Naturism and Race

This post came out of discussions about how to make naturist events more inclusive. It is deliberately quite short, we are wanting to tease out some of the wider issues in later posts. We are looking for people who are interested in sharing their own personal experiences with us, please get in touch through the contact details here. 

Have you noticed how everyone in the naturist community is white? Well, maybe not everybody, but there is certainly a noticeable lack of people of colour in our community. Its worth noting that quite a lot of other communities; vegans, feminists, activists, etc. also have this problem.

How can we explain this? Asking around, a few people have made vague attempts to explain it away with “cultural differences”, but this doesn’t seem to sit right with me. The “cultural differences” explanation puts the work in addressing this problem back onto communities of colour, or at least somewhere external to our community. It says that people of colour need to change their cultural identity in order to fit in to our (white, western) naturist community.

Whilst culture, particularly religious ideology, may play its part – there is nothing innately white about a liberal attitude towards non-sexual nudity, nor is the anything innately non-white about a more moralistic attitude.

Full piece