Walls are Meant for Colonizing
Racial identity presented itself as a matter of trammels and impediments, as "tightening bonds about my feet." As I looked out into my racial world, the whole thing verged on tragedy. My "way was cloudy" and the approach to its high goals by no means straight and clear. I saw the race problem was not as I conceived, a matter of clear, fair competition, for which I was ready and eager. It was rather a matter of segregation, of hindrance and inhibition.
When something is young, evolving, and fluid, it’s difficult to define, but as it hardens into a predictable shape, it’s much easier to understand. Through the years, the Reel Rock climbing film series has served as an essential and unintentionally honest discourse on race in rock climbing. And discourse doesn’t just shape and create knowledge. It ratifies power.
Discourse—public dialogue—is knowledge and power. The Reel Rock short films create a range of expressions about climbing that give a vocabulary of knowledge we use to talk about the sport. Reel Rock is a discourse of language and practice that creates and evolves with the growth of climbing and acts as a public pedagogy on climbing as an idea. When discourse solidifies into an institution, it becomes easier to examine the ideas that shaped it.
If we understand Reel Rock as a discourse on rock climbing, we can’t appreciate its whole meaning without understanding its functionality to its average viewers. To deepen understanding, we might ask ourselves: What is Reel Rock teaching the viewer? About climbing, about sport, and about who a climber is? When viewing Reel Rock, one finds three common elements that constitute an “average” Reel Rock; whiteness, wilderness, and winning.
Whiteness (Segregation)
By the numbers, Reel Rock’s selection of featured athletes is overwhelmingly white (91.42%) and male (82.28%)*. It also repeatedly features many of the same characters; all but one (Ashima Shiraishi) of those who appear three or more times are white men. Alex Honnold & Chris Sharma appear in 12% of all Reel Rock films, and of 174 feature roles spanning 95 individual climbers, only 13 were nonwhite. Asumah (2004) tells us this is “...putting a normative value on whiteness for the rest of the society constrains subordinate groups in a condition of cultural imperialism.” While Reel Rock, under some pressure, has begun diversifying its lineup in recent years, it’s impossible to separate it as a mode of discourse as climbing evolved. While what Reel Rock currently is might be slightly different from what it has been, it’s critical to unpack how its discourse has defined the sport today.
Essential in understanding Reel Rock’s role in shaping rock climbing is understanding the degree of its presence in the climbing community. Reel Rock is ubiquitous in climbing media. Most climbing gyms have copies, show old films, and have ticketed screenings. Indeed, Reel Rock’s entire business model centers around a traveling premier model where facilities will host paid viewings. Its short films form a central narrative about what climbing is, the major characters, and who climbing is for. It’s telling that their first foray into popular media was a retelling of the Yosemite Golden Age for 2014’s Valley Uprising, which reifies its central narrative of outlier white men setting themselves an “impossible” task in a pristine wilderness. Copies of Dosage are as familiar a sight in climbing facilities as old hangboards and chalk dust.
Researchers have found that sports media functions as a kind of public instruction that informs new athletes’ understandings of themselves, others, and their bodies. Faquharson & Marjoribanks (2006) found that these pedagogies “...are implicated in shaping subjectivities including in terms of the embodiment of gender, whiteness, and race amongst other categories of difference.” Rich (2011) further found that “Of consequence is how public pedagogies frame knowledge, practices and embodied learning negotiated within and beyond physical education.” Cummins (2006) says it even more plainly: “pedagogy is significant to the production of learner subjectivities including as these relate to gender, race, and physically active bodies.”
Reel Rock, intentionally or otherwise, functions as a teaching tool that defines and normalizes the parameters of rock climbing for viewers, creating conscious and unconscious bias. The lesson of Reel Rock is not difficult to parse: if you set yourself against a project and emerge victoriously, you are “good.” But the shadow lesson is much more interesting. What things do you need to “project” these impossible tasks? Excess resources, ample time, and the ability to go to and feel safe in “wild” spaces. Who has the time and resources, the comfort to go anywhere and do anything, living “free” as a dirtbag without ever considering the land's etiology and the parameters that make accessing it possible?
Climbing is not exclusively a white privilege, but creating and evolving the discourse about climbing is exclusively white because its Monomyth is only accessible and legible as a function of whiteness. You don’t have to be white to climb, but you do have to be white to define climbingness, and you have to be conversant in whiteness and its values to fit into climbing culture.
Wilderness (Hindrance)
“White folks sure know how to make some nice foliage.” - The Boondocks, April 24, 2005
A key element in climbing discourse is location. The central tension of the films consists of a call to adventure to a more authentic place, a place that is free of race, “politics**” and gender; a realm of pure meritocratic accomplishment; the kingdom of Man vs. Wild.
Melissa Sexton’s excellent 2011 Essay: “Ashima and Obe: Should We See Race/Class/Gender on the Rock?” articulates the tensions in this conception of nature: “Because the wilderness enthusiast and wanna-be climber in me can outweigh the gender critic, and I can revel in physical performance, wild landscape, intellectual quandaries. I love these places because I can embrace the fantasy they provide, a realm where you’re judged solely based on your mettle. Yet I can also see the holes in these visions, the way even the “pure” realm of the rock is a constructed space that favors certain people, relies on certain resources for access, rewards certain kinds of attitudes about ability and embodiment.”
One central problem with this framing is what wilderness is. Like race and class and countless other structures, Wilderness is a construct, something we have created and has meaning only within our cultural space. Definitions of wilderness vary enormously but instructive is the 1964 Wilderness Act:
“A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”
This definition solidifies “nature” as a space that is separate from “culture,” a dichotomized and colonized condition that undergirds every cry of “nature can’t be racist!” or “the outdoors doesn’t discriminate!” If nature is separate and “pure” then the imposition of “politics” and race becomes unacceptable because it violates that foundational divide.
But this definition of wilderness is incomplete. It ratifies what Nicole Lannoy (2012) calls a “treasured patrimony” of the white majority precisely because it has historically and contemporarily been a binary from a settler-colonial & capitalistic perspective. Parks and wild spaces are defined by their absence of human beings despite a rich human history. The Red River Gorge in Kentucky, one of the premier climbing locations in the United States and arguably the world, is not a wilderness. It is one of the 5 “World Hearth of Plant Domestication” sites globally and has a human history of over 11,000 years. It is no more wild and unknown than a suburban backyard; it is wilderness in a contemporary conception because it is new to white people.
“‘White wilderness’ is socially constructed and grounded in race, class, gender, and cultural ideologies” (DeLuca and Demo 2001). It is a romantic construct, intimately tied to a transcendentalist merger with manifest destiny, perhaps best embodied by John Muir - a white man who we attribute with the “first ascents” of mountains that have been spiritual centers for thousands of years, a white man who despised and denigrated the native inhabitants.
In fact, of the 42 most significant “first ascents” in North American climbing history, 23 (54.76%) of them are on sacred mountains to the First Peoples of America. Indeed, the very conception of parks, Caroline Finney exclaims, is predicated on “African Americans, as well as other nonwhite peoples, were not allowed to participate on their own terms in this project [creating parks]” (p. 50). Instead, parks were created as white destinations to escape “urban” miscegenation.
It’s critical to simultaneously look at what else was happening during the so-called “Golden Age” of rock climbing, namely, Reconstruction and Jim Crow. While Muir is “conquering” Yosemite, the 15th amendment ratifies voting rights for Black Americans—who were freed from slavery just four years prior. While John Salathé is hammering in his pitons on the Devil’s Thumb, Jackie Robinson becomes the first black athlete in the modern sense—in part because of Harry Truman’s legal support for integration and civil rights.
When Royal Robbins, Mike Sherrick, and Jerry Gallwas finally ascended Half Dome via the Regular Route in 1957, the Civil Rights Act was being ratified. Cathedral spire was climbed by a white man a few months before the Federal Government passed the Wheeler–Howard Act in 1934, returning autonomy and territorial control to the American indigenous tribes.
This history is the starting point for the sport, as Reel Rock makes clear in Valley Uprising. Rock climbing begins and constructs itself inside an inherently segregated space whose conception of wildness intentionally excludes people of color.
One of the best examples of Reel Rock saying the quiet part out loud is in 2020’s First Ascent, Last Ascent, where climbers (and white women) Hazel Findlay and Maddy Cope “journey to the rocky outer reaches of Mongolia, on a quixotic search for new trad routes.” Those “outer reaches” are a fully populated area with a human culture older than the entirety of North and South America, yet nevertheless are presented as a “frontier” to be “conquered.” It emphasizes the centrality of the white gaze in our understanding of wilderness. Wilderness, then, is not the absence of human beings; instead, it is, in this narrow conception, the absence of white bodies and white experiences.
Winning (Inhibition)
What is the consequence of lionizing, over and over, the accomplishments of a small group of white men? The narrative has become fixed into a format, articulated beautifully by Anaheed Saatchi at Melanin Basecamp as: “white guy has idea that pushes limits of human capability; white guy’s origin story; white guy trains; white guy has setback(s); white guy has doubts! white guy ultimately wins.” As Devin puts it in the episode: it is the Superman story, over and over. Is it a bad story? It is not. But if it’s the only way we tell climbing stories, then this framing is a problem. Reel Rock has calcified the narrative into a trope so rigid that even when the subjects are Black (Black Ice) or women (Break on Through), the films must employ the heroic narrative format, reminding us that whiteness is a construct within which others must fit and contort themselves.
Why is framing climbing videos through “winning” problematic? After all, it’s inspirational material that creates aspirational goals for the viewers. Climbing is notoriously predicated on repeated failures, so sending is that much sweeter, perched on a pyramid of months, even years, of mastering even a single move.
Climbing, like any extreme sport, is addictive. Fischer (2008) found that risk-positive media exposure affected decision-making because the viewer was “primed” to mediate the risk analysis through the lens of media. Langseth and Salvesen (2018) found that climbers develop a “risk libido,” which can impair judgment as to ethical, safe, and credible climbing practices. Heirene, Shearer, Roderique-Davies, & Mellalieu (2016) go even farther, stating: “Rock climbing athletes appear to experience withdrawal symptoms when abstinent from their sport comparable to individuals with substance and behavioral addictions … Deductive content analysis indicated support for each of the three categories of anhedonia, craving, and negative affect.” Climbers at the highest levels overlap in significant ways with substance users.
But addictiveness alone is not a detriment—instead, it serves to highlight several important factors that run through Reel Rock. Climbing is a very expensive niche addiction, requiring resources (mental, physical, and financial) that go far beyond the parameters of ordinary sports. It requires 3-sigma rated gear which wears out quickly, financial means to acquire the equipment and travel, and free time and dedication far above other intramural or amateur sports. In its “purest” form, it's also practiced outside in distant locales, far from urban environments and their political machinations. There is much debate about what constitutes “real” rock climbing, with many arguing that “climbing” without the “rock” is mere practice for the main event. In contrast, others contend that the accomplishments and growth of the gym experience are in and of themselves meaningful.
But Reel Rock spends very little time in the gym, except during the “setbacks” portion of the narrative. Again, Reel Rock communicates clearly: “Real” climbing happens outdoors, and “real” climbers are those deep in the throes of addiction to an expensive and exclusive domain. Only by the hero going into the “wilderness” with abundant “passion” can they finally triumph. Only that wilderness is not wild, and those passions, admirable and inspiring though they may be, are underwritten by class, race, and social positionality.
Is it any wonder, then, that climbing is inaccessible to people of color? One does not have to discriminate actively to discourage or create a lack of safety passively. If climbing takes place in the wilderness (defined via white gaze), and can only be accomplished by enhanced access to said wilderness (which has not historically been, implicitly or explicitly, available to people of color), through a resource-intense addiction, that only values the “conquest” or sending of a body of rock - why then are climbers surprised when people of color describe the space as inhospitable?
Regardless of intent, Reel Rock defines and normalizes the parameters of rock climbing for viewers, creating conscious and unconscious bias about rock climbing as a heroic activity for white conquerors of the wilderness. There need be no active discrimination, no “Whites Only” signs at the trailhead parking lot. Inhibition is not discouragement or antagonism, but rather, as DuBois put it, the tightening of the bonds around the feet. Climbers of color can still walk the proverbial mile, but is the experience the same? Knowing you won't go as fast, you’ll have the same criterion for success as the unencumbered walker, and that the mile you are walking is a groomed and cultivated space designed, explicitly, to exclude you? How could that mile be a separate experience from the binding?
In the end, Reel Rock is about power, representation, history, and who we value. The films serve to document rock climbing, but choosing which stories to tell and how to say to them also helps shape the sport's discourse. The greatest power in Reel Rock is not in the fingertips but the audience's reception to the storyteller's gaze.
*These estimates are based on a count of available episodes on the internet - Named & Numbered Episodes - which were included on either the television or film versions of Reel Rock. We reached out to Reel Rock for comment or correction on these numbers but did not receive an answer. We welcome corrections or additions to help us more accurately reflect representation.
**Politics is the favored stand-in for the topic of race when discussing the outdoors, as in “Don’t bring politics into climbing.” Feel free to read “politics” as “your leftist woke nonsense” or “the unwelcome reminder that America is a flawed and racist place that injures many to help a few and it inflames my own discomfort with the cultural culpability I share and the carries dire implications to my own self-conception.” Politics is easier to type.
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