Racial Diversity in Black Rock City

During the 2014 Burn, the large majority of attendees identified as White. Burners who identified as non-white mostly identified as Hispanic, Asian, and/or Other (in descending order, including respondents who selected more than one race).

White vs Non-White Populations in 2014

 

Over the past three years, participation among whites has fallen slightly and participation among non-whites has shown a corresponding slight increase. Levels of non-white participation in 2014, however, fell short of 2012 rates.

Trending percentage of white participants over last 3 years

Though non-white selections comprised 20.3% of total 2014 responses, 7.7% of participants considered themselves people of color and an additional 8.0% considered themselves people of color sometimes. This indicates that burners identifying as people of color or people of color sometimes identified as multiple non-white races and/or burners identifying as a minority race did not consider themselves people of color.

White only trended – i.e., those who had no other racial identity but White

Comparing BRC’s ethnoracial makeup to that of large US metropolitan areas[1], Black Rock City has a much larger white only population. Only the Boston urban area comes close to BRC’s 81.1% with 77% of Boston metropolitan residents identifying as white alone. BRC’s black population in 2014 was significantly lower than any major US metropolitan area (San Francisco, Washington, DC, Atlanta, Los Angeles, New York, Houston, Chicago, Dallas, and Boston). Even though most burners live in California, BRC has a larger proportion of white only residents and a much lower proportion of black residents than the state as a whole.

[1] All information was taken from the American FactFinder (retrieved from: http://factfinder.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/community_facts.xhtml)

By Rebecca Mason

Edited by Scribble

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