The Unbearable Whiteness of Skiing

Annie Gilbert Coleman's "The Unbearable Whiteness of Skiing uses a variety of rhetorical devices to support the author's contention that commercial ski resorts exclude ethnicity both on the slopes and in their promotions. Tracing the European ethnic roots of skiing's popularity in the U.S., the author argues that the convergence of class and ethnicity in the ski industry has created a condition she refers to as "ethnic whiteout," an oxymoron in its own right as ethnicity typically refers to people of color (Coleman 144). Coleman's (163) main argument is that the American ski industry is an increasingly wealthy culture that excludes minorities and transforms people of color into "invisible workers or exotic objects of tourism" in order to appeal to wealthy whites.

Even before she begins her essay, Coleman's title "The Unbearable Whiteness of Skiing" is a rhetorical device used to demonstrate the lack of "color" in the American ski industry. For her title is an allusion to the novel and film known as "The Unbearable Lightness of Being." In that film, a dominant culture (Russia) crushes a minority group of Czechoslovakian rebels. This allusion is a meaningful reference because, according to Coleman (141), even in the American West, a region known for its racial and ethnic diversity, "Ski resorts have remained as white as snow." By using this simile, Coleman adopts another rhetorical device to demonstrate how the American ski industry typically excludes

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ad all French dishes�and silverware, and the service was exactly like a small place in Chamonix or Val d'Isere." Such images further reinforce the whiteness of ski resorts and their offerings, ones that necessarily exclude people of color. Such images not only serve to reinforce whiteness at the expense of ethnicity, but they are driven by the fact that whiteness is more of a marketing draw than ethnicity for those who typically have the money to afford the luxury of ski trips. As Coleman (151) writes of this phenomenon, "When cooks from Minturn transform into French chefs and Taos, New Mexico, attracts skiers with its European hospitality, you know that European images have acquired a market value." Ski resorts, knowing the value of promoting European whiteness, also resorted to making sure their employees in high profile positions (ski instructors, chefs, etc.) also embodied or displayed such values and images. This was achieved through hiring white individuals for such positions and dressing them in ways that once more reinforced white European values at the expense of ethnic diversity. Coleman uses hyperbole at one point to exaggerate the appearance of such workers in order to show how ludicrous such images appeared in th

Category: Psychology - T