Black women take their place in D.C.’s bike lanes

[Trek420]

I'd like to see that too. Especially here in the good ol' USA I feel cycling is seen as a white sport. OK, can we talk? A rich white sport like golf. In fact some say cycling is the new golf But what we need is like G23 said a culture where you see all kinds of people riding all kinds of bikes all kinds of ways to all kinds of places. That is my hope.

All bikes are good, all people who ride are great.

[OakLeaf]

When I was racing bikes and practicing law, people would ask me why I didn't golf. I'd tell them, "I already have one sport that's ludicrously expensive, predominantly male and overwhelmingly white. Why do I need another?"

But then as now, there's a heavy strain of elitism that fuels the racial divide. If you look at cycling as "sport," there are few non-white participants (even though most cities now have a Major Taylor club); if you look at cycling as transportation, if anything, people of color are overrepresented because of wealth disparities. It's just that people in shabby jeans tooling around slowly on poorly maintained big-box-store bikes, stereotypically ignoring rules of the road, are invisible to a lot of "sport" and "lifestyle" cyclists, and that's a shame.

[7rider]

That's actually one nice thing about riding in the D.C. metro area.
Pretty much everyone here is from somewhere else - whether it's another part of the USA or another part of the world. So riders reflect the diversity in creed and color (and I'm referring to the "golf" cyclists - the club riders - not the invisible cyclists).