As such, I hereby retire from women's history as it relates to bikes with this post about women's present as it relates to bikes. Not sure if I'll entirely surrender my feminist soapbox, but I promise it's in at least temporary storage.
As I noted in one of my previous posts, biking is slowly moving away from its 1980s and 1990s past as a white guy thing. My last post focused largely on the gender switch, but Veronica O. Davis, a woman recently interviewed in Bicycling Magazine, is focusing on both gender and race with her D.C.-based group, Black Women Bike D.C.
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| Photo of Black Women Bike D.C. circa August 2012. Find the original on veronicao.com |
One thing she said in the interview linked above really struck me, especially after noting the way people can be hesitant to enter a sport where no one seems to look like you.
"Everyone comes for different reasons, and it’s about something for everyone, and making people feel comfortable. So if someone says I only want to go to the end of my block, that’s all right, we’re going to celebrate you. If you said I’ll do a century, guess what, we’re going to celebrate you too. A woman in our group, she’s biking around Japan right now—we’re celebrating her. It’s really just about celebrating people getting on a bike."
Yes, that does seem like a lot of celebrating and perhaps an overly saccaharine women's daytime television vein of discussion. But then she goes on to say this:
"A bike is always there. There’s a sense of freedom—I’m not confined to a specific route. If I want to stop and smell the trees I can stop and smell the trees. If I want to go fast, I can go fast. So it’s about empowering women to have that sense of freedom and not being stuck on someone else’s schedule or agenda"
It's definitely easy to forget in Jackson Hole that it can be really limiting to consider white skin the default condition for people as a whole - partly because this is about as white a community as I've ever known. Think about it - if I describe to you "a person doing something," what color is the person you're picturing? If you're on a marketing team, a planning board, a bike shop staff, you can end up leaving a lot of people out of the world you're planning for that way.
If everyone can't look at biking and see enough people like them doing it to feel like it's totally normal, that's a problem. That's kind of why bikes were such a big deal for women in general, and why they're still a big deal for pretty much everyone who isn't a white guy. The more parts of life where you don't see a wide variety of people participating, the easier it is to see all but the most common participants as "extra," or "peripheral" instead of, you know, "people." Biking is awesome, and it shows everyone that all the things it represents - physical fitness, green transportation, looking kinda goofy in spandex - reach a wider community than you might think.
Major kudos to Ms Davis for showing black women that a bike doesn't know what color you are - if you can make the thing move, you can have the same freedom she does, or that I do. It's really great, and all anyone has to do to figure that out is find a way to feel comfortable trying it.
That being said, bikes may not know what color you are, but their riders sure do. If your biking community is only full of people who look like you and ride like you, maybe you need to look around your whole community and see who isn't riding, and think about why. Because I guaran-damn-tee you, biking isn't mostly done by white people because white people are just more naturally gifted at it than everyone else. Men don't still have a slim majority of bikers because women just don't like bikes. If either of those is your hypothesis, you need a new one, stat.
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