Running While Black: Finding Freedom in a Sport That Wasn't Built for Us

by Alison Mariella Désir

U.S. RUNNING HISTORY: Boston Athletic Association (BAA) is established.

U.S. RUNNING HISTORY: Aaron Morris becomes the first known Black man to run the Boston Marathon, finishing sixth.

As James Baldwin said, “Urban renewal . . . means negro removal.”

U.S. RUNNING HISTORY: Kathrine Switzer runs the Boston Marathon when women are not permitted to participate.

BLACK PEOPLE’S REALITY: A white woman is raped in Central Park and left for dead. Five Black and Latino teenagers are falsely convicted.

U.S. RUNNING HISTORY: Oprah Winfrey appears on the cover of Runner’s World after completing the Marine Corps Marathon in October 1994.

BLACK PEOPLE’S REALITY: Barack Obama is elected as the first Black president of the United States.

U.S. RUNNING HISTORY: Black Girls Run is founded.

It’s hard to know whether I’m invisible or hypervisible in these moments.

I am also a Black woman forced to carry the stereotypes that whiteness has assigned to Black people. I would prefer to just be me, but my country has not given me this choice.

They create a hypervigilance, a hum of what can happen when we are doing ordinary things like running. It is a hum that increases in volume when I read that a Black person was killed by a white person, which puts me on high alert for days afterward. Sometimes the worry is too great and I skip a run altogether. Safer inside.

But the hum is never shut off. There is no mute button.

Elijah Anderson’s seminal paper, “The White Space,” in which he talks about the overwhelmingly white landscape of the United States as a place Black people can be disrespected (or worse)

And yet I kept hearing how running was democratic and a sport “for everybody” kept getting repeated: The world’s most democratic sport! All you need are shoes! Just show up! It was both annoying and funny, because it was clear that this message came from white runners in a white sport inside a white country, and they had no idea what it was like to be a Black body in such a climate.

I realized that by our very existence as Black runners we were disrupting the white narrative, carving out space for ourselves.

I’m never quite sure: are they not talking to me because I’m Black, or because they’re white?

Maybe I shouldn’t have come. There’s a reason I’m the only one—we run track, not distance, not marathons. Do I really want to be The Only in this space?

scanned the crowd again and felt relieved to spot two women wearing the same jacket I was. A small sign that I might fit in. They saw me, too.

overenthusiasm some white women employ when greeting Black women, a forced casualness to hide whatev...

I knew this because the lines had been drawn for me in high school. The white kids ran cross-country; the Black kids ran track.

Sometimes it’s easier to pretend something is white people’s shit than it is to reckon with the historical and cultural factors that have stolen everyday activities and places and made them off-limits to us.

It meant we all had to endure whiteness.

feeling both the joy of the sport that was saving me and the awareness that while I was participating, I didn’t really belong.

“As a Black woman, race has always been a prominent part of my life. I have never been able to escape the fact that I am a Black woman in a white supremacist country.”

If it was Black, it was other.

They were pretending that “Black” did not exist and that whiteness had no meaning while treating my difference as something that was strange, even wrong. I shook my head no. I wouldn’t have it. I wasn’t going to let white women touch my hair.

This was the moment I really understood that to be Black was to be something deemed undesirable.

took every opportunity to expand on our lessons.

The Black girls were the first friends I chose for myself.

I could get away with half the things she felt comfortable saying.

The biggest difference was that they got to just hang out while my life was scheduled.

sanitized version white people prefer, like Martin Luther King Jr. He was depicted as a peacemaker, when in reality, he was a radical activist, a moral powerhouse, and such a threat to the white power structure that the FBI followed him until he was assassinated.

👀

I remember being surprised to learn that slaves were smart enough to overthrow their owners, which is embarrassing to admit, but true.

The Haitian people were enslaved, they were not slaves. This flipped a switch in my mind. “Slave” was not their identity; it was a label and a life forced upon them.

They were vibrant, creative, smart, human.

What my parents were teaching me was the truth. They were rooting me with a strong sense of pride in my Blackness in a world that would tell me I was worthless. They were teaching me to question what was presented, and who benefited from the way something—a story, history, a news article—was told or phrased.

Where were all the Black people?

You are going to have to be better, they would say, referring to school and education. You are going to have to be mindful of how you present yourself. The message: White people can be average and get ahead. You have to be exceptional.

It was subtle, but also right under your nose if you knew your history. White people didn’t, so my brother’s name was deemed safe.

Except it was me. I loved the energy of the group. I loved having a contingent of kids who looked like me in class.

The low-performing white kids were not kids I was supposed to stay away from, but the low-performing Black kids were a “bad” influence?

When something big happened that involved Black people, my classmates wanted to talk with me about it. Take the murder of Tupac. Who did I think shot him? Was Biggie Smalls involved? What

was his best album? Which was better anyway, East Coast or West Coast rap?

When the rumors began that Tupac might be alive, my classmates assumed I was following the case and looked to me for answers.

I looked at him in confusion, having no idea it was a Crips hand signal (or was it the Bloods?).

As my classmates’ vision of a Black person, it was my responsibility to present us as knowledgeable, informed, and in the know. It was stressful, and exhausting.

I wanted to let my classmates know that I was just me, Alison, not a symbol of Black people they could use to “understand” Black people.

I took every opportunity to disrupt the white spaces I was in. I knew an entire history my white peers (and it seemed my white teachers) had no knowledge of.

I also wanted the opportunity to humanize Ota Benga. When I first heard his story in one of my mother’s classes, I was struck by the blatant disregard for him as a person. They put a human in the zoo?

whiteness hid behind “science” to justify white supremacy.