Not Everything Is About Race
The media routinely publishes accusations of racism based on no evidence, while America lets the real thing fester
I suppose I should have known. The moment Sha’Carri Richardson was suspended from international track and field competition for 30 days for testing positive for marijuana, it would not take long for mainstream media outlets like Huffington Post, as well as Twitter, to explode with charges of racism. Why are they doing this to Black athletes, the question went up. HuffPo’s story also brought in the intersex athletes who were recently barred from certain women’s Olympic events because they could not get their testosterone down within limits. Those athletes, led by world champion middle distance runner Caster Semenya of South Africa, also happen to be Black.
So obviously it’s a conspiracy among the people who run international sports to exclude Black athletes, right? Um… wrong…?
Let’s start with drug testing rules. They are administered by the World Anti-Doping Agency, an international organization with a very strict reputation. WADA relies on scientific studies, and indeed, a 2011 study showed that marijuana could be performance enhancing. On the other hand, some of WADA’s critics claim the science is not sound and WADA is basically enforcing a moralistic rule. That’s a legitimate debate, but a number of athletes, white and Black, before Richardson have received marijuana suspensions. For instance, Michael Phelps, the greatest swimmer of all time (who happens to be white), was once suspended for three months because he was photographed with a bong pipe.
Doping regulation is strict for a reason. International athletics competitions are rife with performance enhancing drugs, and when you allow the athletes and their coaches to set the rules, they tend to allow lots of loopholes. For instance, it took Major League Baseball over a decade to get the player’s guild to agree to drug testing, and even now, it is far looser than track and field’s system, with strict limits on out-of-competition tests. (In track and field, the tester can show up and knock at your door.) And the owners were reluctant too- Mark McGwire’s and Sammy Sosa’s steroid-fueled home run chase sold a whole lot of tickets.
The point is, the only way to do this is to turn it over to people who don’t give a damn if some popular athlete gets suspended. Which is why we have WADA.
The important thing you have to know about WADA is that it has a sterling, race-neutral record. Right now it is waging its biggest fight with Russia, banning their (almost all white) athletic teams from the Olympics and other international competitions because they were circumventing drug tests so their athletes could dope. Why would WADA seek to eliminate one of the biggest suppliers of successful white athletes if its purpose was to stop Black athletes from winning Olympic medals?
As for the intersex athletes, track and field has been fighting this battle since at least 1936, when the white Polish athlete Stella Walsh was rumored to be intersex. Again, like WADA and marijuana, it’s perfectly legitimate to criticize the IAAF for being too restrictive; it is certainly heartbreaking that Semenya, who has been a girl/woman all her life and is a great champion, is excluded from the thing she does better than all but a few women in history. But the IAAF did not invent the rules about intersex athletes to screw Black women. They have enforced them, in a race neutral but perhaps very intrusive manner, for many decades.
What actually is happening is simply that many track and field athletes are Black, so any rule enforcement at all is likely to snag some Black athletes. I.e., the false start rule probably disqualifies some Black athletes too. That doesn’t mean it’s racist to call false starts.
The point of this post, however, is not about two sports rules that are obviously not racist, even if they may be wrong. It’s about the media. You see, I could have predicted with 100 percent certainty that some mainstream outlet was going to run the “marijuana testing is racist” take about Richardson. This is what the media does now. If you want to accuse some ostensibly race-neutral body of racism, you don’t need evidence. You don’t need to have any knowledge of the history of the subject matter. (I am willing to bet good money the HuffPo editors have never heard of Stella Walsh.) You literally don’t need to know anything or have any basis for the accusation. You just have to say “a Black person was hurt, therefore racism”. There is literally no more basis for this conclusion than if you came to the scene of a car accident, saw that a Black man was hurt, and said “that does it, the other driver hit him because the other driver was racist!”.
We live in a world with tons of actual racism that screws Black people. Housing segregation. The carceral state. Vote suppression. Implicit bias in things like employment and housing. And we need to do more, much more, to right the wrongs done to Black people which date back centuries.
But racing to the presses with a false, half-baked accusation of racism every time something bad happens to a famous Black person doesn’t do anything about any of that. And the editors and publishers who run these pieces, while refusing to run any piece that actually calls BS on an accusation of racism, create a terrible media ecosystem where anyone the least bit skeptical about these hot takes is shunted off to Fox News and other right wing sites which also tolerate a bunch of open racism.
Conservatives say a lot of horribly wrong things about race. But one of the things that conservatives say that is correct is a lot of white liberals are deathly afraid of being accused of racism themselves, so they are unwilling to say what they really think. Now personally, I don’t think this is completely a bad thing- we don’t need white journalists going out into the world with “actually, Charles Murray is right about race and intelligence” takes even if they privately think them. But it is a bad thing when it means we can’t subject hot takes that falsely accuse people of racism and inject race into non-racial situations to even minimal critical thinking and discourse. It’s a problem, and the mainstream media is getting worse, not better on this issue.