"Click" on Personal Safety and Privilege

As a middle-class white girl growing up in Lewiston, Idaho, and then Spokane, Washington, I never knew fear. Not real fear. Not the fear that someone is going to hit me, hurt me, rape me, kidnap me, steal from me, kill me. 

When we moved from Lewiston to Spokane it was just as the South Hill rapist, Kevin Coe, began his string of attacks. I was turning 13 that year. I remember my mom at some point letting on that she was worried about this move to the big city and the inherent dangers of the metropolis. I think she told me to be careful, but I'm pretty sure she also tried not to scare me.

(I pause here to add a laugh track for people familiar with the area: We moved into the Ponderosa subdivision in the Spokane Valley, on a street where every other house had the same floor plan and split levels were big. Gritty it was not. That doesn't mean there weren't assaults, domestic violence, and more in those "nice" neighborhoods, but we weren't moving into an area known for its high crime rates.)

I had tons of privilege I didn't even recognize. Reading Ms. magazine starting in high school opened my eyes to just how many women were attacked, beaten, raped, killed every day -- the hidden epidemic of violence all around me that had never touched my family directly.

Even with at least some consciousness raised, it took me a while to develop any kind of self-defense awareness and practice. College had its share of weird alcohol-impaired encounters, but even then I generally moved in a pack with other women and counted on safety in numbers.

After college, living alone in an apartment for the first time I locked my doors and carried mace on my keychain. I took a 6-week self-defense class at the YWCA taught by a 6'4" fourth-degree black belt. I paid attention to where I parked my car and didn't get in without looking underneath and in the back seat. 

I walked assertively and made eye contact with everyone who passed me. I played "eyewitness": Observing every man walking toward me and developing a quick list of things I would say to the responding officer and then the sketch artist. (Note the privilege right there? I was sure police would respond appropriately, believe my account, and help me.)

I still operated from a fundamental belief that most people are good, not bad, but at least I started paying attention in case that belief was misplaced.

When I had children my sense of danger and awareness expanded. We read books on the difference between good touching, bad touching, and secret touching. I talked to them about what to do and who to ask for help if for some reason I wasn't there (seek out a mom with kids). I looked at men walking toward me in full Mama Bear Mode: assessing whether they looked like they'd hurt my children more than whether they looked like they'd hurt me. 

When I began bike commuting I paid attention to personal safety through yet another lens: Do drivers see me? Are they driving accordingly? Do I have an exit strategy in this badly designed corridor if something goes wrong? This round of safety thinking wasn't about being attacked so much as it was about the physics of trajectories and impacts. 

I'm not 100% consistent. I don't keep my guard up at all times. But I have an ongoing low-level awareness that my personal safety is my responsibility. I feel a great sense of freedom and strength when I'm riding my bike, while maintaining a sense of situational awareness.

This was brought home to me yesterday morning when I rode for miles behind another rider who never looked around to see if I represented any kind of threat whatsoever. As a woman, no matter how complacent I may be at times about the many wonderful people in the world, I would never ride for miles with someone right behind me without looking at the person, without paying attention.

Yet another "click" moment highlighting just how oblivious privilege can make you.

Related Reading

• Personal Safety and Privilege: A Vignette
• Be a Green Dot on a Bike, Part I
• Be a Green Dot on a Bike, Part II--The Hard Part
• How to Be a Good Guy/Gal on the Street
• Seeing with New Eyes

Improving the Happiness Quotient

I loved reading a quirky, wonderful, unique story: The Good Luck of Right Now,* by Matthew Quick. It's not every day you read an epistolary novel in which the correspondence carried on is a one-sided outpouring to Richard Gere.

The mother of our letter writer, a devout Catholic, has a somewhat karmic approach to dealing with life's blows and setbacks. She tells her son Bartholomew that for every unhappy there is a happy -- and vice versa.

If you're experiencing something bad, someone somewhere -- not necessarily you -- is experiencing something wonderful. Bartholomew's mother takes solace in the idea that some good is balancing the scales somewhere.

Conversely, if you're happy than somewhere, someone is suffering, or at the least having a bad day.

Earlier this year I successfully completed 30 Days of Biking, to which I added a word/picture of the day challenge to myself. As I wrapped up the series I chose "happy" as my word of the day. I sincerely hope this didn't mean someone else was having a bad day.

I've long held the belief that I should contribute to the net positive balance of energy in the universe by doing good things. If the balance is actually 50/50 as Bartholomew's mother believed, it's important for me to notice and cherish every scrap of happiness because someone is paying for it.

Even though I don't really think you're paying for my happy day, it's still worth paying attention to and appreciating.

The research into people's behavior with respect to their shopping and service experiences says that we share negative experiences much more often than we do positive ones. While I definitely think there's a place for feedback that helps others improve (ask me about my luggage lost en route to Washington, DC, and meetings with members of Congress), we too seldom take a moment to thank someone for a job well done or a really positive experience. We take that for granted and focus on the screw-ups.

What if we made a point of paying attention to our happiness, to good experiences, and sharing those and only those for a day or a week? We'd be adding to the net happiness in the world.

Let's change the equation.

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*Bookshop.org affiliate link. I urge you to buy from your local bookstore or check it out at your local library. If this is the way you choose to get the book, know that any commission I earn will be donated to organizations doing good htings to make streets safer and happier for all of us.

Recent Favorites

These posts are favorites from the past few months--either mine, or the favorites of others based on the number of views they're getting. Enjoy the round-up!

Personal Privilege and Biking: It Takes More than a Bike Lane to Start Riding

We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident: There Is No "Right" to Speedy Travel

How I Came to Be a Bike Advocate

A Little Kindness

So This Interstate Highway Walks into a Bar....

13 Reasons Bicycles Are Perfect for the Zombie Apocalypse

In a category all its own:

• Women's Bike Blogs: The Comprehensive List

This is a page, not a post, that I update periodically with women's bike blogs from around the world. The tally was close to 600 at the last update; I prune defunct blogs and at times the count has been over 700.

Much of my writing appears in other spaces, primarily the Washington Bikes blog and an occasional piece on my Bike Style blog. The archives here list everything I write in every space, including guest posts, as a purely chronological list.

How I Came to Be a Bike Advocate

“How did you come to be a bike advocate?”

To answer that question as one of the opening speakers at the first-ever Future Bike when we held an “Inside the Advocate’s Studio” session, I had to back up to how I came to be an advocate of any kind.

I thank my mother for raising me in a way that shaped me into an advocate.

While she wouldn’t have used the word “feminist” to describe herself, she absolutely raised me to be one.

When she married my father she had already been an independent woman with a job and a car (which was hard to come by during World War II). She used stories about her mother and herself to illustrate why I needed to ensure that I could take care of myself as an adult before getting married. (She definitely assumed I would marry.)

She was pro-choice in an era when abortion was illegal, understood that to be a complex position, and answered honestly with good explanations of the various facets of the issue when as a young teen I asked her position.

She raised me to look at others with empathy. If we saw someone who was morbidly obese*, for example, instead of responding with criticism of their size she would say with compassion, “Just think how hard it must be for her to go to the movies or ride a bus when the seats are so small.” [*edited to add 2023 note: I've now learned much more about discrimination against people in larger bodies and wouldn't use the word "obese".]

Mom had never heard of privilege, but she inherently understood the concept. She told me I was a lucky kid: I had two parents who loved each other, a safe home, plenty of food, a good education, and lots of opportunity. Therefore I needed to use that education and opportunity to help people who weren’t as fortunate as I was.

I know calling it “luck” doesn’t unpack the invisible knapsack or dig into multi-generational and structural advantages and disadvantages. But Mom—born in 1921—prepared me well to understand it, and to want to address it. She explained pieces and parts of the world’s problems as being rooted in other people not having the advantages I’d had.

She had watched her own father, whom she described as a proud man, go door to door during the depths of the Depression asking if he could rake leaves or shovel snow to try to earn a little money so he could give his three children a birthday or Christmas present.  She knew what it meant that she had been able to attend a two-year teachers’ college to earn a degree and what a difference access to an education made.

She knew how far my father had come from his humble beginnings, how hard he had worked to rise through the ranks at the lumber company he worked for, and how much it meant to him that every one of his six children earned a college degree.

Mom told me a story that has always stuck with me, perhaps more than almost anything else she ever said.

One summer she and Dad and the four older kids in the family (I and my younger sister not yet having made our appearance) went to Chicago for several weeks. Determined to make the most of this opportunity in the big city, every day she got on the city bus with the kids, a map, and plans for some cultural or educational destination.

On one of these outings as she stood waiting at a corner for the light to change, a funny feeling crept over her. When she looked around to figure out why, she realized she was only the white adult in sight. The only other white people were her four children.

This woman, born and raised in nearly all lily-white Lewiston, Idaho, could have told me about her anxiety, even fear, at these unfamiliar circumstances. What she told me, though, was this: “I realized this must be what it feels like to be in the minority.”

As an adult I understand that in that moment she still carried with her all the advantages American society gives those who are white. She certainly spent the vast majority of her time in a world that didn’t expose her to that feeling, let alone restrict or block her access to what she wanted in life because of her skin color.

But as a child, I heard her tell me that there was something wrong with our world if being of a particular skin color made you feel funny, feel different, feel left out.

She reinforced this with other stories (quite a storyteller, my mom), like the one about a friend whose bitterest regret later in life was that he refused to attend his daughter’s wedding when she married a man from Hawaii who was of Japanese descent. Mom’s friend did this because of his experiences during World War II, but he came to appreciate his son-in-law and thanked him for being such a good husband. She credited him with overcoming his discrimination.

Or the one about a white family in Lewiston whose son married an African woman he met while serving as a missionary, how wonderful Mom thought it was that the mother-in-law welcomed her new daughter-in-law with open arms, and how there were others in town who would not have done so. Her disapproval of those who would criticize or reject a loving couple was clear.

Raised an Episcopalian and later a Lutheran, she didn’t bat an eye when one of my brothers married a Jewish woman from Brazil; rather, she read up on the significance of the bris ceremony her first grandson would have. She chose a formal departure from the Lutheran church because she couldn’t accept that being a good Muslim or follower of Australian aboriginal beliefs or anything else meant you couldn’t go to whatever reward might await after death, modeling religious openness and justice. I know this because she told us so--her values were there for me to learn from.

When the message from your mom is that you’re lucky, you should use what you have to give back, lots of people are unfairly discriminated against for who and what they are and what they believe, and good people don’t do that, you grow up to be an advocate.

And as soon as you bicycle on almost any street in the U.S., you become a bike advocate because you see how critical is that we change our streets so that everyone whether age 8 or 80 can feel comfortable riding. Mom's dementia meant that she never really knew this became my job, but I know she'd approve.

Related Reading

• Inclusion
• Personal Privilege and Biking: It Takes More than a Bike Lane to Start Riding
• 3 Things My Mother Taught Me
• Goodbye, Mom