This just in from our friends at Rivendell…
Starting October 12, Rivendell Bicycle Works, the 26-year-old San Francisco Bay Area bicycle company, is rolling out reparations pricing for Black customers.
Rivendell’s CEO, Grant Petersen says, “The American bicycle industry has been racist, often overtly racist, since 1878, and Rivendell has been obliviously—not “obviously”— racist ever since 1994. We say this not to scold the industry, not to scold other bicycle businesses, and not to be on-trend.
For the last two years, Rivendell Bicycle Works has offered a 45 percent discount to Black customers who shopped in person. COVID has curtailed that. They are going national with the same plan, but now with a name and an acronym: Black Reparations Pricing (BRP).
Ten percent of Rivendell’s bikes and frames will be allocated for BRP. In the 12-month period beginning October 2020, they’ll make about 850 bikes, 85 of which will be set aside for the discount program.
In its BRP plan, Rivendell adds, “Racism doesn’t respond to inaction or self-proclamation. In other words, it doesn’t go away when you know, even in your bones, that all people are created equal. It responds to anti-racist action. Reparations are an example. Not because Reparations are “a nice thing to do,” but because they’re owed.
Reparations acknowledge that, in this country, white wealth—recent or inherited/generational, has been ‘earned’ by the labor of Black people, who, even after slavery, were never given a leg up. Your non-Black tycoon great-grampa may have been born poor, may have been a sharp and clever go-getter at the top of his class, but he wasn’t born Black.”
Rivendell is also offering its customers the opportunity to contribute to the BRP fund with every purchase they make.
For further information about BRP, please follow this link:
https://www.rivbike.com/pages/
To contact Rivendell regarding this story, please email john@rivbike.com
