White People On A Hike

Submission 4,725

Part of a series on TikTok. [View Related Entries]

About

White People On A Hike, also known as White People Hiking or Walking Past White People When They Hike, refers to a TikTok trend in which people parody white people's perceived tendency to be polite and courteous to strangers on hikes, particularly by making short comments while passing others on trails. In October 2023, a similar video created by a group of Black people became the subject of discussions about racism on X (formerly Twitter), with some conservative X users claiming they were unable to identify the humor in the video and taking offense to it while others felt it was a lighthearted generalization of white people.

Origin

Jokes about white people's perceived tendency to be polite and courteous on hiking trails (usually with lighthearted small talk) have often been explored in sketch comedy, with a notable early example being an April 16th, 2023, TikTok^[1] posted by user @mikelenczewski, which gathered over 16 million views and 2.5 million likes in six months (seen below).

Spread

Over the following months, various other creators made videos joking about the polite behavior of white people on hikes, with TikToker^[3] @bjcalvillo posting a similar video on May 27th, 2023, gathering over 5 million views and 600,000 likes (seen below, left). On August 18th, TikToker^[4] @darbleymiller posted a video participating in the trend, gathering over 4 million views and 700,000 likes in two months (seen below, right).

Racism Discourse

On October 1st, 2023, TikToker^[2] @rasclottt posted a similar video about encountering friendly white people while hiking, gathering over 16 million views and 2.6 million likes in a day (seen below).

The video was then reposted to X^[5] on October 1st by user @bannedyoangel with the caption, "I’m wheezing laughing." The post gathered over 130,000 likes in a day (seen below).

Various X users gained viral traction on posts questioning the humor of TikToker @rasclottt's video in particular, with many expressing confusion about what the joke is.

For example, X^[6] user @ElijahSchaffer made one such post on October 1st, gathering over 29,000 likes in a day (seen below, left). Ian Miles Cheong reposted the video asking what is funny about it,^[7] and then saying that Black people would react badly to such a joke if it were centered around them. Cheong's post gathered over 48,000 likes in a day (seen below, right).

Other X users subsequently posted various responses to the video, which some found overtly racist, as seen in posts by user @0x49fa98^[8] (seen below, left) and @Kiefer_Wool^[9] (seen below, right).

X^[10] user @AzaleaDunn posted a thread discussing the racist reaction to a group of Black people remaking a joke about white people hiking, theorizing that many conservatives don't understand the humor in the joke because they see jokes as necessarily hurtful. The post gathered over 17,000 likes in a day (seen below).