Friends,

I have to say this thread has been a good read and I am thrilled to find out that the diversity of RYPN regulars is greater than I realized.

Happy Thanksgiving,

Rob

we are all of different colors forms types and states of gender.
makes it more interesting, just as an engine is to a caboose.

I'm part Scottish, English, Prussian, so beam me aboard Sceppe

I see the minority or female under-representation, as an instance of a much larger phenomenon that I see in many other places.

Computer hackers. Board gamers. D&D types. Chess club. SETI@home. Early adopters of almost any technology. The people who camp out all night at Best Buy or the Apple Store for the latest video game or iGadget. Almost exclusively - white males, with some Asians thrown in. Cultural discrimination, you say - nope - on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog!

Take World of Warcraft, the faraway most popular MMORPG. The other players can't know you're black, gay, old, morbidly obese, HIV+ or even have legs. They can't even tell from female unless you use voice chat. They CAN see your in-game character race - human, elf, gnome, werewolf. Nobody even cares about that. All they care about is be nice, show up on time and play well. And in that absolutely discrimination-free environment - well - who goes to the annual convention? Take a look
http://www.google.com/images?q=blizzcon+crowds

(You have to factor that computer gaming is young and railroads are not; it's huge in Asia; and most photo-records of the event are taken by those same crowds, and thus, are wildly skewed toward sexy elf chicks in bikini armor.)

Factoring thusly -- it looks like exactly the demographic of railway preservation.

I attribute this not to race, but to culture, and the tendency of culture to parallel race. It's not that many cultures are anti-intellectual - not at all. It's that many cultures place HUGE priorities in places other than intellectualism, introversion and love of learning; such as hard work, family, and church. As such, members of those cultures, just don't have TIME to be a geek. It's not valued, and other things are, so that's what people do.

It is on this altar that I lay our lack of minorities. That and, for immigrant minorities, a complete lack of personal history in the subject.

Certainly patently untrue unless limited to the last 40 years or so. Our railroads not only were built by immigrants, but largely operated by immigrants and in fact encouraged immigration directly by sending agents to Europe to offer farmland to farmers having little plots in very crowded countries in an effort to populate the frontier in the northern plains. Let us not forget that ethnic minorities were not only racially, but nationally seperate from the English based culture that ran most big businesses and held national public office. Until these immigrants successfully melted into the pot and acquired their share and became part of the "majority," and in fact intermarried into other national groups and became the average American mixed breeds we "caucasions" are mostly today, they faced the same discrimination faced for much longer by ethnic groups whose physical characteristics make them more easily definable. Bill Cosby did a film on derogatory national / ethnic stereotyping, complete with jokes and uncomplementary "N-word" type names, that should be required elementary school cultural education. Knowing all our ancestors faced prejudice and discrimination makes for an empathic basis to relate to those who still do.

dave

The contemporary situation is the topic of this thread. None of us care about the racial makeup of railway museums 70 years ago, since there weren't any.

The problem is, "immigrant" is a word whose meaning flows like a glacier. I think you are erroneously fixing "immigrant" to mean the 19th-20th century trend, those whose port of call was Ellis Island.

For the purpose of my posting (and probably this whole thread), you should assume that "immigrant" means those port of call is SFO or the Arizona chapparal.

The top 10 sources of immigrants are: Mexico, China, Phillipines, India, Vietnam, Cuba, El Salvador, Dominican Republic, Canada and Korea.

So what's at your museum to interest them???