Understanding prejudice

Since I’m white, male, and middle class, I have little experience of being on the receiving end of prejudice. Of course, I try to sympathize, but it’s one thing to know intellectually about bigotry and another to be on the receiving end, day in and out.

Which is one of the many reasons I like cycling. It means that I can open a national newspaper and find well-paid columnists threatening to kill me, or inciting their readers to do the same.

Brian Appleyard in the Sunday Times:

now I find myself facing the real possibility that I am going to kill someone and they will probably be wearing lycra shorts

He plans to think of the killing as “assisted suicide”.

Jeremy Clarkson in the Sun:

Do not pull up at junctions in front of a line of traffic. Because if I'm behind you, I will set off at normal speed and you will be crushed under my wheels.

Is he serious? I can’t tell. But sometimes when I stop at a junction, I look at the driver of the car behind me and wonder if he might be a Clarkson-wannabe.

Matthew Parris in the Times:

A festive custom we could do worse than foster would be stringing piano wire across country lanes to decapitate cyclists ... the lynching of a cyclist by a mob of mothers with pushchairs would be a joy to witness.

I think Mr. Parris intends this as a joke. Ha ha ha, stupid cyclists, can’t take a joke, can they? But I will be feeling a little bit of fear every time I cycle down a path that runs between trees.

Of course, this only gives me the tiniest taste of what it's like. And I have a choice: when I get off my bike, no-one can tell that I’m not an ordinary person. But I try to use this experience to increase my understanding and empathy.