Citibike Karen

Last summer, I was dealing with some personal and professional issues. Struggling, really. There were weekly calls with a round robin of professionals as I tried to help deflect the collateral damage created by someone in my world with serious mental health issues. It nearly broke me, to be honest. The feelings of helplessness, fear, and anxiety were overwhelming. Then, I discovered these new ebikes. They are magic. Every day that I could find one of these, I would unlock it, and head to Central Park with the latest track from Beyoncé (“Break My Soul”) on infinite repeat blasting through my earphones. It was divine and healing, perhaps divinely healing for me. One late summer afternoon last year as I was making the top of the loop in Central Park, near where that awful thing happened in 1989, and a group of 5-7 young guys, all in their teens, all Black, sailed passed me on the newest ebikes. They looked so happy and free.

These are “pedal-assisted” rather than fully automated, so you have to pedal, and when you do they accelerate faster than the previous versions of the ebikes. It’s part of what makes them so damn fun to ride and useful to get around on. In NYC, these on-the-go bike rental racks that have appeared everywhere. I started using them to commute last year and when the weather is pleasant, it’s a brilliant way to get around the city. It also puts you in the bike lanes where casual commuters, like me, are vastly outnumbered by the guys working delivery, many of whom are organizing under the banner of Los Deliveristas Unidos. And I've wondered: for my fellow white-raised ebikers, does the proximity in the bike lanes make you feel solidarity with Los Deliveristas? Or, something else? (Great piece here on what these folks deal with.)

The thing is, the new ebikes are SCARCE, only 4,000 total in a city of 8 million. Even though it can feel like there are racks everywhere in NYC, these new ebikes are rare, like maybe 1 or 2 per rack, often with a red-error-light flashing (so, in the rack but not functional). But the ebikes are GREAT!!! The feeling of riding them is like flying. Really transporting. (ha!) 

I've wondered what would happen once they really caught on and demand went up.

Wonder no more, dear reader.

Please meet the woman people are calling Citibike Karen, for this video, originally posted on Twitter that has been widely shared enough that it filled my morning inbox of Google alerts for “white women,” with articles like this, this and this.

What transpires is this: at first the woman cries, “help, help” to people walking by and mostly, people ignore her. A very polite young man (already sitting on the bike) calmly explains that the bike is already checked out on HIS account. He shows her his phone as evidence. She doesn’t listen to him and tries to BODY him off the bike. She literally is trying to shove him off the bike as she’s screaming “help, help.”

Then, a white man wonders by and tries to get involved by immediately taking the white woman’s side and suggesting that the young man “reset the bike, just reset it,” as if that’s a solution. The young man simply got to the bike before this white woman.

She then tells him, “You’re hurting my fetus, you’re hurting my unborn child,” as he responds, “You’re putting your stomach on my hand.”

Then, when her damsel-in-distress cries go unheeded, she starts with the fake crying. Eventually, she sees that’s not working either and walks away, as the young man shouts after her, “Not a tear came down, Miss..."

The woman in the video has been identified as Sarah Jane Comrie, an employee of Bellevue NYC Hospital, and she’s since deleted all her socials.

Kudos to this young man, who I think is a teenager (but I don’t have this confirmed), for staying on the bike, staying calm, and for standing up for himself in the face of white aggression.

There are lots of takes out there comparing Cormer to Carolyn Bryant Donham, the white woman who falsely accused 14-year-old Emmett Till of accosting her, and died recently, at 88-years-old, without ever facing any accountability for that young man’s death. I’m not sure that’s the precisely the right comparison because - thank g*d - the young man did not die because of this altercation with Cormer. But I do appreciate that people are making the connections about white women’s lethal power because there are all sorts of ways this encounter could have gone that would have ended differently, and much, much worse.

One thought experiment to consider: imagine what other kinds of interactions Corner has with Black people, especially any patients she interacts with. Does she treat them this way? Why was she so flustered? Had she never had a Black person refuse an order from her before?

A second though experiment to consider: what other kinds of encounters with aggressive white women do you think the young man on the bike has had in his short life? Could it be that this was not the first time he’s experienced this kind of behavior from a white woman? Perhaps this was not, as they say where I’m from, his first rodeo.

The struggle this not-so-nice white lady put up over this ebike seems like a metaphor for how we approach resources in society.

Yes, the new ebikes are the bomb. For some (Los Deliveristas) ebikes are a livelihood. For others, they're recreation. If there aren't enough of them, what are you gonna do?  Cry fake tears and throw a tantrum?!  Please.

Instead being stuck in our aggrieved entitlement, and in our confusion (or willful ignorance) that bullying someone is somehow an affordance of feminism, we could choose another way of being in the world.

We could see ourselves as no better or worse than anyone else, no more entitled to the shiny, new ebikes than anyone else, ride in solidarity with Los Deliveristas and happy for young Black guys who get to the bike rack before us.

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Two cool events this week to tell you about:

• Let This Radicalize You - book launch for Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba’s new book from Haymarket Press. RSVP here for the virtual book launch TONIGHT at 6:30pmET.
• SURJ National Strategy Launch - Join me and other white-raised folks in solidarity on Thursday, 5/18, 8pmET for a strategy session about how we fight back! RSVP here.