2 Biker Rallies: One White, One Black — One 'Badass,' The Other, Just 'Bad'
In his column this week, Charles Blow of The New York Times broke down the difference between "bikers" and "thugs" in the wake of the deadly biker gang shootout in Waco, Texas:
"The words 'outlaw' and 'biker,' while pejorative to some, still evoke a certain romanticism in the American ethos. They conjure an image of individualism, adventure and virility. There's an endless list of motorcycle gang movies. A search for 'motorcycle romance' on Amazon yields thousands of options. Viagra, the erectile dysfunction drug, even has a motorcycle commercial.
"While 'thug life' has also been glamorized in movies, music and books, its scope is limited and racialized. It is applied to — and even adopted by — black men. And the evocation is more 'Menace II Society' than 'Easy Rider.' The pejorative is unambiguous."
It turns out that a version of this dynamic plays out every summer in South Carolina's Myrtle Beach area, where two different festivals for motorcycle enthusiasts are held each May — one white, one black.
The first is the Harley-Davidson Motorcycle Rally, which regularly draws about a half-million people. Its attendees are mostly white. The other is the smaller Memorial Day BikeFest, which is mostly black and informally known as "Black Bike Week."
Jason Eastman, a sociologist at Coastal Carolina University, has studied how residents of the Myrtle Beach area, around 70 percent of whom were white at the time of his research, feel about these two events. In a paper published last month in Contemporary Justice Review, he analyzed 8,600 comments left by readers on online articles in the Myrtle Beach Sun News about the Harley rally and the Black Bike Week held in 2009, and about controversial new rules the city had placed on the events — mandatory helmets, no loud mufflers — that year.
Eastman found that while the black bikers were painted as "underclass criminals who attend the rally to steal and murder," the white bikers were framed as "exemplars of American Individualism," whose disregard of the new rules was "celebrated as defiant acts against authority."............
http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswi...s-one-white-one-black-one-badass-one-just-bad
In his column this week, Charles Blow of The New York Times broke down the difference between "bikers" and "thugs" in the wake of the deadly biker gang shootout in Waco, Texas:
"The words 'outlaw' and 'biker,' while pejorative to some, still evoke a certain romanticism in the American ethos. They conjure an image of individualism, adventure and virility. There's an endless list of motorcycle gang movies. A search for 'motorcycle romance' on Amazon yields thousands of options. Viagra, the erectile dysfunction drug, even has a motorcycle commercial.
"While 'thug life' has also been glamorized in movies, music and books, its scope is limited and racialized. It is applied to — and even adopted by — black men. And the evocation is more 'Menace II Society' than 'Easy Rider.' The pejorative is unambiguous."
It turns out that a version of this dynamic plays out every summer in South Carolina's Myrtle Beach area, where two different festivals for motorcycle enthusiasts are held each May — one white, one black.
The first is the Harley-Davidson Motorcycle Rally, which regularly draws about a half-million people. Its attendees are mostly white. The other is the smaller Memorial Day BikeFest, which is mostly black and informally known as "Black Bike Week."
Jason Eastman, a sociologist at Coastal Carolina University, has studied how residents of the Myrtle Beach area, around 70 percent of whom were white at the time of his research, feel about these two events. In a paper published last month in Contemporary Justice Review, he analyzed 8,600 comments left by readers on online articles in the Myrtle Beach Sun News about the Harley rally and the Black Bike Week held in 2009, and about controversial new rules the city had placed on the events — mandatory helmets, no loud mufflers — that year.
Eastman found that while the black bikers were painted as "underclass criminals who attend the rally to steal and murder," the white bikers were framed as "exemplars of American Individualism," whose disregard of the new rules was "celebrated as defiant acts against authority."............
http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswi...s-one-white-one-black-one-badass-one-just-bad
