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

by Alison Mariella Désir

the result of misguided white folks at the time, rather than seeing that we weren’t very far removed from how white supremacy was affecting me.

White people were naïve and ignorant about race, unable to see the white supremacy all around us.

Not because I needed to be twice as good, but because I was a gifted person. Mr. Anderson saw me as an individual, not a race, and he encouraged me to draw out all the talent inside me.

had natural leadership ability. I was generally an upbeat person. I was studious, and I liked being busy—pye

But it also felt necessary.

The Black students were associating me with whiteness, something that I, too, was being harmed by. The white students had such strong stereotypes of Black people, it never occurred to them that we were a diverse group, with different accents and language depending on where we grew up. It was painful. I was just speaking the language I’d been surrounded by my whole life,

I loved the discomfort my teachers and classmates seemed to feel when faced with language and ideas we were not supposed to use.

seen as a reflection on the poem “Harlem (A Dream Deferred)” by Langston Hughes. I read Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and wrote about how I, too, felt caged by the white forces around me.

These men, by the simple act of seeing me, created space for me on campus. They told me that despite the surroundings, the white space, I did belong.

Sean’s racial identity was one brimming with deep pride in Blackness, one that was not contested at every turn as mine seemed to be.

I was doing everything possible to get as far away from whiteness as I could, and Bad Boy seemed like the other end of the earth. I applied and got the job.

People had sex in conference rooms and came in hungover

WELL WELL WELL. LOOK AT WHERE WE ARE NOW IN 2024

He was six feet tall with a caramel complexion and dark black hair. Fine. Very fine. He invited me out. I was nineteen. He was thirty-six. I fell hard.

sounds about puff

So I focused on the scholars and writers with dual heritage like mine.

Who chooses what is good and worthy is a product of worldview, not fact.

Is Shakespeare really the best playwright to have ever lived? Hardly. He is given prominence in curriculums because of who makes the decisions.

I took solace in the fiction of Edwidge Danticat, a Haitian American novelist and short story writer. Her book Krik? Krak! strung together stories of Haitian struggle and survival. I loved finding my family in her words. There was a realness to her work that let me know I, too, could make my mark on the world for being authentically me.

I’d heard so many times in training: that we were all in this together—that the marathon was an equalizer, a place where differences disappear. We’re all just runners on the road, I’d heard someone say. Rhetoric like that didn’t normally land for me because it simply was not true. But I was grasping for anything that would give me a sense of connection and community.

white people can view community differently — not as means for survival but as a secondary other thing.

I loved experiencing how the choices I made affected my running.

obvious it was that the sport was a white space, particularly in Black areas like DC. I had a sense of being an observer more than a participant, someone outside the culture looking in.

heavy on being an observer vs a participant because you don’t see yourself reflected. where people don’t get this.

These thoughts were true, but they didn’t fully explain why I thought distance running was for white people. Or why Mr. Anderson suggested I run track instead of cross-country. If white people were seeing themselves in distance running, where were we? Who was a runner to us? A Black runner was Jesse Owens, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, or Carl Lewis. They were Flo-Jo or Allyson Felix. A Black runner was a track star.

Black people were stereotyped as being only good at power sports, limiting the definition of what we could do in a way that did not apply to white people.

Black Americans were marginalized, pushed to occupy a space dictated by whiteness.

Kathrine Switzer. She ran the Boston Marathon in 1967, when women weren’t allowed to run, and the race director famously tried to pull her off the course. The images of the scuffle pushed the women’s running movement into the mainstream. Switzer, I learned, went on to advocate for women’s inclusion in distance running.

I noted an assumption among runners that anyone who wanted to run could run. All you need are running shoes! Just show up, and It’s simple and accessible were common phrases. I recognized it as the same sentiment in the marketing materials at Team in Training: running was “for everybody.” But the “everybody” running called to, through its media, its marketing, and its image, didn’t include us.

Black people have to know the rules of the white world and our own world, while white people don’t even have to know there is another world.

It is carried by every white person, and allows them to be seen, centered, and feel normal at all times. It allows them to run.

Don’t run in public as a rule for Black men learning to navigate white culture and white spaces. A story in the Michigan Chronicle in 1997 summed up the risk: “If you’re driving, walking, or—God forbid—running (jogging), and you simply look like an African American, you are subject to a stop and search.”

forcing us to carve out spaces for ourselves.

We can make a way out of no way. There is no shortage of examples where our culture, beauty, and resilience have resulted in some of the most incredible gifts to the world. The Harlem Renaissance, every Black college and university, the Greenwood District, Seneca Village, jazz, hip-hop, and civil rights.

Sometimes when we were at home, I’d stare at the black-and-white photos of my mom and dad hanging out at the Cotton Club and Smalls Paradise, wondering why they ever left—wishing I had grown up there, wishing

I could be transported back to that place and time.

wondered, why are statues of Black icons only in Black neighborhoods? Why are our icons not American icons?

also plotted our routes to showcase Harlem’s historic monuments and places. In these ways, Harlem became a member of Harlem Run, and we became custodians of the neighborhood.

Running with other Black people was exactly as I’d pictured it, better even. Harlem Run had members who were white, Asian, and mixed, but Harlem Run was decidedly a Black space—warm, welcoming, centering us.

It was exactly the joy I’d anticipated, not unlike the experience of finding Black friends in college when, suddenly, I’d felt normal.

WOW. formulating what i have been processing forever.

Social justice counseling puts the individual within the context of society, meaning it doesn’t look only at what’s going on with you; it explores how what’s going with you is influenced by social forces like racism, sexism,

The program spoke to me because my own life had been shaped by living as a Black woman in a world that centered whiteness. Some of the feelings of self-loathing and worthlessness that led to my depression came from feeling like I didn’t fit a white ideal.

I have created a space where Black people feel comfortable, a place people want to come to, a place where people are forming connections and friendships. A Black space, a place for us. These runners would never have to wonder if running was for them because we’d created a space that was.

There was so much comradery and excitement.

doing the most important thing in the world for Black people, in the most important city in the world for Black culture.

A place where folks like me can exhale.

My upbringing had taught me that white supremacy existed, but up until that moment I hadn’t really understood how it was directly linked to me.

I hadn’t connected the dots to how white supremacy had impacted my feelings about myself and

my sense of self-worth—that white supremacy...

White supremacy—belief that the white race is the superior race—the belief system that drives ra...

“In your formative years, if your identity development is formed with this lens of racism, it impacts how you think about yourself and what you think you can do, where you think you can go and how you navigate the world.”

Do I hate white people? Or do I hate white supremacy? Is there even a difference?

THAT PART!!!!

I resented that white people didn’t see the entitlement and privilege that comes with being white—and ultimately, that the racial work of our nation falls on the shoulders of Black people.

Oh for fuck’s sake, I thought, just get on the end. White people are so uncomfortable with race that they pretend not to know the color of their own skin.

LMAOOOOO