Google Maps Bike There…for a safer, healthier, happier world. :-)

Rode into work today — won’t be doing that again for a while (ever?).

Admittedly, I have a low tolerance for suffering indignities, but this morning was just no fun. People who bike in America and other bike-hostile locales around the world are my heroes — they should be treated as such.

Black Like Me (wiki), of course, is the story of a white guy who, in the crazy-racist 1959 American South (not that the North was exempt), disguised himself as an African American/black guy and traveled around the South to see what the daily experience of being black was like. It was an eye-opening experience for author, John Howard Griffin, and for much of America.

Riding a bike is not the same thing as being African-American, of course, but both cyclists and African-Americans are often subjected to unjustified, random violence and threats of violence, and often are hated, just for being black or just for riding a bike. The lucky part for many cyclists, however, is that many of us can just hop off our bikes tonight and never pick them up again.

There is a great profile of John Howard Griffin in the Washington Post, written just four years ago, in 2007. There may be a lesson here for the cycling community:

Thus began Griffin’s six-week odyssey through the South, a journey that took him from New Orleans to Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia. In March of the next year Sepia published his story, and in 1961 an expanded version was published as a book, “Black Like Me.” The cumulative effect of the magazine story, the book and all the attendant publicity — Griffin was interviewed by the television journalists Dave Garroway and Mike Wallace and featured in Time magazine — was astonishing. The book became a bestseller. It awoke significant numbers of white Americans to truths about discrimination of which they had been unaware or had denied.

I was one of them. In 1961, I was 21 years old, newly graduated from Chapel Hill. I had written sympathetically about the emerging black protests for the student newspaper, but I was deeply ignorant about the truths of black life in America. That it took a white man to begin my awakening is, in hindsight, distressing, but Griffin’s story managed to put me in a black man’s shoes as nothing else had. (My first readings of James Baldwin’s essays were still a couple of years in the future.) “Black Like Me” had a transforming effect on me, as apparently it did on innumerable others. That it has remained in print for more than four decades is testimony to its continuing influence, in great measure because it is taught in high schools and colleges.

How do we get drivers to understand what it’s like to be a biker? Obviously, one answer is to build appropriate infrastructure so we can allow more ‘regular people’ to bike — not just thrill-seekers, or only young males, or the indigent, etc. But what else can we do?

Being terrorized on the road is such a common occurrence for cyclists that many of us just take it for granted. Most of the time it doesn’t even warrant a phone call to police because we are confident we won’t be taken seriously. Subjecting ourselves to violence and threatened violence is just something one signs up for if one decides to ride a bike in America, and in many parts of the world. It shouldn’t be this way. We could really use a ‘Black Like Me’ for cycling. Even a full accounting of the violence and threatened violence that cyclists experience on a single day could be very useful to help sensitize drivers to what it’s like out on the roads as a cyclist — to help build support for common standards of decency and new and better laws to protect cyclists.

I’ve wondered aloud about trying to get newspapers to run a ‘Ask A Cyclist!‘ column — because drivers are typically the most ignorant of road users, and cyclists are typically the most knowledgeable, and much of the harassment and violence drivers direct at cyclists is because drivers are ignorant of the law. “Get out of the middle of the road!” or “Get on the sidewalk!” are just two of the more-common battle cries. The ‘Ask A Cyclist’ column would be a take-off on the ¡Ask A Mexican! column. The wiki says this:

Every week, readers submit their questions based on Mexicans, including their customs, labor issues, and illegal immigration. Arellano responds to two queries a week in a politically incorrect manner often starting with the words “Dear Gabacho.”

If I had a sense of humor or could write, I’d try to do it myself. Any takers?

Update: Impeccable timing: some teens wanted to provide me a good example of unjustified violence against bikers.