Like Encouragement And Gratitude, But Spendable

Nothing says “inclusion” quite like “us only”. I’ll bet the next Tour de France will be lit, as the kids say.

You can’t call yourself a cycling community without fat Black women … Whenever you are at a table, whether it’s a meeting, an event, or a casual group ride, take a moment. Look around. Then ask yourself: Who’s missing? Whose absence goes unnoticed? Whose stories aren’t being told?

It’s usually not said out loud quite this explicitly, but the current racial morality is indeed that if whites were insensitive enough to found cycling clubs or countries without blacks, then whatever the founding purpose of their group was, they’d better make it their higher purpose to recruit and cater to blacks.

As a fat Black woman, I was used to not being seen. But here, in the cycling world, I was nearly invisible … I gave myself permission to take up space … With every pedal stroke, I claimed space. I made space.

In physical fact, fat black women among skinny white cyclists take up more volume, breathe more air, and intersect more eyelines than average. What they call invisibility is not getting status and peer esteem commensurate with their self-estimation, which is very high and uninfluenced by competence or contribution.

Still, so many cycling clubs feel exclusive, competitive, and closed off, like there’s a checklist you have to pass before you’re considered a “real” cyclist. And I’ve felt that exclusion. I’ve been dropped from group rides because I was “too slow.”

When it comes to expectations of competence for safety-critical professions in a technocracy, or for expectations of civility and pleasantness in cities and towns, the national peloton, as it were, has been required since the 60’s not to discriminate against those who can’t keep the pace, so it would be in that spirit to demand the same for real pelotons.

Though I wouldn’t want a rapist from my culture back in my culture’s neighborhood even if he raped a little girl from a culture that I despise. But hey, that’s just a cultural difference. Who am I to judge?

Letters of support from his community (community of whom? Of Minnesota men, naturally).

Nine pages of how he’s nice to his mother, volunteers at the mosque, is helping to import a mentally ill relative for a better life on welfare. Which is nice for Somali Minnesotans, but what do non-Somali Minnesotans get out of this? The mitigating circumstances – that he couldn’t speak English, hadn’t finished school, was unsuited to the pace of American life, and in fact unwilling to adjust to American morals – just seem like good reasons not to have imported him in the first place. He’s not about to find a cure for cancer or release a sequel to Rosemary’s Baby – he drives an Uber, which seems like a bad thing and not a good thing to allow a repeated unrepentant sexual predator to do.