dear ecotopians – especially dear black, brown, indigenous, asian and migrantized ecotopians,
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for a long time the ecotopia biketour has been quite the white environment and it mostly is that way still. this doesn’t mean that no BBIPoC or migrantized people have joined ecotopia in the past or have been/are part of the tour and orga, of course. but they have usually been a minority or even just a single person. some of our PoC friends feebacked that they were hesitant to join or didn’t come to the biketour because our group was so white. we would like to acknowledge, challenge and change that.
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there are many reasons for this exclusion, most of which have to do with structural and individual/casual racism. it also has to do with the history of cycling and climate activist communities in the past and today. it also has to do with how we are organized and how difficult it can be to make a community that is constantly changing places, people and structures into any kind of a safer space.
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but we are sure there are ways to open up more space, as we know there are just as many enthused cyclists in BBIPoC and migrantized communities as there are in white ones. we also draw hope and motivation from seeing how tools like the QINTAW start have changed the biketour structures.
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so there are some steps we want to take to make the tour more welcoming and safe to you as a person and less dominated by white voices overall. we already have a few concrete ideas that we will talk about more and hopefully put into action during the ecotopia orga month and some others we still need to work on and discuss more.
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one thing that we want to invite you to right now is to make your voice be heard by the broader ecotopian community. throughout the next months leading up to ecotopia biketour 2024 we would like to have more regular blogposts and we want a big portion of them to adress and challenge ecotopias whiteness. some of these posts will be written by us, reflecting on our values and structures and educating each other about racism and critical whiteness.
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for other posts we invite you to write us and share your perspectives in your own voice. you can write about anything you want. feelings like anger, frustration, exhaustion, fear and sadness are just as welcome as joy, love and jokes. you can tell us about what keeps/kept you from joining the biketour, any good, bad or mixed experiences you had while on ecotopia or in other travelling and bike communities, anything you want white people to finally understand or anything you would like to tell your communiti(es) about cycling and being with a group like ecotopia.
of course, you don’t have to write about any of this or anything related to racism at all. some of us are motivated to work on more educative and explanatory blogposts and it’s not your responsibility to make ecotopia a less racist or less white space. so write about anything you want!
any format you choose is welcome, be it a poem or a drawing or a shortstory or a long essay or whatever else you choose to express yourself.
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you can send your contribution to info@ecotopiabiketour.net and put «suggested blogpost» into the subject of the email, so we know where to put it.
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let’s start some change – careful with each other, dangerous together!