A Part of Hearst Digital Media I finished the podcast thinking about how living and podcast, to appear on the show. I was a huge fan of her work. She was a professor of history and African American studies and her scholarship centered the experiences of Black women in sport. The podcast featured guests who were my heroes, like Wyomia Tyus and Gwen Berry. I was honored to be invited to talk about my recent piece in Outside [ldquo;High-level math,” I said. “Exactly!” she replied].
We started off by talking about Mother’s Day and the weight I carried that weekend following Ahmaud [Arbery]’s murder and the publication of my op-ed. Then we segued into a wide range of topics, touching on the grand You Keep the Change, I’ll Take the Hardware and the unique burden white supremacy places on Black youth and us as parents. Amira, a mother of two boys and a girl, said the first paragraph of my piece spoke to her. She, too, worried that her child would be shot or murdered, and discussed how Black children are seen as older than they are. Tamir Rice, for example, was described as a “man” despite being twelve years old. At what age would her sons cross the line from adorable to being seen as a threat?
I told her that when I look at my son, I think about the ways I want to set him up for success and that I want to introduce him to the outdoors and running and give him access to things I didn’t have until I was older. But in the back of my mind, I wonder to what extent I am setting him up to feel too comfortable. God forbid he’s hiking or running and someone sees him as a threat. Or he’s making some ordinary teenage mistake and a cop pulls his gun. How do I prepare him to be self-assured, to own and fill the spaces he is in, while also making sure he understands that shrinking yourself is sometimes necessary for survival?
Boston Marathon Results.
Every Black person has a story of being policed, surveilled, watched running will make him look more threatening, but since he’s pushing his daughter in a stroller, maybe that’ll signal he’s not a threat. It’s a constant, complex equation.
“High-level math,” I said. “Exactly!” she replied.
I told her about my own debates about a mask—choosing between protecting my health and that of the people around me, or catering to the white gaze for survival. I told her that I think about the relative safety of my neighborhood before heading out, and rationalize that if I am stopped by a cop or have an incident with a white person, I have the ability to stay calm, maybe talk myself out of anything bad happening, even though I know safety isn’t guaranteed and the strategy could fail.
Keira D’Amato’s Favorite Running Songs I Did 30 Burpees For 15 Days, Here’s What Happened requires a constant negotiation around what might pose the least harm. I finished the podcast thinking about how living and?
Pros React to Des Linden’s Final Boston Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd resulted in an uptick in reporting on how white supremacy destroys Black people, both in running and outside of it. It was impossible to look at mainstream media and social media without coming across an article or a post.
One was from my friend Mirna Valerio, a.k.a. The Mirnavator. She wrote about an experience she had at the end of a long run. She was in Georgia, where she lived at the time, and was decked out in bright clothes—technical attire, gear that indicated she was running. But near the end of a run, a white woman in an SUV passed her and pulled over ahead of her. Mirna ran past and saw the woman on the phone, so she smiled and waved. The woman left. Five minutes later, a cop car rolled by, so she smiled and waved again. A second cop car came from the opposite direction. Mirna was incredulous. “I’m like, what the fuck,” she wrote in her post. “This is two miles away from my house. And you know, in my head I’m like, I’m running. I am just running.”
I felt every one of the stories I read. I felt the pain and the trauma. I felt the anger and frustration. Their stories tapped into my own fear. You tell yourself it can’t happen to you, but it can. You talk yourself into believing such incidents aren’t as common as they seem. And yet they are. an op-ed on whiteness in running and the racial division in the sport. Of being harassed or othered in one way or another, at work, at a social gathering, at a park, on the street. Every family has their language or ritual around safety—Amir [my husband] insists I turn on my GPS tracking so he knows where I am when I’m running. I ask him not to go running at night after work if it’s dark.
I continued searching for stories, and every few weeks I found another. A Black man was handcuffed and detained while jogging in Florida. A white woman threw a bottle and shouted a racial slur at a Black woman running in Queens. ICE agents in Boston stopped and questioned a Black man who was running by them.
I pasted the links into a Google Doc and titled it “Running While Black.” I see now that creating this list was a reality check, a reminder to not get too comfortable, to watch my back. It was a reminder that I am not crazy for worrying. I am not imagining things. The threat is there all the time. It is real and it is part of our every day.
From RUNNING WHILE BLACK: Finding Freedom in a Sport That Wasn’t Built for Us by Alison Mariella Désir with permission from Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2022. Book release date: October 18, 2022.
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