Congratulations to Simone Manuel on becoming the first African American to win an Olympic Gold Medal in an individual swimming event! Manuel won gold in the 100m freestyle competition on Thursday, August 11th.
With all the racial controversy that’s been in the news over the past few years, many (typically whites) will say, “I don’t see color,” “I’m color blind,” or “there’s only one race,” followed with a statement about “stop being divisive.”
While yes, biologically we are all one race, and there’s a lot of unity that needs to be found in that fact, somehow Jackie Robinson’s experience in baseball was a quite different than Joe DiMaggio’s. To be “color blind” not only disrespects Jackie by minimizing all the oppression he had to go through, it disrespects all people of color who go through micro and macro oppression on a regular basis. By “disrespect”, I mean that it ignores it, it acts like it’s not there, when it is very “there” for people of color. If I convince myself people of color get treated exactly like white people, then I don’t have to deal with all the ways they are mistreated. I don’t need to advocate, protest or bring justice because I’m convinced everyone is treated the same. A very convenient position for a white person who doesn’t face oppression and who isn’t in close relationship with people of color who do.
If everyone were treated the same, it wouldn’t be a big deal that in 2016, Simone Manuel became the first African American to win an individual Olympic gold medal.
Manuel said in an interview with NBC. “It means a lot. This medal is not just for me, it’s for a whole bunch of people who have came before me and been an inspiration to me,” she said. “It’s for all the people who come after me who believe they can’t do it. And I just want to be inspiration to others that you can do it.”
Who are all these “other people” who came before her and who will come after her, people who might not think they can do it?
Did you know the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says 70 percent of black children and 60 percent of Latino children don’t know how to swim? Compared to 31 percent of white children.
Did know for most of the 1900’s, black kids were not allowed in white pools or on white beaches? (So that’s pretty much every pool and beach in existence)
Jeff Wiltse says in his Journal of Sport and Social Issues article (Vol. 38(4), 2014) entitled, “The Black-White Swimming Disparity in America: A Deadly Legacy of Swimming Pool Discrimination,”
During much of the 20th century, Black Americans faced widespread discrimination that severely limited their access to swimming pools and swim lessons. The most consequential discrimination occurred at public swimming pools and took three basic forms. Public officials and White swimmers denied Black Americans access to pools earmarked for Whites. Cities provided relatively few pools for Black residents, and the pools they did provide were typically small and dilapidated. And, third, cities closedmany public pools in the wake of desegregation, just as they became accessible to Black Americans. Black Americans also faced restricted access to Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) pools and YMCA swim lessons—especially during the critical period of 1920 to 1940, when swimming first became popularized in the United States. Finally, Black Americans were systematically denied access to the tens of thousands of suburban swim clubs opened during the 1950s and 1960s. These poolsspurred a second great leap forward in the popularity of swimming, but only for the millions of White families that were able to join.This past discrimination casts a long shadow.
So when Simone Manuel stands on the podium receiving her Olympic gold medal, we must see color. We must see color so we can celebrate and congratulate Simone on the incredible accomplishment of overcoming generations of discrimination that have kept black people away from swimming pools. We must also see color because it forces us to see discrimination and oppression. It forces us too look at its ugly face and decide what we are going to do about it. To choose to be “color blind” or to say “we’re all one race, so let’s stop talking about race” is to allow the ugly beast of discrimination and oppression to continue. We are better than this. Love and unity are better than this. We must acknowledge what people of color have had to go through and what they continue to go through so that we can truly love and be in community, and so we can get on the front lines of stopping the injustices people of color face.
Congratulations Simone!
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Here’s Simone Manuel’s Medal Ceremony, Since NBC Didn’t Air It …
do you have a link for this? it didn’t show up
May 9, 2015 by Voddie Baucham
Category: Politics | politics, racism
I hate to say, “I TOLD YOU SO,” but I did tell you so. In a November 5th blog, following the election of Barack Obama, I wrote:
The people have spoken. Barack Hussein Obama has been elected the 44th President of the United States of America. The Left Wing press is ecstatic, white guilt has been assuaged, Affirmative Action has been vindicated, and socialist Europe loves us again. Now comes the rub… It ain’t over! If you think this means that the “America is a racist society” crowd will have to shut up, you’ve got another thing coming. In fact, watch the press closely in the coming days. There will be a concerted effort to press the opposite point. Jesse Jackson (who said he wanted to castrate Obama a couple of months ago because he had the audacity to call black fathers to account), Al Sharpton, and their ilk will argue that this is merely proof that policies like Affirmative Action work, and that such efforts need to be redoubled; not abandoned. They believe we need to continue telling young black boys and girls that they are not smart enough, good enough, industrious enough, capable enough, and America is not ‘fair’ enough for them to succeed without special help that their white (or Asian) counterparts don’t need.
Now the other shoe has dropped. Attorney General Eric Holder (a black man appointed by a black President) has called the United States a “Nation of Cowards” because of our supposed unwillingness to ‘talk’ about issues of “race” (enough of this electing and appointing people… lets talk). Many have condemned Holder’s comments. However, others are chiming in and singing the same old “America is a racist nation” song. Frankly, I’m tired of it all. Are there racists in America? Absolutely! There are white racists and black racists, and racists of every political, socio-economic strata. So what? Is “talking” about race really what we need? The answer to that question is a resounding NO! Talk is cheap. Racism is sin, and the last time I checked, the gospel, not talk, was the only cure for sin.
We’ve been having a so-called ‘racial dialogue’ for as long as I can remember. Unfortunately (as evidenced by the following clip), that dialogue has not advanced one inch. The Michael Eric Dysons of the world are still singing the same tired song and the Pat Buchanans of the world are still falling into the trap. Ironically, though he tried to paint Bucanan as the racist, Michael Eric Dyson is the man who referred to interracial relationships as “genocidal”. He wrote:
Man, that’s genocidal. And not only on a metaphysical level; that’s genocidal at a physical level. Because what ends up happening is that you’re slapping your mother, retroactively. You’re trying to commit retroactive abortion, by reseeding yourself in the womb of a dominant white culture that wants to produce you as their child. (Source: Debating Race With Michael Eric Dyson, p. 172).
“Retroactive abortion”? Can you imagine a white man saying that about the idea of intermarrying with black women? I guarantee you he wouldn’t have kept his professorship at Georgetown. Or how about a white Attorney General who called America a “Nation of Cowards” for its unwillingness to talk about the fact that the leading cause of poverty, teen pregnancy, dropout rates, violent crime and incarceration is not racism, but fatherlessness (see here). Or the fact that 94% of black murder victims are killed by other blacks?
Racism is big business (non-profit organizations, grants, quota-filling professorships, quote-filling political appointments, quota-filling corporate jobs, corporate extortion, etc.). There are people whose entire careers are based on promoting the idea that America is a racist Nation from which “racial justice” must be extracted by force. That is not to say that racism is dead. As I stated earlier, there are plenty of racists in America. It’s just that those with increased melanin levels are usually referred to as something else… especially by people who want to avoid being called racists. Unfortunately, these are the people to whom Holder referred as cowards. I guess that’s what you call a “Catch 22”.
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