Anti-Racism is Not an Olympic Sport

Olympic Season is upon us! Thrilling spectacles and breath-taking performances of competitions on every night!

On social media, between posts about Olympics, I have also been seeing posts from white anti-racists shaming other white people or congratulating themselves that they are not like them.

Brief PSA: Anti-Racism is Not an Olympic Sport

You do not get to the medal podium just because you can quote Malcolm X’s Bullet or Ballot by heart while curling or because you can condemn other white people’s use of African-American Vernacular English while skiing downhill. This is not a competition for how many more times you have confronted friends about using Martin Luther King Jr. quotes out of context on Facebook and Twitter.

I am not saying that any of these actions are necessarily wrong. But I have seen activists turn activism into a game of trying to prove how they are nobler than others. This is the activist’s form of a pissing contest. I have done this to others and others have done this to me.

Let’s stop it!

The white anti-racist activist jona olsson calls this kind of behavior “White on White, and Righteously So” in her article on Detour Spotting, which list ways of how white people derail their own anti-racist work. jona writes:

We distance ourselves from “other” white people. We see only unapologetic bigots, card-carrying white supremacists and white people outside our own circle as “real racists.” We put other white people down, trash their work or behavior, or otherwise dismiss them.

I often read anti-racist white people talk with disgust and scorn about other white people who aren’t as enlightened as them on racial matters. I have done this myself.

Yet, thinking back to my own journey in anti-racism, disgust and scorn did not help me to come to this place in my journey as an anti-racist. It was white anti-racist people and people of color who put up with my ignorant self, time after time with loving care as I learned about the current realities of racism in culture, not people who constantly shamed me. I am not saying that loving care did not come sometimes with tough conversations and frustrations on all sides.

The shaming causes people to shut down and they are least likely willing to ever enter into dialogue about the important issues concerning racism in our communities. It didn’t help anyone become anti-racist and it won’t help anyone in the future. As jona writes, this behavior only works “to divide us [white anti-racists] from potential allies and limit our own learning.”

Now back to the Olympics!