Article April 8, 2013 Issue

Crashing stereotypes

Jenny Sawyer

TMC Youth’s website, time4thinkers.com, has featured this article as a blog.

I was going to crash. I gave my bike’s handlebars one last futile yank, but my tire lodged in the street trolley track. I was eating asphalt before I could blink.

Traffic stopped. I untangled myself from my twisted mess of a bike and hopped up as quickly as I could. I was scraped up and mortified, but basically unhurt. When I pulled my helmet out of my eyes, though, I saw two people emerging from the SUV that had stopped just a few feet away. A guy and a girl. 

Now, if you’d asked me before the crash, I would never have characterized myself as a person who trafficked in stereotypes. I grew up in a total melting pot of a city. I loved diversity, didn’t I? I was comfortable with it. And yet, when I saw that guy and girl coming toward me, my heart sank. He was wearing a letter jacket and his baseball cap was on backward. She had on a little sundress and all the right accessories. College students. Rich, obnoxious white kids may have been the words that flashed through my mind.