious racism in climbing, but our sport still stems from a lineage of exclusive, homogenized spaces for the fortunate few. So, while the climbers who hate on newcomers today may not be doing it for racial reasons, what they are doing is reinforcing a long-standing history of elitism, entitlement, and whitewashed environmentalism.

A Love of Nature 

It’s also worth acknowledging that this is not about Black people just “not liking the outdoors.” Contrary to popular belief, Black people love nature. Our musings on the beauty of nature date back to the 1700s—before romanticism and transcendentalism, before chattel slavery ended in the US.

“I would love to dedicate more time to climbing,” one Black female climber told me. “I would love to go outside every weekend.”

Sure, some Black people label climbing as “white people shit”—in fact, I used to do it myself. But most of us aren’t scared of nature; if anything, due to America’s history of discrimination, we’re just scared of white people.

Escapism

Climbing also adds a different kind of inaccessibility to the mix—one that comes from its community’s active use of the sport itself to ignore problems.

“I got into an argument one time with a sales rep,” a white female climber told me. “He’d straight up said that he doesn’t care about any political issues because the only thing he cares about is climbing. And he’s lost relationships because of it, but he doesn’t care, because his relationships don’t matter to him as much as going outside and climbing.”

This thinking seems pretty common among climbers. Many see this sport as a way to escape the “real world.” That matches up with climbing’s history in America: many Golden Age Yosemite climbers believed they were opting out of society and often climbed with that idea in mind. To quote a line from the film Valley Uprising, “climbing, in those days, was not seen as a respectable activity to be doing… it was an outlaw activity.”

From the start, climbing has been hailed as a departure from the norm. It’s ironically seen as becoming one with nature when it’s just becoming one with yourself in many ways. But what do you do when the very thing you’re trying to run from exists because of who you are?

For many climbers, “society” cannot be escaped through climbing. Society follows them in the form of their skin color, gender, sexual preference, neurodivergence, able-bodiedness, or any other trait seen as other. And no matter where those people go, these traits still impact their experience. On top of that, most attempts to aid their escape into climbing are met with backlash from our community, or at the very least, groans of “changing history.” It is ironic that the climbing community willfully ignores some parts of history but will adamantly fight to preserve others.

I’ve seen climbers vehemently argue for preserving route names like “Happiness in Slavery,” “Limp Wristed Faggots,” and “Another N***a in the Morgue.”

I’ve watched gyms reject inclusive programming or begrudgingly approve before dismantling it soon after the trendiness of anti-racism wore off.

I’ve heard climbers complain that they “don’t wanna hear about race when they come to the gym,” despite the fact that most Black people don’t wanna hear about race either—the difference being Black people don’t get a choice.

And I’ve known climbers who care so little about others’ culture they would rather get their send than respect people’s wishes. This is something we see play out regularly on Devil’s Tower, where climbers still ignore the pleas of Indigenous people to refrain from climbing there one month out of the year.

Climbing Needs Advocates

Climbers will often applaud our community’s lack of overt, cartoon-character racism—as if that shouldn’t just be the bare minimum. But that same community, in my experience, has shown incredible resistance to forward progress. Where is that same level of fervor for actually making climbing more welcoming? “Don’t be mean” isn’t the same as “actively bring people in.”

“[Climbing’s] not necessarily being blatantly exclusive,” said one female Black climber, “but they’re not trying to be inclusive deliberately. And that’s the problem.”

“The challenge with climbing is that it’s a cultural thing,” said one Black male. “So, the natural demographics of your area are then going to influence the culture of your climbing. And that argument of ‘I just wanna come and climb’ breaks down when you’re the only person that looks like you and thinks like you—especially if, as the person who looks totally different from everyone else, you also have to express a different opinion.

“So, the reality is that [as a minority,] you can’t just ‘come and climb.’”

The external space of climbing does not change the internal experience of otherness. Black people can’t be anything but Black, even at the crag—and with that comes a different experience. I wish our community would be willing to simply listen to others rather than being so quick to defend itself. And I wish climbers would wake up and realize that this sport does not belong to them, or any of us for that matter. What reason do any of us have for excluding new climbers who couldn’t have also excluded us? And what value is there in preserving history if that “history” is elitism, inaccessibility, and a false narrative of isolation?

I’m not asking for climbing to mold itself around every single person who walks into a gym. I’m asking for an awareness of experience. It’s true that climbing may not be for everyone, but right now, it feels like it’s for only one—that is, one type of person. And perhaps I wouldn’t really see that as a problem, were it not for the false praising of climbing as an everyman sport. How is climbing a sport that welcomes everyone when there are climbers who wish there were fewer people at the crag or climbers who comment online that “bringing in social justice is just going to ruin it for everyone”? Unless you literally invented rock, you were not the first person to climb on it—and I, for one, am done letting the climbing community pretend otherwise.

Our sport has a lot of walls, but they’re not all made of rock and plastic. Some are intangible, and some are harder to scale for certain people. And yes, it’s true that we can’t expect climbing to fix every problem in society. But in my opinion, it’s our responsibility to keep the sport healthy, and that means making sure climbing lives onto future generations long after we’ve climbed our last. That cannot happen without making climbing more accessible—and that cannot happen without discussing racism. Let’s start that conversation sooner rather than later.