A woman by the name of Nina Revoyr had an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times on Sunday entitled “What’s missing when you hike the California backcountry? People of color.”  Here,  But it’s better entitled “Climbing Aboard The Crazy Train.”

Because Nina believes (or says she believes) that one reason that “people of color” are not well represented in the hiking and camping community is that:

For many, the wilderness, historically, is dangerous territory. Escaped slaves passed through forests full of danger …

Of course, a scholar might ask if anybody anywhere at any time in all the immense body of literature recording the black experience in America ever noted a tendency on the part of black parents to pass on a fear of the forests.

But scholarship hasn’t very much attraction to race-baiters like Ms. Revoyr, who’ll seize upon any silliness to illustrate how steeped in hatred America is even to the point of reformulating Congressman Alcee Hastings’s wacko idea that national parks are racist because blacks were once lynched from trees and there are any number of trees in those parks (see the Frontpage Magazine article here).

Or was she not race-baiting at all, and just having a bad day?  Let’s look.

Wiki describes her as an author of a number of novels, so I go to Amazon, and the first of her books I come to is entitled Wingshooters, whose first review is from Booklist and begins:

Revoyr continues her unique and affecting exploration of American racism in a concentrated novel that draws breathtaking contrasts between all that is beautiful in life and the malignancy of hate. Charlie, an alpha blue-collar male and a bigot like his buddies, is horrified when his son marries a Japanese exchange student…

So no, she wasn’t just having a bad day.  Indeed, she’s not just a racial grievance writer; she’s a committed racial grievance writer.  A career racial grievance writer. 

And, according to her, set on that path in life by her horrible experiences growing up in the U.S. as a child of mixed Japanese and Polish parentage. 

Yet, as I believe Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot once said, “Hastings [another Hastings], you persist in believing something is true just because someone says it is true.  That is almost always a mistake.”

One of my five sons married a Japanese exchange student.  In fact, of my six grandchildren, four are either part Vietnamese or part Japanese.  I’m kind of a blue-collar guy – at least that’s my family background.  I associate with such folks at the American Legion, in gun clubs, church, even Overeaters Anonymous.  I know literally hundreds of them and have never encountered any malignancy of hate toward these children.

Indeed, quite the opposite.  When I took two of my young grandchildren to a show put on by a local woodworking club, I almost couldn’t escape the abundance of enthusiasm those white blue-collar guys and girls showed for kids, any kids, and they left with pockets stuffed with tiny hand-made wooden airplanes, giraffes, and stirring spoons.  Same thing at an encampment of Revolutionary War reenactors, where a big burley guy insisted they fire his gigantic antique brass horse pistol, and if saner heads had not prevailed, he would have had them loading and firing cannon. 

Most American people, blue-collar people, white-collar people, collarless people any color or tinge, just love kids.  Any sort of kids.  And will do anything for them.  One hundred percent white or not.

And let’s bear in mind that my grandchildren were and are growing up in a majority-white working-class American small town where the race-baiters like Ms. Revoyr tell us the American malignancy of hate both endures and propagates.

In short, I don’t believe that Nina Revoyr is telling us the truth, or at least not the whole truth, about either her own experience or the experience of others.

But returning to Ms. Revoyr’s original topic, maybe blacks just don’t like hiking and camping?  Has she ever thought of that?  Has she ever talked to a wide cross-section of blacks and asked why they’re not schlepping through the poison ivy and sleeping in the cold rain like the rest of us?  Ms. Revoyr describes herself as half-Japanese and half-Polish; has she ever remarked on the fact that blacks don’t like Polka music all that much, either?

Aren’t blacks, or anybody else, for that matter, allowed to like what they want to like without some darker meaning being attributed to it in a major publication?

So will these people like Ms. Revoyr ever give up making things up about racial animosities?  Answer: not any time soon, because there is a market for what they’re cranking out, it’s extremely addictive, and just like cocaine as long as people keep buying people like Ms. Revoyr will keep pushing. 

But my real question is, when will blacks themselves finally start telling liberal America haters like Ms. Revoyr to shut up?  “No, you idiot – we’re not afraid of forests or trees or Polka music.  We’re not afraid of Sharknado, David Duke, or those disgusting corn dogs whites insist on eating at county fairs, either.  The only thing we’re afraid of is being forced to listen to white grievance street walkers like you telling us what we’re thinking and feeling.”

But until then, let’s not take any more rides on the Crazy Train.

And oh yeah, aren’t I lucky to have grandchildren in America?  And aren’t they lucky to be growing up in America?  And of course, aren’t they lucky to have me for a grandfather?

Even if I wouldn’t let some enthusiast help them load up an old cannon with gunpowder and fire it off.

Richard F. Miniter is the author of The Things I Want Most, Random House, BDD.  See it here.  He lives and writes in the colonial-era hamlet of Stone Ridge, New York, blogs here, and can also be reached at miniterhome@gmail.com.