I’m not a bicyclist. I used to be but gave it up when my body got all creaky and sore. I have nothing against bikes or cyclists. They’re great. But I do wonder how cycling got so mixed up with progressive politics.
I came across this group, Bike East Bay, because Dan Kalb retweeted something of theirs, and I’ve been trying to figure out what makes him tick, so I thought I’d check it out. Turns out that Bike East Bay is exactly what you’d think it is—a group that promotes cycling—but with a twist. Somehow, they decided to focus on what they call “transportation justice.” Now, whenever I hear the word “justice” attached to anything, I immediately know that, whatever the specific cause is, somehow it’s going to be about race. And, in fact, what Bike East Bay means by “transportation justice” is this: “In order to fulfill our mission and build a more just and equitable transportation system, we must take into account our society’s systematic inequalities, including those based on race, class, gender, ability, and geography.”
It’s great that Bike East Bay is promoting bicycling. But what does this have to do with “race, class, gender, ability and geography”? It seems to me that Bike East Bay decided that promoting biking wasn’t enough; they also had to jump on the woke bandwagon and turn into leftist activists—as if only progressives ride bicycles. Maybe their executive board got hijacked by “social justice” types, who saw an opportunity to turn a perfectly innocuous group into another arm of the woke state. I checked out their Board of Directors. The Board Chair is Chris Cassidy. The first line of his bio identifies him as “a social justice advocate and communicator.” Social justice and biking? What is the connection? And why does advocating “social justice” make Mr. Cassidy a good choice to lead a bicycle group? The Vice Chair is Enjoleah Daye, who says one of her goals is to “re-energise the [cycling] space with more advocacy promoting more visibility of Black women cyclists, who often exist in predominantly white spaces.” I don’t even know what “predominantly white spaces” means. Piedmont? Finland? Their Secretary is Eric Monek Anderson, who says “[T]here are many impediments to ensuring that all communities and people in the East Bay have the same freedom to get around safely and on their terms.” Again, what does this mean? Isn’t anyone, anywhere, free to bike? I do understand that biking can be dangerous in our automobile-centric society, but that has nothing to do with race or gender. And what does “on their terms” mean—that cyclists get to do whatever they want, like blowing through stop signs?
Among Bike East Bay’s goals is this: “Build community and build power by centering the voices and experiences of people of color, people with fewer resources, women, and other groups that have been historically excluded by bicycle advocacy and transportation planning.” It sounds like Bike East Bay is implying that cycling has historically been something that White people do. I don’t know if that’s true or not. I live in Downtown-Uptown Oakland, where there are lots of cyclists, and from what I can tell, they’re pretty much from every racial and ethnic group (although they do seem to skew younger). But Bike East Bay’s implication is that people of color, poor people, etc., have been systematically “excluded” from cycling. Really? Who’s excluding them? This sounds like just another imagined grievance. I never heard of a White cycling proletariat that devotes itself to keeping people of color from cycling. Has that been going on? They’ve kept it a pretty good secret.
The problem here is this sense of blame that progressives always aim at White people. Everything is White peoples’ fault. If people of color aren’t biking, it’s not because they choose not to but (according to Bike East Bay) because of a conspiracy to keep them from doing so. The progressive left always does this: they find racial grievance everywhere. This attitude is very insulting to people of color. It suggests that they’re unable to make informed choices of their own, but are simply puppets manipulated by a White power structure.
I honestly don’t know what Bike East Bay hopes to achieve by this trendy preoccupation with race. My advice for them is, Stay in your lane. Promote cycling as a healthy, environmentally-friendly way of getting around. But please, don’t drag wokeness into it. Next thing you know, Bike East Bay will be calling for defunding the Oakland Police Department! Oh, wait, they already are: “Bike East Bay joined an advisory board of the [Reimagining Public Safety] Task Force last September and has been working with the Anti Police-Terror project and Defund the Police Coalition...” And that, friends, is how even bicycling became woke.
Steve Heimoff