so i bought a mountain bike
So I bought a mountain bike. Her name is Misande.
I'd never considered buying something so... lavish for myself. But here we are. With a multi-grand playtoy that I definitely (definitely) didn't wreck the first 10 times I rode her.
Mountain biking is just one of the most recent activities I've taken up to distract myself from the craziness that is 2020. To have the privilege to do such a lazy thing such as to just...check out... is embarrassing, to say the least.
But, the craziest thing, which is what I really wanted to talk about, is the obvious and visible lack of diversity within the sport, both professionally and casually. Of course, these individuals exist, but I'd be hard pressed to find someone who could name more than two sponsored riders of color, or even the last time they saw a black person on the trails.
I live in Hood River, Oregon, where you can find some of the best biking in the country - and it shows. On weekends the trails are packed and the staging lots full as out-of-towners and the ever popular day-riders out from Portland clamber to get their time in the dirt. It's fun, it's exciting, but it's also incredibly homogenous. At a time when you think the expanded population of riders would yield a handful of black and brown people, you still don't really see anyone who looks... different. You've still got your kitted out mommies and daddies with the e-bikes and the pickups filled with 30-something year old dudes shuttling to the very top. And they all present as white.
This is all to say, can we please stop paying attention to white riders? Can we channel our energy elsewhere? Perhaps toward unlearning our own inherent racism and privilege? Can we all acknowledge how crazy it is that entire sports (that the entire outdoor industry) are dominated by a single race?
It's been super cool to learn more about an already successful and established movement to get more black and brown people outside. In the process of trying to find groups that looked like me out on the trails, I found some accounts that are up to really cool things. @allmountainbrothers @pedal2thepeople @melaninbasecamp @blackgirlsdobike are great places to start. And, these are just a handful of groups, so definitely do your own research.
