An Ideological Mess: Or, How I Learned To Not Stop Worrying And Still Love Rock Climbing

By Guest Contributor Narinda Heng, cross-posted from Girls Like Giants

Ashima Shiraishi via author. Courtesy: Julien Jarry Photography

I’ve been climbing fences, balconies, and trees for years, but it wasn’t until January of 2011, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, that I went rock climbing for the first time at Malibu Creek State Park. It’s funny that instead of participating in a Day of Service, I went rock climbing. I guess that could be seen as one of the very first moments when I had to grapple with feeling a contradiction between pursuing rock climbing and the many other ideals and identities that I hold dear. And now here I am–here we are–discussing race, gender, and class in rock climbing.

And it feels good. Really good. Even though it’s uncomfortable and difficult. Because I don’t feel like I need to ignore or hide the fact that I think about and experience these contradictions and, what’s more, I’m seeing that there are so many people out there who are supportive of talking about it. And my partner, who has been climbing and dealing with this for much longer than I have, gets to heal a bit from her earlier discouragement with discussions like this in the online climbing community.

I submitted the link to Melissa Sexton’s article Ashima and Obe: Should We See Race/Class/Gender on the Rock?”  to Climbing Narc because recent discussions made me feel like there were people in the climbing community who were ready and willing to talk about it. I was also ready to see people be defensive and assert that there’s no race/gender/class on the rock, and I actually agree with that–those delicious moments of just climbing are part of why I love it. So I understand why Guidoprincess said this:

I think the reason many people, including myself, find this offensive is that we turn to climbing exactly to avoid worthless BS like this. While many other public forums are full of this “racial landscape navigation” nonsense, climbing is a pure activity where everyone can just chill the f-ck out.

The thing is, for me, it’s not nonsense. I navigate my race/sex/class everywhere, all the time, and telling me to “chill the f-ck out” is like telling me to perform a lobotomy on myself. I can’t “chill the f-ck out” because there’s a lot more in play when I’m trying to get into the “pure” part of the activity.

As [commenters] Brad, Tyler, James, and Jason have helped articulate in their thoughtful replies, these issues are real for people, and it’s not about whether the climbing community is racist, but that society is racialized, that there are financial challenges to participation, and that gender and sexuality affect us when we’re at the crag, and that all these things intersect and affect us before we even show up at the crag.

To have people help articulate this reality and why it’s important to talk about it actually makes my eyes sting with relief and joy. Tyler put it well:

… So yes, once you are in the climbing community, race and class have little influence. But one’s access to our community is decided in large part by a vastly unequal society, and we should therefore address this inequity and work to eradicate it.

… There is a difference between looking to a category of people and blaming them for inequality and simply looking at our society and recognizing that inequality exits and the need to address it.

And James Mills points out:

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