Heritage, Tourism, and Race (Heritage, Tourism, and Community)

I just finished The Other Side of Leisure. It's really, really good. Jackson did an amazing job of connecting the "everyday lives" of black people with sophisticated theoretical analysis of leisure, exclusion, and African-Americans' creative construction of spaces of joy. She emphasizes the right of refusal (as in the refusal to be denied the right to public recreation) and identifies leisure as an expression of humanity. Each individual story is powerful and poignant independently and together they are inspiring and painful. The Mammoth Cave and Shake Rag account of how generations of blacks extending back to the enslaved explored, explained and defined this space only to be excluded from it when it became a National Park offers a kick in the teeth to Weber and Sultana, "Why do so few Minority People Visit National Parks," and its implication that there is something wrong, and possibly even un-American about "Minority people" because they "decline" to use public parks. This account also critiques indirectly more mainstream rhetoric like that of the Sierra Club whose roots and realities are deeply racist and deeply denied. I hope the book becomes required reading for NPS personnel. Jackson's concludes in McKinney, TX where the violent exclusion of black kids enjoying a neighborhood pool party brings the whole work full circle. I hope the book is being widely reviewed, read, discussed, and assigned. It is perfect for an undergraduate class -- accessible, worthy of great discussion, and theoretically sophisticated. Just wow.