“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
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.
by Christopher McDougall.
