President Obama greets Ranger Shelton Johnson.

New York Times reporter Miryea Navarro has an interesting story about the racial make-up of visitors to U.S. National Parks, which is overwhelmingly white and underwhemlmingly African-American. While it’s not precisely clear why attendance is so homogenous, Shelton Johnson, a ranger for the National Parks Service, has enlisted Oprah Winfrey in trying to change the demographics. An excerpt:

“Yet no group avoids national parks as much as African-Americans. The 2000 survey found that blacks were three times as likely as whites to believe that park employees gave them poor service and that parks were ‘uncomfortable places.’

Park Service officials emphasize that the demographics vary, and that parks like theMartin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site in Atlanta and the Manzanar National Historic Site in Independence, Calif., site of a World War II detention camp for Japanese-Americans, draw diverse crowds.

But attendance tends to be more homogenously white at wilderness parks like Yosemite, where a 2009 survey found that 77 percent of the visitors were white, 11 percent Latino, 11 percent Asian and 1 percent black.

When Ms. Winfrey visited Yosemite this month to tape her show, Mr. Johnson said, he was not surprised to hear that it was her first trip to the park and her first time camping. He said he was more likely to meet someone from Finland or Israel in the park than from, say, Harlem or Oakland, Calif.

‘It’s something that’s pervasive in the culture — it doesn’t matter whether you’re Oprah or a postal worker,’ Mr. Johnson said.”