The author employs a careful structure in her essay so that the reader is driven to understanding her point as if he or she were getting off a ski lift at the beginning and careening downhill toward her purpose. Beginning with a historical approach in order to convey her message, the author discusses the growth and attitude of the sport in the 20th century. She describes the American adoption of the sport an

A great irony of the skiing industry that the author addresses is the way in which ethnic minorities are represented in skiing communities. Instead of riding the chair lifts and enjoying a dizzying ride down the snow-covered slopes, "Mexican Americans, Mexicans, Eastern Europeans, and even Africans...have been filling manual labor and service jobs, joining a multiethnic labor force that supports American ski culture. During the 1980s, Mexican immigrants and their families began coming to the Roaring Fork Valley because Aspen businesses recruited them as seasonal labor." Unlike the European immigrants who came to the American West to work as ski instructors and became envied and imitated cultural icons, these people of color came for low-wage jobs and are hidden in the parking garages and laundry rooms of the ski resorts. Sadly, too, the minorities who work for the glamorous and opulent resorts can not afford to live anywhere near the polished floors and roaring fires. "Ski resort workers live in broken-down trailers, government-subsidized housing, cheap apartments two mountain passes away from their jobs, tents on National Forest land, and even vans parked in maintenance garages." It would be ironic under any circumstances to have such economic disparity that the workers for an organization could never afford to participate in that organization's business. It is especially ironic in this case because of the ethnic differences that delineate where people reside and because of the striking differences between the earlier European imports and the later people of color. The difference is as great as the distance between the basement laundry and the highest snow-white peak. The author draws on such an irony and weaves it into her argument.

The ethnic segregation of skiing in America has created some bizarre situations that increase the effect of the irony the author describes in her essay. Hispanics who wished to ski had opportunities at small (and sometimes short-lived) family-operated ski resorts. These groups preferred such smaller-scale operations because "'They didn't want to ski Vail...that was a totally alien situation and they didn't feel comfortable there, so skiing became foreign to them.'" How ironic that the foreign feel of having European instructors and European-inspired clothing and equipments trends was so welcome to white groups, and so "foreign" to Hispanics who were probably native to the area.

Native Americans who probably had claim to much of the ski territory before they lost it to white invaders probably have the greatest claim to irony in their treatment by the skiing industry. Some groups like the Mescalero Apaches have built their own ski resorts and employ Native Americans in all sorts of capacities and jobs. Their resort, Ski Apache, caters to Native American skiers and also West Texans and wealthy Mexicans. "Here is an example of Native Americans selling a historically white sport to wealthy Mexicans-a curious scenario." Other Native Americans have not fared so well. The Pueblo Indians were, ironically, treated as outsiders in their own home, Taos Ski Valley, and became "sightseeing attractions in a place where skier-tourists could participate in one set of ethnic cultures and observe another on the same trip." Near Vail, a similar situation occurs where the Native American tribe of Ute Indians "perform a 'snow' dance and become a tourist attraction in the process." The refusal to value indigenous culture while embracing that of a foreign, but white, culture is the central irony that drives the author's argument that skiing is blindingly white.

The author's structural suggestion of complexity opens the door for her use of metaphor in order to explain the "ethnic whiteout" of the ski culture. Europeans may have been an early influence, but that fact does not explain why non-whites living next door to Vail are not skiing there. The answer, suggests the author, lies in metapho

Some common words found in the essay are:
White Americans, Native Americans, Rockies Alps, Scandinavian European, National Forest, Aspen Telluride, American West, Ute Indians, Native American, United America, ski resorts, ski culture, native americans, ski slopes, meta discourse, unbearable whiteness, european skiing, american ski, skiing america, unbearable whiteness skiing, skiing industry, american ski culture, visitors ski resorts, whiteness ski slopes,
Approximate Word count = 2760
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page double spaced)