No, The Countryside Is Not Racist

Is the countryside racist? Apparently so, according to a new report by academics from the University of Leicester’s Centre for Hate Studies. The report, titled “How Can We Make The Countryside More Inclusive,” says that non-white people suffer “discomfort” and a “psychological burden” when visiting rural sites in the UK because these areas are “overwhelmingly white.” 

How, exactly, can the countryside be racist? The researchers point to “monocultural customs” like the country pub as some of the chief culprits. They also claim that the natural world does not contain the “appropriate facilities to meet religious and cultural needs,” such as prayer spaces and halal food offerings. The irony of suggesting more animal cruelty as the price of “inclusivity” appears to be lost on these people. As MP Rupert Lowe has pointed out in his campaign to ban halal slaughter, non-stun methods of slaughter cause unnecessary pain and suffering to animals. Nonetheless, rural businesses are being advised to support this cruelty if they want to welcome more “minoritised individuals” and improve their “cultural sensitivity.” 

This is obviously all complete nonsense. There is no spectre of racism haunting the British countryside. There are no doubt individual cases of hate and prejudice, as there are in any part of the country, but the idea that rural communities are crammed full of bigots is as outrageous as it is insulting. According to Tim Bonner, chief executive of the Countryside Alliance, “recent government hate crime statistics show an inverse relationship between rurality and racist hate crimes.” 

Regardless, the identitarian Left has a bizarre fixation on the perceived ‘whiteness’ of the countryside. The debate around racist nature comes up in the UK with an alarming regularity. Last February, charity umbrella group Wildlife and Countryside Link told Parliament (giving evidence on the link between climate change and “systemic racism,” no less) that the British countryside was influenced by “racist colonial legacies” and is “dominated by white people.” Supposedly, the country’s green spaces are plagued by “white British cultural values,” which keeps non-white visitors away. 

The year before that, racism ‘experts’ announced they were launching a scheme, the Rural Racism Project, to “explore the lived realities of those encountering racism within the English countryside whose experiences are routinely overlooked, minimised and unchallenged.” These academics—also from the Centre for Hate Studies at Leicester—wanted to uncover why non-white people accounted for so few participants in hiking and other outdoor pursuits. Indeed, a 2019 study found that just 1% of visitors to English national parks came from an ethnic-minority background. 

There is a very simple reason why the British great outdoors skews white. And it’s not because our rural villages are populated by hateful racists who hunt ethnic minorities for sport, or whatever it is these people think is going on. Rather, it’s because the overwhelming majority of non-white Brits live in urban areas. As of 2021, around 96% of people from an ethnic-minority background live in towns and cities—mostly in inner-city areas and post-industrial towns. London alone accounts for almost half of the country’s entire black population. So it’s far more likely that ethnic-minority people are being kept away from the countryside by Britain’s terrible transport links, rather than a plague of racism. 

There is something absurdly funny about going to a place overwhelmingly inhabited by white people, and then being shocked and horrified that white people live there. Incredibly, this response seems to be echoed across Western Europe. The race-obsessed Left has the countryside in their sights as one of the few remaining targets of ‘decolonisation.’ 

In 2021, Dutch news site De Correspondent ran an article under the headline, “The Dutch nature scene is far too white.” The author, Thomas Oudman, argues that the fact there are practically no black Dutch bird experts must be evidence of some kind of systemic racism. The idea that bird enthusiasts are mostly white men is intolerable to him—it can’t possibly be that people from different cultural and ethnic groups tend to have different interests and pastimes. He expects an already niche hobby to perfectly mirror Dutch society, which itself is only around 5% black. An article from 2023 expressed a similar concern, with one researcher claiming the Netherlands needs to “decolonise the nature sector,” because “not everyone feels welcome.” Another complained that things like hiking, cycling, and camping were largely perceived as “white hobbies.”

Similarly, a Spiegel article from 2023 moaned that, in Germany, “Black people rarely go into the forest because they don’t feel safe there.” In an effort to combat this, black-only holiday camps were set up to provide children with a space “free of racism.” Initially, the article included a warning that white people should “stay as far away from the camps as possible,” but this was removed after it provoked (understandable) controversy. But perhaps it’s the non-white Germans who ought to steer clear from outdoor pursuits—after all, according to brain-rotted leftists, hiking is a gateway drug to right-wing extremism and white supremacy. 

This kind of rhetoric pushes a narrative that rural communities are backward and primitive. Treating pubs, parish fêtes, and rambling clubs like hotbeds of racism will only further drive division between town and country. Countryside dwellers are more likely to feel bemusement rather than guilt upon being told they must decolonise their hedgerows. They may well also feel a deserved sense of anger at being patronised and demonised by urban academics. 

It’s insulting to ethnic minorities, too. Why do we not think they are capable of making decisions for themselves? If the majority don’t want to go hiking or birdwatching, are we supposed to convince them otherwise? And why do we assume that they are so fragile so as not to be able to cope with being surrounded by people who are different from them? If, as we are so often told, diversity is one of the most important values, then presumably we should be celebrating pluralism—including the freedom to not share exactly the same hobbies.

In the end, the ‘racist’ countryside is just another metropolitan fever dream. There are no white supremacists hiding among the crops or goose-stepping militias lurking in the hills. All of this is a delusion of a city-dwelling elite, whose closest brush with nature is the plastic pot plant in their air-conditioned office. If they tried stepping outside of their physical and ideological bubble for once, they’d find out that the countryside, from the UK to the Netherlands to Germany, is populated by friendly, interesting and overwhelmingly hospitable people. Some fresh air and a digital detox would do them—and the rest of us—a great deal of good.