Today was a two Karen day, like male and female bookends they were triggered by my riding a bike they "felt" was: A) Odd for a Black person to be riding; (B) Too expensive for a Black person to be riding, so maybe I'd stolen it?; and (C)
needed to tell me they own a much nicer and more expensive one, at which point I said my food is getting cold I have to leave.
These are my neighbors, and now that Trump has won, will be even more insufferable.
#BlackMastodon
@muiren
Did they say your specific brand of bike was too expensive for a Black person, or was it more that any new bike would be too expensive?
To me it seems very strange to claim that a bike would be too expensive for someone and but also say you own a more expensive one, I just don't think of the bike market as having a structure that makes it plausible to happen.
Honestly I would have expected "black people can learn to bike?" as the more likely type of racist reasoning around bikes.
But I'm neither black nor American, so I obviously know very little about the texture of American racism (in general and in your region specifically).
@WhiteCatTamer @tobychev Got that right. More than once I've had white people in state parks contact park rangers because they were so freaked out seeing a Black person on the trail.
Because in their minds it's just something Black people would normally think of doing, in a place where they are used to feeling safe from people who look like me.
The frustrating thing are Black people so unconsciously domesticated to knowing their place that they literally believe these racist stereotypes are true, that "real" Black people don't do these things
@WhiteCatTamer
I'm with you on the part where racists are angered by black people breaking their expectations on which spaces they can inhabit.
But I was specifically surprised by, and asking about, the specific way they choose for trying to fit op back into their frames.
Though now that I write it out like this I see it: a black lady was seen with a surprising object and easiest way to fit that with their model of the world is invoking crime (because it makes the object not really her's, solving the contradiction).
Thanks for your patience!
@muiren
@tobychev
They are triggered by the style and the brand of bike. I have an e bike, a white 2020 RadCity 3 Step-Thru with panniers and a few upgrade customizations.
Typically they try to interrogate me, try to catch me in a lie while coming up with a pretense for taking a picture of the serial number.
Nobody ever wants to talk about biking like a normal person, just how much it costs.
@muiren
Wow, looking at the pictures I get searching for that name I have a hard time imagining a normal situation where I would suspect someone stole that bike.
How do you store it? Does your house have a special room to keep the bikes? I know this is common in some places.
@tobychev @muiren I think you’re overthinking this.
The people who say this have an image of black people in their mind that is inflexible and does not contain hobbies or items that are too expensive or too “white”; see the white woman who called police over a black man out birding, a hobby that costs between a few bucks for a guide and a little over a hundred for a set of binoculars.
OP existed outside of that image, and that challenged them, and that angered them.