Bike-Outs: Super-Predators Wilding? Oh, The Menace!

They ride bikes together.

Oh, and those bikes are s-s-scary:  They’ve got fat wheels and look like Hell’s Angels motorcycles without the motors.

And the kids who ride them—T-they ride in packs and make a lot of noise.  A-and, you know, they pop wheelies and stuff.

They’re-they’re teenagers.  And they’re...

If you were in New York thirty years ago, you can fill in that last ellipsis.  Let’s just say they’re, um, darker than I am—and use words I didn’t learn in Spanish 101.

It seems that every generation or so, some j-school grads with too much time on their hands find new ways to whip up hysteria about groups of urban teenage boys being, well, groups of urban teenage boys.  The latest, it seems, is something that’s been dubbed the “bike-out.”

A Bike-Out?! Oh, my!

Indignation over boys riding modern versions of “Choppers” or “Stingrays” has been ignited by a 74-year-old man who was out for a stroll when, he says, he was attacked by a group of “lawless” teenagers on bikes.

My purpose is not to doubt the man.  One attack, however, does not a phenomenon make.  I am reminded about the hysteria about “wilding” generated by the Central Park Jogger case.

That assault was indeed brutal.  But a certain entrepreneur took it upon himself to take out full-page ads in which he demanded the death penalty for the alleged attackers:  teenagers whose confessions, as it turned out, were coerced and who were finally released from prison on the cusp of middle age.

I am, of course, referring to Donald Trump.  In his ad, he famously bellowed, "I hate them. I want to hate them."  

One thing you have got to say for El Cheeto Grande:  He knows how to play the media.  Or, at least, he shows what one can do with the media if one has, say, a couple of billion lying around.

The "bike-outs" are as much a phantom phenomenon as "wilding" was, and their perpetrators were just as mythical as Hilary Clinton's "super predators."  Those ghost stories (pun intended) involve urban teenage boys and young men who are black and Latino. The only difference between them, as far as I can tell, is that in one legend, the bogeyman show up on bicycles.

(Thanks to Eben Weiss for writing about the "Bike-Out" hysteria in Outside magazine.)

Have You Experienced A Hate Crime On Your Bike?

What do lynching, gay-bashing, rape and child molestation have in common?

The perpetrators of these crimes see their victims as less human than themselves.  That is one reason why lynchings and attacks against LGBT people are classified as hate crimes:  Seeing someone as less human than one's self is, to my mind, a pretty good working definition of "hate".  For that reason, I would also classify rape,child molestation and domestic violence in the same way.

And acts of aggression by motor vehicles against cyclists.

Now, I have long felt this way.  But now a study from Australia could give lawmakers good reason to classify motorists who deliberately run cyclists off the road in the same category as those who harass or assault immigrants.




Researchers from Queensland University of Technology, Monash University and the University of Melbourne studied 442 people in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland.  

The subjects were first asked whether or not they were cyclists.  Then they were shown one of two images:  one showing the evolution of ape to human, or another showing stages of evolution from a cockroach to human.  That second image was designed, according to Alexa Debosc (the study's lead author) because some cyclists reported slurs in which they were compared to mosquitoes, cockroaches or other insects.  The images were given to the subjects at random.



Perhaps not surprisingly, a far greater percentage of non-cyclists than cyclists rated cyclists as not fully human.  Moreover, non-cyclists were much more likely to put cyclists on the ape or insect (depending on which image they were shown) end of the "spectrum" rather than somewhere in the middle.  Whether the subjects were shown the ape-human or insect-human images, the percentages of subjects who saw cyclists as less than fully human was just about the same.

Perhaps even less surprisingly, non-cyclists were far more likely to engage in harassment of cyclists (e.g., shouting or making rude gestures at us) as well as acts of direct aggression such as throwing an object, driving too close or using a car to deliberately block or cut off a cyclist.

In their report, the researchers acknowledge some inherent biases, as young, high-income males were over-represented at least in comparison to their proportion in the overall Australian population.  It's a lot easier for those with wealth or other kinds of privilege to dehumanize those who lack them:  That is why, for example, members of racial minorities and immigrants are so stigmatized.  

That acknowledgment, however, allows the researchers to draw the parallel I've made between the dehumanization of cyclists by motorists and of minority groups, such as Mexicans and blacks in the US or Arabs and Aborigines in Australia.  That is a very important point because, as the researchers point out, it isn't enough simply to "encourage positive attitudes" in order to curb aggression. (Too many diversity programs, trainings and policies do just that or, worse, try to bully, coerce or intimidate people into such attitudes.)  A better course of action, the researchers say, is to put a human face on cyclists:  Just as prejudice against, say, Muslims or gays results from other people seeing them as monolithic, hostility against cyclists comes from motorists seeing us as lycra-clad law-flouting machines that whiz by them.  

And reducing prejudice, and the resulting aggression, against cyclists or other groups of people could also halt a self-fufilling prophecy.  People who are dehumanized and, as a result, experience prejudice and hostility too often feel resentment and even hate against those who dehumanize them. (I plead guilty to that!)  That, in turn, causes victims to act aggressively, sometimes in collective ways, which helps to reinforce the attitudes of their dehumanizers.  In brief, victims of hate crimes sometimes hate back.  

Of course, one of the reasons why the hated hate the haters is that the haters' crimes are too often punished lightly, if at all because they are not treated as hate crimes.  I can hardly think of a better example than the driver who injures or kills a cyclist by running him or her off the road and gets off scot-free.

I Am Such A Menace!

I guess I shouldn't be surprised to read another article that vilifies cyclists.

Most such drivel blames cyclists for traffic jams and all matter of quality-of-life issues in a city because, if they are to be believed, we all run red lights and run over someone's grandma who's carrying a puppy or a kitten she just took in from the shelter.

Well, there's a new twist on this theme today, in the Washington Post blog.  It starts like this:

  Scenes of Washington life include pedestrians on the streets with headphones, or cell phones or perhaps a purse.  The city's streets are also home to bicycles and bike riders.  And every now and then the pedestrians and the bicyclists do not mix well.

Its author, Martin Weil uses this opener as a Jaws-style setup:  Just as some unwitting swimmer has a cut or barely-concealed body part (a breast, perhaps) that causes the shark to smack its lips and think "LUNCH!", those poor, innocent pedestrians' head phones, cell phones and purses are bait for bad, bad people on bikes.

A real menace 2 society!

Yes, Mr. Weil writes about a string of purse- (and head- and cell-phone) snatchings committed by...a guy on a bike.  Specifically, a young guy or adolescent male on a bike.

Well, I guess I'll have to watch for that when I'm off my bike and crossing a street.  But at least it's good to know that, as a middle-aged woman, I don't fit the profile of the perps Mr. Weil describes.

Now I'm going to tell you a secret:  That's the reason I changed my gender.  I didn't want to seem like the sort of menacing young urban male who preys upon unsuspecting pedestrians at busy intersections! :-)  Heck, I don't even fit the profile of scofflaw cyclists who run red lights and run over old ladies with puppies and kittens.  After all, I really can't bring myself to harm someone when I look at someone and that person is a mirror.

Drug Dealers, Rapists, Murderers...And Cyclists!

Donald Trump has labelled Mexican immigrants as drug dealers, rapists and murderers.

In my grandparents' generation, Italian immigrants were almost automatically seen as criminals and the Irish who came a generation earlier were viewed as drunken brawlers.  And Asians, particularly Japanese-Americans during World War II, were depicted as shifty and untrustworthy.

These days, when someone uses the word "thug", it's assumed that person is referring to a black male.  Likewise, "Arab" and "Muslim" are uttered interchangeably; both are used as synonyms for "terrorist."   

Now it seems that, at least in the meida, "cyclist" has become the new stereotype.  Whenever some drunk or distracted driver runs one of us down, we made the misguided choice of riding a bicycle--never mind that we were riding in a "protected" lane and the driver veered into it. But we are not, in those situations, labeled as "cyclists."

Instead, the c-word seems to refer only to those who are breaking the law--or, in one recent case, windows.

Now, I'll be the first to say that the pack who rode the wrong way on a Chelsea street--especially the member(s) who smashed the rear window of someone's new car and who smacked into a police officer--should be prosecuted.  The news reports I've seen and heard about it, however, seem designed to whip up as much hysteria as possible against anyone who pedals two wheels on this city's streets.  You can hear it in the way "reporters" (Where have journalistic standards gone?) elicit reactions from bystanders.  To hear them, cyclists are as much a menace to this city as MS-13 is to some immigrant communities.

To make a bad "report" even worse, the accompanying video, which purports to be a record of the rampage, actually has nothing to do with it.

Who Are We?

We're white.  We're male.  After our training rides in the park, we wheel our flashy carbon-fiber machines under canopies of luxury condo buildings.

We're male, too.  But we're brown and black.  We pedal dilapidated-looking-bikes--or bikes that we're not supposed to be able to afford because, well... We don't speak English well, or at all.  We're probably undocumented, to boot,

We are also male--and could be white, brown or black--but we're not likely to be yellow.  We are riding bikes because...we can't afford to drive.  Or we can't drive because we've lost our licenses, or couldn't get them in the first place.

The Rev. Laura Everett describes each of these stereotypes about cyclists in her Daily Beast editorial, "We Need To Ditch All The Old Cliches About Cyclists."  She makes a very good case against each of those cariactures, using data (e.g., that the majority of cyclists are indeed poor, but don't necessarily fit into the second and third stereotypes) from various studies I have mentioned in some of my earlier posts.

She also makes a very interesting point:  During the two previous "golden ages" of cycling in the US--1890-1910 and the 1970s--cycling was seen as a pastime of the leisured class.  And, once it lost that status, cycling fell into a steep decline.  The first "boom" ended when automobiles became affordable to average working people. (Interestingly, during the 1890s, a bicycle cost what an average worker earned in year!)  The second declined with a deep recession fueled by a spike in petrol prices and suffered its death blow when the election of Ronald Reagan ended the first major environmental movements in the US.

She sees that we are in a third "golden age" of cycling. In order to sustain it, she says, all of the stereotypes have to be shattered. Cycling will never become mainstream if it is not seen, by planners and the general public alike, as a vital link in the transportation system.  That, in turn, will not happen if cycling is seen only as a leisuretime activity of the privileged or as the "last resort" of the poor, nonwhite or criminal classes.

For her part, Rev. Everett says she began cycle-commuting because she was a poor recent graduate who was just starting her career.  Seven years later, she continues to ride because, as she says, it really is the best transportation option for her--and because she enjoys it.

To me, she sounds like the kind of cyclist the public needs to know more about if cycling is to become mainstream  And, I must add:  She's a woman.  Thus, she can't help but to break the stereotype.  I  like to believe that I am, too.