An important disclaimer: As a white male student at UVM writing about race and cultural exclusion, I recognize that my own experiences and privileges limit my perspective. I do not claim to speak for BIPOC communities at UVM or to fully capture the depth of their lived realities. My analysis is based on documented testimonials, scholarly research, and historical accounts, but it remains an outsider’s interpretation. I offer it in solidarity and humility, inviting those with firsthand experience to challenge, refine, and expand these observations.
A then-current UVM student discourages a concerned Black prospective student from enrolling after they have been accepted. r/UniversityofVermont, 2021.
If you want to understand UVM’s culture, don’t look at what it includes—look at what it leaves out.
It’s time to talk about the more insidious side of granola culture, because when it comes to the people it excludes, the impact isn’t equally distributed.
Technically, there’s only one type of person granola culture pushes out: anyone who doesn’t fit the mold. But who was this mold built for in the first place?
UVM’s self-image has been described satirically as a “holistic, granola and kale-crunching personality” complete with “organic, locally produced foods” and a co-op culture that evokes a very specific eco-conscious archetype rooted in white upper-middle-class sensibilities. Granola culture operates through what could be called encoded whiteness: cultural markers that seem racially neutral but demand familiarity with mainly white social settings and economic situations.
That coding runs deep. Granola’s signature “earthy” look and lifestyle can be traced directly to the back-to-the-land movement of the late 1960s, when health-food entrepreneurs and countercultural communities (overwhelmingly white and middle-class) recast a once-obscure cereal into an emblem of wholesome simplicity. Granola was resurrected in tandem with Lisa Law prepping food for Woodstock in 1969 and Adelle Davis’s “modern granola” recipes, and its aesthetic—tie-dye, hemp, and hiking gear—was cemented by a predominantly white hippie subculture. Raised in suburbs that “were very white” and with “little experience with people of other races,” these hippies often had blind spots that made “African Americans uncomfortable.” Though they were never a majority, their tastes became synonymous with granola culture, baking whiteness into its image from the start.
Skiing offers a parallel. In the United States, skiing remains deeply white-coded. National data shows that 88.2% of ski-area visitors in 2019–20 were white, while Black participants comprised just 1.8%. Recreational skiing as we know it today originated as a European aristocratic sport, intentionally developed into a luxury pastime that required significant wealth, Eurocentric taste, and access to expensive resorts, all of which historically excluded nonwhite communities. In the U.S., this model was imported by resorts like Sun Valley, attracting a clientele that was almost exclusively white and reinforcing both the financial and cultural barriers to entry. Persistent high costs, a lack of diverse representation, and unwelcoming environments continue to frame skiing as a white-coded activity, with limited access for people of color due to these systemic, not accidental, exclusions.
UVM’s celebrated outdoor-and-environmental culture—from the elevation of eco-consciousness above other struggles for justice to the Vermont Outing Club—operates on assumptions of middle-class, land-rich leisure that align with white suburban norms rather than the lived realities of many students of color. As Assistant Dean Marie Vea of the Rubenstein school observes, it’s “passively exclusive because you need particular knowledge and particular equipment to engage. You have to have a certain privilege to engage in the outdoors.” Miguel Reda, a 2017 graduate and former ALANA GEAR co‐leader, similarly noted that “many people of color weren’t comfortable” on regular Outing Club trips, prompting the creation of People of Color Outdoors to “give POC the support to explore that interest.”
The result is a bifurcated system: default, white-coded outdoor programs on one side, POC-focused alternatives on the other. This split underscores how access to recreation at UVM is organized around whiteness. Because a white, upper-middle-class majority reinforces its norms, the customs erased are mostly those practiced by BIPOC students. Outdoor activities often require expensive gear and transportation to spaces historically dominated by white people; the indie folk soundtrack of dorm life, thrift-store fashion done “correctly,” and environmental activism focused on wilderness preservation rather than urban justice all reflect the preferences of a predominantly white student body. The outcome: a supposedly “colorblind” culture whose standards override and erase nonwhite cultural expressions.
For BIPOC students, one effect is constant hyper-awareness. “I always feel cautious about every move I make,” one student shared, “since I’m not white.” Another described “this general energy of not being understood or not being seen, and at the same time, being hyper visible.” The contrast with more diverse spaces is stark: “When I’m in New York, I don’t think about the fact that I’m Black… versus when I’m in Vermont… I get stares, like I’m the only Black person in the room.” Others spoke about the emotional toll: “What makes me comfortable is when I can just… exist as a person and not think about all the structures trying to keep us down… but the emotional safety is really lacking, I think, in Vermont.” Even in online forums, the pattern is clear: “Vermont in general is very white and there is a lot of micro-racism around.”
This is what makes granola culture so insidious: it appears culturally neutral while systematically excluding nonwhite forms of expression. Hip-hop music, streetwear fashion, urban recreational activities, and non-European cultural traditions aren’t rejected explicitly but through structural invisibility—they just don’t register as legitimate within the mainstream framework.
As one Black student put it, “I just try to fit in with my peers and not follow the negative stereotypes that are associated with my race.” To belong, students of color must code-switch into a white-dominated cultural language, leaving behind parts of themselves that don’t translate into hiking boots and acoustic guitars. The result is a campus where diversity exists primarily through assimilation rather than cultural expansion, where students of color are welcome only to the extent they can perform granola identity convincingly.
UVM’s own data confirms what students describe. The 2025 Campus Climate Survey reported no meaningful increase in overall student perceptions of inclusivity, from 79% to 78%, between 2019 and 2025, with ratings actually dropping to 71% in the 2022 survey. Accounts from several UVM students of color over this timespan describe the survey’s numbers are just another confirmation of a longstanding reality—that the default sense of welcome is calibrated to white experience alone. As a senior from 2022, in which the Campus Climate Survey recorded inclusivity ratings dropping down to 71%, observed, “UVM is inclusive for white people because that’s what everyone is. … I don’t think that’s an experience POCs feel.”
This is a cultural ecosystem so entirely white-coded that other forms of expression are constantly at risk of becoming socially unthinkable within its boundaries, via chronic delegitimization, invalidation, and nonrecognition.
A clear way to see how UVM’s culture plays out is to look at the university’s own numbers on inclusivity and belonging broken down by race. In a campus climate where overt racism is rare but white-coded norms dominate, you’d expect the pattern to be steady, with nonwhite groups scoring slightly lower than white students.
That’s exactly what the 2025 Campus Climate Survey shows. Across five different gauges—general inclusiveness (QA01), safety in cultural expression (QB01), satisfaction with equity efforts (QG01), respectful treatment (QA02), and belonging (QA03)—white students come out ahead in 29 of 30 comparisons. Not by a mile, but by an inch: an average gap of about a quarter-point on five-point scales, with effect sizes that are small yet stubborn. Think of it as the quiet tilt of the playing field: hardly visible on a single play, unmistakable over a season.
Belonging is where the tilt is easiest to feel—gaps of roughly half a point for Indigenous/MENA/NHPI and multiracial students, and nearly that for Black students—exactly the pattern you’d expect in a campus where overt racism is rare but the default settings are white-coded. UVM’s own numbers read like a thermostat set a few degrees warmer for one group than for everyone else.
But notice the one place the pattern flips: awareness of discrimination (QF03). Here, every nonwhite group provides an average ranking higher than white students, by margins from +.22 to +.49 out of 5 points. And if you think about it, this seeming “contradiction” makes perfect sense. If you fit into the granola code, UVM feels welcoming precisely because the small exclusions are invisible you. If you live just outside it, you notice what doesn’t register as “real” to the majority—the jokes that pass, the tastes that count, the styles appreciated.
And when the norms of expression map so closely onto white-coded tastes, the result is a campus that can measure itself as “racially inclusive” in the aggregate while quietly taxing anyone who doesn’t speak the dominant dialect.
UVM’s granola culture is a system of social exclusion so effective, it doesn’t need to be explicitly racist to keep racial homogeneity. Instead, the culture polices itself with invisible lines and a strong sense of belonging for those who fit the mold—white, outdoorsy, and upper-middle-class—while silently signaling to everyone else that they’re outsiders.