That’s one of the most judgemental things I’ve ever read. I grew up, and still live, in the most rural place you can imagine. Not once have I ever been harassed running or biking. I’ve biked highways and backroads and everyone here has been nothing but respectful. There’s good and bad everywhere, don’t generalise.
I still don’t think it’s judgmental.
This author seems to be honestly laying out his own personal experiences with running in his area. If he were lying, ok, I’d call him extremely judgmental. But he is one who grew up in that area, understands it well, and is coming back to it to re-evaluate it again from a fresh perspective. You can’t ask for a more fair assessment.
And when he writes about his experiences, they are his actual experiences. I don’t think he’s lying - he could be, but there’s no real motivation to do so on a free blogpost. And while your experiences may be completely carefree with running in the Deep South so you have your own view, he his allowed to have his own view based on his experiences.
I also suspect you’d come a lot closer to his perspective if this happened to you:
*Running along Carolina roads between 2000 and 2010 was an experience of sustained hostility, punctuated by moments of real violence. While out running in rural Carolina I have been spit on, had lit cigarettes and bottles of beer thrown at me by passing cars. Both men and women have called me a “faggot†more times I can count. (Being the target of homophobia is an inherent risk if you wander outdoors in running shorts.) I have gotten into scuffles with white men of all ages. Running with my college team in Greenville, an old man in his seventies once pulled off the road to curse us out because we forced him to swerve around us. How do you argue with a 70-year-old about whether you have a right to run down a road? This kind of harassment was constant. Almost weekly, a car would swerve toward us at high speed, forcing us to scramble off the shoulder. When we traveled to northern California for the Stanford Invite, my team was utterly baffled when cars actually stopped to let us run through a pedestrian crossing. “Can you believe it?†my teammate asked, astonished. “They would have simply run us over in South Carolina, before calling the police to report us for jaywalking.†It was a nice reprieve. Two weeks later, back in the South, a carload of high school kids nailed me with a Solo cup filled with beer. The year after I graduated, two guys came up from behind me with their car and knocked me over with their door. They gave me the bird as they drove off. I used to joke with friends that, while I couldn’t be certain of the exact details of my death, I knew it would involve an angry white guy and a pre-owned Chevy Cavalier. *
That’s directly from his blogpost.
If anything, I think the whole “I’m fine - bad stuff like that NEVER happens to me, so he’s just making a big fake fuss over it, and passing unfair judgment” might be one of THE deepest problems in society.
I’m a minority, but I have rarely been overtly harrassed in public or overtly held back from career advacement because of racial bias. But does that I am in the right if I criticize African-Americans, Latinos, and Asians who have been tremendously harrassed and even killed, as judgmental because they write that it happens to them on a regular basis, on the basis of my own personal problem-free experiences? I think not.