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

by Alison Mariella Désir

1919 U.S. RUNNING HISTORY: Aaron Morris becomes the first known Black man to run the Boston Marathon, finishing sixth.

1942 U.S. RUNNING HISTORY: The New York Pioneer Club changes its constitution to allow members no matter their race or creed, becoming one of the first large-scale interracial clubs in any sport, amateur or professional. The New York Athletic Club prohibits Black people from joining.

1973 U.S. RUNNING HISTORY: The Cherry Blossom Ten-Mile Run in Washington, DC, is created. The Falmouth Road Race begins.

1995 March U.S. RUNNING HISTORY: Oprah Winfrey appears on the cover of Runner’s World after completing the Marine Corps Marathon in October 1994.

2017 U.S. RUNNING HISTORY: Run 4 All Women is founded. U.S. RUNNING HISTORY: Black people are 7 percent of runners, up from 1.6 percent in 2011.

2020–2021 BLACK PEOPLE’S REALITY: Black Americans are three times more likely to be killed by police than white Americans.

February U.S. RUNNING HISTORY: Out of a record 500-plus women running in the women’s Olympic marathon trials in Atlanta, only four are Black; only one is African American.

When I go for a run, I’m not just going for a run. I am stepping outside as a Black body in a white world. I am Alison Mariella—mother, runner, activist, wife—and 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. I learned from a very early age that I am never just myself in white spaces; I must be aware of how whiteness sees me.

We carry these memories—those from centuries ago and those from last week—with us. They create a hypervigilance, a hum of what can happen when we are doing ordinary things like running.

He describes the “criminal stereotype,” which means “virtually every public encounter results in a degree of scrutiny that a ‘normal’ white person would certainly not need to endure.” The scrutiny, the arrests, the violence Black people encounter in the white space exists for us at all times.

Running also brought its unique brand of whiteness, with its hierarchy of who belongs at the top—white, thin, fast people. The sport’s whiteness sent a message about who a runner was, and it wasn’t a Black woman. 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.

A place is never separate from its history, even if you don’t know it. It’s in the trees and grass, in the buildings and the air, and in the people.

Everyone was white, and no one was talking to each other, a habit of white people I find odd—a default to being stoic and standoffish. I’m never quite sure: are they not talking to me because I’m Black, or because they’re white?

Shit, I thought. 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?

A part of me wanted to sleep and not wake up. But what I really wanted was to be better, and sleep seemed like the best solution. If I could shut my eyes through this bad patch and wake up sometime after it passed, my life would be back on track.

I didn’t know him that well, but he was Black and training for a marathon, and Black people didn’t run marathons. 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. I myself ran the 400 meters and 400-meter hurdles. Distance was for white folks; sprints were for Black people.

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.

He wrote about the pain of the long run and how, after the agony of it all, he somehow felt surprisingly good afterward. He said he felt better than he ever had in his life. He saw himself in ways he never had before. On the surface, I was watching a man train for a marathon, but really, I was witnessing a transformation. Could the marathon transform me?

A therapist had helped me understand that feelings of hopelessness and worthlessness were not how I would feel forever, but he hadn’t told me how to change the feeling. Running seemed to offer a path.

But there was also a comforting, familiar feeling: I was running at a highly uncomfortable pace, and while I wanted to stop, I was convincing myself to keep going. This felt like something.

There was a sense of being myself in my body, a singular human being bolting through time and space. The moment was brief but powerful. It had returned me, momentarily, to the person I was seeking.

I welcomed the larger presence of people of color, of course, but it didn’t change the white culture of the group. It meant we all had to endure whiteness.

The pills had made me believe I’d be okay. Now, running did. So I stopped taking them.

Week after week, running made my body—and me—feel alive. Afterward, there was a good hangover, one that lit me on fire, made me alert, lighter.

Running, it seemed, worked similarly to antidepressants. The effect was cumulative. The medication needs time to get into your bloodstream, and so does running. During my first run with the group, I had felt a desperation to feel better. A couple of months in, I felt good during the run and for a little while after. Now, running was in my bloodstream. The aftereffect had somehow become how I felt all the time.

When I read Ijeoma Oluo’s book So You Want to Talk About Race, I saw myself in her words: “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.”

There were Black salons. Black barbers. Black neighborhoods. But the “regular” salon, barber, and neighborhood were white spaces. If it was Black, it was other.

This was the moment I really understood that to be Black was to be something deemed undesirable. The air in the room had shifted around me when the women spoke. I was simply not white, I deviated from the norm, and I understood that I would be treated differently.

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.

I was reminded of how I felt when the teacher couldn’t remember my name, when there were no hairstyles for Black girls at the salon. I had been invisible.

U.S.’s duplicity, how it had denounced imperialism but embraced expansionism: same concept, different words.

how the U.S. branded itself a democracy, but oppressed its own people and supported dictators in Latin America and the Caribbean, oppressing entire populations in favor of its own interests.

What this meant for us, my parents would tell my brother and me, though not in the same conversation, was that we were going to have to work twice as hard as our white peers. 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.

White people would often tell me how articulate I was and how smart I sounded, which, years later, I realized was a microaggression rooted in the surprise that came from not expecting as much from a Black girl.

I would be expected to speak for the entire Black race.

At a parent-teacher conference, my teacher told my parents that I was socializing with the “wrong crowd.” These kids, my teacher said, were going to pull me down. I was so annoyed. Why was hanging out with the Black kids—the kids I wanted to be around, was happy to have after years of playing with mostly white kids—bad?

It was the first time, but not the last, that I saw how race and class were often conflated in the United States and how the kind of Black I was (middle class) was somehow seen as exceptional, but in danger of being “contaminated” by the kind of Black (working class) some of my classmates were.

My parents weren’t so much worried about my brother’s friends as they were about how the combination of his wardrobe, skin color, and friends could be interpreted as trouble by the police. The risk of my brother being profiled for doing some everyday act like walking down the street was too real.

More often than not, from sixth through twelfth grades, I was the only Black student around, and so my white classmates viewed me as the “representative.” When something big happened that involved Black people, my classmates wanted to talk with me about it.

White kids could know things or not know things, but I believed I had to have all the answers. 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 wrote about what it was like to be treated as a Black person rather than as me. I wrote about the burden of it, the weight it put on me. I wrote that I’d rather be accepted as an individual with unique interests, that I could not speak for the entire race in the same way that one of them could not speak for the entire white race.

I wasn’t in a physical cage, but I was performing for my white peers, trying to be the Black person they expected me to be. In my retelling I could show Ota Benga, and perhaps myself, through my eyes, as a person deserving of kindness and respect. Maybe, in a small way, this project could course correct history.

But no one seemed to see the larger picture. They viewed Ota Benga’s treatment as a moment in history, 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. I was, it seemed, alone in my understanding about race. White people were naïve and ignorant about race, unable to see the white supremacy all around us.

My classmates’ faces changed when they realized how good I was. It was validation. It was recognition. I could survive here by being good at everything.

My white peers moved through the school with the ease that came with knowing they belonged there. Their presence was inherent. Mine felt conditional. I wasn’t white and we weren’t wealthy, but dammit I was smart and talented. It was proof that I deserved to be there.

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.

What I craved was a sense of belonging. I wanted my heritage, the color of my skin, the beautiful aspects of Black culture, and the contributions of Black people to be a part of the story. I wanted to be seen as a person, not a race.

I read somewhere, years later, that fitting in is shaping yourself to try to match the space or people around you. But belonging is being yourself, being accepted for yourself regardless of the space you are in or the people you are with. Belonging is being embraced and valued as your authentic self.

While classes on the Haitian Revolution and Latin American Culture were not part of the core curriculum, it felt important that these topics were included at a prestigious institution. It was, to me, an acknowledgment of the inherent value and worth of our perspectives and experiences, a different story from the one typically told.