Recently in these pages, we have addressed matters of structural and institutional racism in the context of the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests, and more specifically we have attempted to assess the impact of these demonstrations on our sport (see Jack Gray ‘The Africans. Covert Racism in Endurance Running, June 17th and Matt Long, ‘A Race Which Must Be Run, June 18th).

A hero and credit to our sport

You will recall how track and field was thrown into the spotlight several weeks ago following the actions of Patrick Hutchinson. This occurred when several hundred demonstrators attended a protest at Parliament Square on Saturday 13th, thought to be organised by far right groups, including Britain First.

When violence erupted within the proximity of the Royal Festival Hall, the image of the Hercules Wimbledon sprints coach ‘rescuing’ a white male, thought to be a far right protestor, went viral around the world. The instantaneous nature of social media was wonderfully described by eminent sociologists Jeff Ferrell, Keith Hayward Jock Young (2015) as offering “the panoptic gaze of digital citizenry”.

It was indeed what the pioneering photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson would have referred to as ‘the decisive image’. The image of Hutchinson carrying a clearly concussed man over his shoulder and thus ‘saving’ him from an impending beating, righty saw him receive considerable plaudits for his actions.

His own club took to social media to announce, “What a hero he is and everything that Hercules Wimbledon AC stands for”.

Moreover, when Athletics Weekly reported this, on their social media channels our sports fans endorsed these sentiments. One posted that Hutchinson was the embodiment of ‘Hope’ in these divisive times with another even suggesting that his heroics should be recognised in some way at the Sports Personality of the Year Awards. High praise indeed.

Image interrogation

The actions of Patrick Hutchinson were undoubtedly benevolent and it’s beyond question that his association with our sport is a credit. This being said, a more sociologically informed account would encourage us to look not so much at his actions, but rather the presentation of his actions, their packaging and consumption by the mass media.

The aforementioned Ferrell, Hayward and Young (2015) would have us “interrogate the image” rather than to merely accept its appearance at face value. In recent years, visual ethnography has been a growing methodology across the social sciences.

By combining a critical interrogation of the visual we can begin to see some subliminal messages within the ‘story’ of the image. What social scientists refer to as ‘narrative analysis’ offers a series of analytic frameworks whereby researchers interpret ‘stories’ which are told within cultural formations, including news outlets.

Our own coach Patrick Hutchinson! Saved a counter-protester’s life on Saturday with the help of his security team Ark Protection. What a hero he is, and everything that Hercules Wimbledon AC stands for #UpTheHerc #WeAreAllOne pic.twitter.com/fY1rtdeov9

— Hercules Wimbledon AC (@hercarmy) June 15, 2020

Narrative analysis

So, let’s apply a narrative analysis to the presentation of both the imagery and discourse/ language around Patrick Hutchinson’s intervention as reported in ‘The Sun’ tabloid newspaper (See Gysin, 2020). By doing so we can uncover a number of what the sociologist Dick Hebdige (1979) referred to as “hidden messages”, which are not immediately apparent but which may permeate our subconscious minds. There are at least four hidden narratives at play:

Narrative 1. The euphemism of ‘rivalry’.

Significantly, Gysin (2020) presents the injured white protestor ‘saved’ by Hutchinson not as a racist thug but more euphemistically as a “far right rival” Whether intentional or unwitting, this presentation frames the injured white man as a ‘deserving’ victim of circumstance.

The Black Lives Matter protestors along with the Far Right protestors can conveniently be presented as participants in a ‘game’ of protest where the match is stopped when such a player gets injured.

No one ‘side’ holds the moral high ground through the lens of this presentation because ‘rivalry’ can get out of hand by ‘unruly fans on both sides’ when the ‘rules of the game’ are forgotten. Hutchinson’s status as the guardian of ‘fair play’ is therefore unquestionable.

Narrative 2. Restraint despite the physicality of the hero

Gyson (2020) is at pains to make the reader aware that Hutchinson is both a Martial arts ‘expert’ as well as a personal trainer. His physicality as a strong, well-muscled black man is emphasised along with the fact that he has managed to restrain his obvious physicality in the face of probable provocation.

He is undoubtedly ‘the better man’ who doesn’t need to resort to violence. A subliminal message could be that other members of minority groups would do well to follow his example of restraint in the face of prejudice and discrimination.

Narrative 3. The assumed benevolence of the police as a state agency

Gyson’s (2020) article tells that, “Patrick took him (the injured man) to the safety of police lines”. Indeed, Chris Otokito who assisted Patrick, reportedly said, “Patrick picked him up and tried to do what we could to hand him back to the safest place he could go”. The fact that it was reported that the Metropolitan police confirmed that no less than 23 officers had been injured and a staggering 113 arrests made, is overlooked in this narrative because the police are the proverbial ‘good guys’.

When interviewed in the days after his intervention, Patrick Hutchinson himself would say, “If the other three police officers that were standing around while George Floyd was murdered had thought about intervening and stopping their colleague from doing what he was doing, George would be alive today”. At the common sense and pragmatic level, Hutchinson was of course right to point this out. This being said, his comments are representative of classic ‘bad apple’ theory.

Structural and institutional racism is ignored – the police are not a rotten barrel- there are merely a few ‘bad apples’ who need rooting out and common sense will win the day. Racism is reduced to a matter of mere interpersonal sensitivity and ‘respect’ between the police as agents of the state and citizens.

Narrative 4. Black people’s needing to ‘earn’ their right to full citizenship

Underlying the undoubtedly praiseworthy actions of Hutchinson’s ‘rescue’ is the subliminal message that through their heroics, BAME people can sometimes transcend their ‘blackness’ and gain acceptance as fully fledged and ‘worthy’ citizens. A great example of this cultural process would be that of Mamoudou Gassama, the so-called Malian ‘Spiderman’.

In May 2018, Gassama unbelievably scaled four storeys of an exterior block of flats in Paris in a matter of seconds in order to save a 4 year old child who was hanging precariously from a balcony. Several months later, Gassama had ‘earned’ his right to citizenship following the intervention of President Macron.

At this point, it’s worth reflecting on the difference between social practice and the post hoc articulation of such practice. In simple terms, Patrick Hutchinson ‘walked the walk’ by his actions. The ‘problem’ comes when such people are then asked to ‘talk the talk’.

When thrust into the uncomfortable spotlight of the mass media, Hutchinson scrambled for the right sentiments, one of which was the seemingly contradictory sentiment that, “It’s not black versus white, it’s everyone versus the racists.” Once again this was the ‘right’ thing to say in terms of its reconciliatory tone, but it arguably exonerates the injured man’s alleged allegiance to the activism of the far right.

Walking the walk and talking the talk

The real contribution of the undoubtedly heroic Patrick Hutchinson is not in terms of what Kendi (2016) would term an ‘interracial educator’, but rather as a pragmatist. In his own matter of fact words, he recalled that,

“His (the injured man) life was under threat so I just scooped him up on to my shoulders and started marching towards the police with him”.

In this sense, the 49 year old’s real contribution to matters of diversity is as an empathetic ‘doer’ rather than an ideologue. Kendi (2016) traces the tradition of this important contribution both within track and field and in other sports, by making reference to the great Jesse Owens along with the former Heavyweight Champion of the World, Joe Louis, the latter of whom let his fists ‘do the talking’ when he battered Nazi Germany’s Max Smeling to defeat in 1938.

In a similar vein, by winning four Olympic gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics in front of a visibly infuriated Adolph Hitler, Owens cemented his place in history by proverbially urinating on the burning fire of Nazi hatred.

It’s all too often overlooked that 32 years later, he was perhaps reluctantly sent to Mexico by the United States Olympic Committee in order to strongly discourage athletes like Tommie Smith and John Carlos from continuing with their ‘Black Power’ protests. Owens’ best contribution was therefore as a ‘doer’ in 1936 rather than as a ‘sayer’ in 1968. Owens’ was no Martin Luther King Jr or Malcolm X or nor did he ever pretend to be.

An accidental hero?

The late French philosopher Pierre Bourdieu did much to advance our understanding of the differences between what he referred to as ‘the dispositional’ compared to the ‘attitudinal’. Basically people do things instinctively without being able to articulate in a stylised way why they did it or to fully comprehend the political ramifications of their actions.

The moral of the story is that we should be willing to interrogate the image of Hutchinson’s ‘rescue’. The issue is not what he did or even what he said about what he did afterwards, but the way in which the mass media can wittingly or unwittingly repackage and commodify the image in order to reinforce some very damaging stereotypes about race, racism and citizenship in the year 2020.

For many including myself, Patrick Hutchinson remains a hero, albeit an accidental one and the man himself is deserving of the last word- “It was scary. But you don’t think about it at the time, you do what you’ve got to do”.

Dr Matt Long has authored more than 250 coach education articles and works as a social scientist at Nottingham Trent University. The above are his views alone.

Some further reading

Gysin, P. (2020) Message of Unity: Hero BLM protester delivers powerful message saying ‘it’s not black versus white, it’s everyone versus racists. 15th June. Available at: https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/11860439/hero-blm-protester-black-versus-white/

Ibram X. Kendi (2016) On the Racist Ideas Jesse Owens Could Not Outrun. Black Perspectives. Available at: https://www.aaihs.org/on-the-racist-ideas-jesse-owens-could-not-outrun/

The post The accidental hero appeared first on Fast Running.

Following on from Jack Gray’s hugely thought provoking “The ‘Africans’- covert racism in endurance running’, this follow up piece in the context of the Black Lives Matter Protests, considers the cyclical nature of history and questions the prospects that next year’s Tokyo Olympics could see a rewind to Mexico 1968.

The philosopher and historian Karl Marx once memorably said that, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce”. Words spoken two centuries ago had a resonance in a recent BBC 5 Live interview with Michael Johnson.

The four time Olympic champion and BBC pundit turned his considerable intellect to matters of both the tragic and the farcical as he offered his insight into the recent killing of George Floyd in his native America and framed this within the political context of what could euphemistically be described as the ‘controversial’ Donald Trump Presidency.

Born in a time of bitter struggle

Born in the late 1960s in a period of bitter and often violent struggle in a United States which was simultaneously trying to embrace the new civil rights era, whilst at the same time passionately disagreeing with itself over the ethics of the Vietnam War, there are few black track and field athletes alive today who are better placed than the 8 time world champion to understand the manifestations of what he referred to as, “systemic and institutionalised racism”.

Some of you will be old enough to remember those dazzling golden spikes worn by Johnson during his finest hours over 200m and 400m in the deep South of Atlanta in 1996. You may also recall the iconic moment when a trembling Muhammad Ali lit the flame at those Olympics and appeared to appease a worshipping nation which had been so ready to censure and imprison him for obeying his conscience and refusing to fight in Vietnam just three decades earlier.

Ironically, those who cried tears of adoration as the capacity crowd roared “Ali! Ali! Ali!” may have had not too distant relatives who would have been only too ready to dish out their own form of summary justice on the likes of Ali and fellow civil rights activists back in the 1960s. It was an era where the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacist hatred was still alive and very much kicking.

Part of a wider dysfunctional political culture

As well as the monumental events which unfolded on a Minneapolis pavement on May 25th in front of the full social media view of the entire globe, an exasperated and at times emotional legend of our sport was keen to link his understanding of institutional racism to what he perceived to be a much wider and dysfunctional political culture which, “stokes racial tensions.” As well as articulating his thoughts on George Floyd, Johnson was keen to speak out about other high profile incidents where racial injustice appears to have been central.

The recent Christian Cooper case in New York’s Central Park where the Black and Minority Ethnic man appears to have been wrongly framed as an aggressive predatory criminal by a white dog walker was alluded to as well as the Ahmaud Arbery case where the 25 year old jogger was allegedly followed by a white father and son in Brunswick in February and deliberately shot dead.

It’s obvious Johnson feels that those protesting are doing much more than simply showing their ‘Love For Floyd’ as some of the press in this country have chosen to frame the issue.

Cultural and sporting symbolism

One has to consider that just 7 years prior to the publication of Harper Lee’s classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird, which some of you will have read at school, the great man was born in Dallas. In telling the story of a black man wrongly accused of raping a white woman in Alabama, this tale would have had an uncomfortable resonance during his formative high school years as his talent for speed was being realised.

Whilst he would have been too young to remember seeing the men’s 200m medal ceremony at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico, he would have been pointed to archival footage of it as he became a college student and started to become much more politically aware. The grainy images he will have viewed will be dated to October 16th, when gold and bronze medal African-American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos took to the podium and used a combination of their body language and attire to protest perceived injustices back home.

Whilst the bowed heads and raised gloved fists became synonymous with the so-called ‘Black Power’ movement there were some subtleties which should not be overlooked.Olympic champion Smith wore a black scarf around his neck which was a material representation of black pride. Alternatively, Carlos sported an unzipped tracksuit top as symbolic solidarity with blue collar workers in the US, so that the interweaving of race with social class was situated. His wearing of a beaded necklace was in memory of all those tarred, lynched or hung back in the America so brilliantly encapsulated in the aforementioned novel by Lee.

Smith and Carlos were not only criminalised by the movement whose track they had graced in Mexico by being unceremoniously expelled from those Games but significantly they suffered immeasurable abuse over the next couple of decades, both verbally in terms of death threats, emotionally and financially.

Silver medallist Peter Norman who joined them in their protest would likely be framed as a “white ally” had he lived to see the current manifestation of Black Lives Matter and whilst he would not have had to endure social media abuse as some vocal white supporters of BLM are, he was thought to be ostracised as somewhat of an embarrassment by his own athletics federation back in his native Australia.

A sporting bubble?

If you have an uncomfortable feeling in your stomach in reading this it is probably due to the fact that we were all once socialised into believing that sport was somehow a separate bubble from wider society- a place to go in our lives where structural issues and differences should not matter- the ideology of sport as the great level playing field.

The disturbing fact is that whether we like it or not sport is inherently political. Just ask Lord Coe as President of the IAAF who practically owned the global stage with his arch rival Steve Ovett in the US led boycotted Games in Moscow, exactly 40 summers ago.

Moreover, the late great BBC commentator Ron Pickering once made the astute observation that, “Sport is a microcosm of society“. In light of contemporary protests and counter protests, many like Johnson may feel that issues of race and diversity have regressed back to the 1960s and that history is in danger of repeating itself.

“Silence ensures that history repeats itself”

On the above note we have come full circle to Marx’s observation about the tragic and the farcical. It’s worth looking ahead to the Tokyo Olympics which are now re-scheduled for next summer and reflecting on the fact that according to the Olympic Charter, “No kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas”.

Some commentators are speculating as to whether Black Lives Matter will in some way be protested on the biggest global sporting stage of all and if so how it will be received. It’s a sobering thought that Tokyo 2021 could take us full circle back to Mexico 1968. Would that be a bad thing or do we need to go back in order to try and move forward? I pose the rhetorical. The aforementioned Marx also said that the point of history was not just to understand it but to change it.

In a similar and more contemporary vain the pioneering school teacher Erin Grunwell has said, “Silence ensures that history repeats itself”. Whether you are athlete, coach, official or plain track and field fan, the contemporary Black Lives Matter protests will require you to confront the complacency of silence on this issue, for even the fleet of foot amongst us cannot outrun this issue of race.

We cannot all seek to mirror the articulacy of Michael Johnson, whose grip of the verbal is as majestic as his grip of the tartan back in the 1990s. This being said, whether, when and how we speak out are matters which require us to delve as deeply into our consciences as we would dig in any athletic completion of endurance, speed or strength. It’s a human race whose debate must be run. Who appears to be leading it? In the immortal words of the late David Coleman who commentated for the BBC in Atlanta, “It’s Johnson by yards”.

The above views are those of Matt Long alone. Dr Matt Long is an athletics coach with Birchfield Harriers, was the Editor of BMC News between 2014-2018 and is England Athletics lead on Youth Endurance Workshops.

The post A race which must be run appeared first on Fast Running.