Biking and white privilege

This is an excellent blog post about how biking has helped the author to learn about "white privilege".

I am white. So I have not experienced racial privilege from the “under” side firsthand. But my children (and a lot of other people I love) are not white. And so I care about privilege and what it means for racial justice in our country. And one experience I have had firsthand, which has helped me to understand privilege and listen to privilege talk without feeling defensive, is riding my bike.

I can imagine that for people of color life in a white-majority context feels a bit like being on a bicycle in midst of traffic. They have the right to be on the road, and laws on the books to make it equitable, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are on a bike in a world made for cars. Experiencing this when I’m on my bike in traffic has helped me to understand what privilege talk is really about.

Read the whole thing.

Comments

[charlie]

Thank you. There are really days I wake up and feel blessed in not being white. It must be so difficult with all that guilt.

[Joe D]

Interesting. One piece of privilege he doesn't mention is timed traffic signals; they're never timed for the speed I ride. I've been on many one-way streets where the lights go green in order at the right time for a vehicle going 35 MPH. I can sprint like crazy as hard as I can and I get three (maybe four with a tailwind) blocks before I get another red light, or I can go easy and get two.

[Greenbelt]

David Alpert at GGW also speaks of riding a bike as sometimes being a formative for people who would otherwise not have had the experience of being a despised (by some) minority. I agree. Part of understanding privilege realizing when the whole system is slanted in your favor. Or not.

[DE]

That's true about the lights, and is also true for pedestrians--you walk one block only for the next light to change right as you approach, because it's all timed with cars as the priority. Also, in the suburbs, lights often have trips that cars can set off but bikes can't. I will always run those particular lights.

[SJE]

Very true.

[T]

He offers an interesting analogy. My critique would be that I think socio-economic status has a lot more bearing on privilege than race these days. People get caught up in the easiest to notice differences.

The biking analogy would be that I often are upset with drivers thinking they harbor ill intent, when in fact I'm sure most of it is that they're just not educated as to what the cycling is like. It's less I'm on a bike and more they have never had that experience or not a significant enough one.

[FlyingBikes]

DE -- in Va you are authorized to run those if they don't trip but you have to wait through 2 entire cycles.

[rek]

@DE/FlyingBikes:

Or two minutes, whichever is shorter.

[Smedley Burkhart]

Interesting and well drawn argument, but if it worked, I wouldn't be such an insensitive pig