What the Kentucky Derby Scandal Tells Us About Systemic Racism
PED's in sports are the classic example of a systemic problem portrayed as an individual one
Bob Baffert, the horse trainer in all sorts of trouble after his Kentucky Derby winning horse tested positive for a banned substance, was widely mocked after a television appearance in which he portrayed the attacks against him as yet another form of “cancel culture”.
Obviously, enforcing the rules of competition in a sporting contest is not “cancel culture”- Pete Rose wasn’t removed from baseball because of “cancel culture”, but because he repeatedly violated a rule that everyone understood carried the punishment of being kicked out of baseball. One of the key aspects of actual cancel culture is that the rules are not announced ahead of time- nobody told the Dixie Chicks in advance that they couldn’t criticize President Bush; nobody told the USC business school professor that he could not discuss Mandarin words used extensively in Chinese business transactions that sound somewhat close to the n-word. But when you violate a rule that carries a defined punishment, that’s not cancel culture.
But Baffert was actually onto something, unwittingly, in that his situation does share something with the current debates over race and racism in America. Performance enhancing drug use in sports is the classic example of a systemic problem. Indeed, it is almost a paradigm for understanding how other systemic problems, including racism, work.
In 1988, Ben Johnson was disqualified after finishing first, in world record time (9.79 seconds), in the 100 meters dash in the Seoul Olympics. He tested positive for stanozolol, a banned steroid. Here’s the thing, though: while all the other seven athletes in the 100 meters final that year tested negative, all but one of them (including the 2nd place finisher, the great Carl Lewis, who was elevated to a gold medal by Johnson’s DQ), were eventually linked to performance enhancing drug use. Johnson was punished because he got caught and, at least in Seoul, they didn’t.
How did it happen that seven of the eight competitors in the most important track race at the Olympic Games were PED users? Well, because while the sports media tells a story of good guys and bad guys, of honest, hard-working athletes who get there on natural ability and who have to compete with a few cheaters, the real truth is that once an athlete hears that other athletes are gaining an edge, the pressure is enormous to gain the same edge. Sometimes this is relatively harmless- e.g., athletes in team sports hear that other competitors are practicing during the offseason, so they start practicing too. But the same effect occurs with respect to conduct that is against the rules.
For instance, in basketball, it is well known that a lot of officials let certain sorts of fouls and traveling violations go. If you are a basketball player, you have to exploit that. You can’t say “well I’m going to be moral and follow the rules to the letter while these other players disobey the rules and get rewarded”. Nobody says that.
And so it is with PED’s. The moment you hear that your competitors are using them, if you are an elite athlete, you are going to want to use them. Championships ride on whether you use them. Salaries and endorsement money rides on whether you use them. Thus, the problem isn’t that the evil, cheating athlete is using PED’s- it’s that once PED’s, like any other sort of rulebreaking, is established as something athletes can get away with, everyone basically has to use them to stay competitive. It is a systemic problem.
And you can see that in other sports. Bob Baffert is hardly the only horse trainer to ring up drug violations; many of the sport’s biggest names have done so, because the punishments are so light compared to the amount of money you can make winning the biggest races. In cycling, when the drug problems of the 1990’s were finally exposed, it turned out that almost all the top riders in the Tour de France were using drugs. Baseball’s player’s union agreed to a year of drug testing for research purposes only, figuring the amount of PED users would be small; it turned out to be a huge number, high enough to trigger a contractual concession instituting a drug testing program that then snagged many of the game’s major stars.
This is how systemic problems work. There are structures that dictate people’s conduct. In the case of PED’s, it’s the structure of elite competition and financial rewards attached to it that drive the problem, rather than personally unethical athletes.
And this is what Black scholars have been pointing out for many years about racism. Obviously, we want people to be be less prejudiced, and open racism is a lot less acceptable than it was 60 years ago. But many of the systems that perpetuate racism are still in place. For instance, the legacy of decades of segregated housing policies is the concentration of Blacks into poor, urban areas, which then become the focus of violent policing tactics. Throwing lots of Blacks in prison then creates a vicious cycle of poverty and crime. Further, this means that many Blacks who grow up in the hood and could be very successful in life go to schools which lack the resources and connections to track students into highly selective universities. All these things work together, even if there isn’t a single George Wallace-like figure expressing open prejudice against Black people. It’s systemic.
Systemic problems are a lot harder to root out. What makes PED use in sports so difficult is that once so many athletes are using them, it creates a market for undetectable PED’s that do not show up in drug tests, defeats any incentive for athletes to snitch on other athletes, and creates a situation like we saw with Major League Baseball where they were afraid to do something that might reduce home run totals that were feeding attendance gains at the ballpark.
It’s therefore convenient to think of social problems as the product of a few bad apples. Unfortunately, that is not the case, and it takes real work to address them.