Do you remember the Olympics? That’s right, the O-lym-pics: it’s a quadrennial international festival of athletics and competitive sports generally. It’s usually held in a world capital, and believed by many people to be a sort of assay of that country, and its global standing (whatever that is).
Aha! Yes! I see a glimmer of recognition in your jaded eyes – do you remember that just before you jetted off on holiday, I was contending that the opening ceremony of this year’s O-lym-pics – which was held in Pa-ris, Fra-ance – was a misguided attempt on the part of its “writer” – the Moroccan-French novelist and No 1 Macronista Leila Slimani – to encourage intercommunal relations between the two principal ethnic groups within the French nation. Those of north African heritage, and those of north European?
Anyway, it didn’t go off well, and Slimani, along with the rapper Slimane (confusing, isn’t it?) who appeared in the ceremony, ended up the subject of grotesque threats issued by the usual suspects. I didn’t watch much of the ceremony – but then that’s being a cultural critic for you, as the one-time Booker Prize laureate, Bernadine Evaristo, so percipiently observed: “Life is too short to read Ulysses.” By which index, a fortnight is way too short to bother watching people reeling, writhing and fainting in coils.
And I wouldn’t’ve, were it not that my physical therapist once trained with Keely Hodgkinson, who won the gold medal for the women’s 800m in fine style. (And don’t rush round to bust me, TV Licensing Authority – see MM passim – I waited until the final was posted on YouTube before watching.) Some hours after, we cheered her on – as had, live, what looked like at an entire stand full of friends and family at the stadium in Paris; together with a village hall full of the same back home in the Manchester ’burbs.
“She’s doing it for white people everywhere!” we joked, as she broke free of the pack and breasted the virtual tape – because indeed, there wasn’t a black or brown face to be seen in the stand or the hall, while all the runners trailing her were, without exception, of African heritage.
When we had our next session, I remarked on this to my trainer – who’s white – and she conceded she’d noticed as well: “Why,” I asked her, “are almost all the runners on the starting grid, for almost all the elite Olympic events, black?”
She thought for a moment – and then gave what might be classed as a racist explanation: black people are innately better at running than whites. A few days later a British-Somalian friend came round. Like my trainer, she’s a young woman who enjoys sport, and she’d also watched Keely. Laughingly, she said she’d thought the same thing as us: the gold medallist had done it for the whites. I asked my friend the same question as my trainer – and she gave the same answer: blacks are genetically superior athletes, even setting to one side obvious anomalies like Ethiopians and Kenyans whose advantage derives from living at a high altitude.
I set them both right in the same way: “Blacks” aren’t any faster than “whites” – indeed, “blacks” is a pretty specious catch-all, given that Africans are the most genetically diverse human population in the world: a Mbuti pygmy is far more genetically distant from a Watusi tribesman than an Inuit is from a north European. Indeed, given Homo Sapiens only left Africa 60,000 years ago, and had been there for four times as long, fucking and fighting, all other human populations are, frankly, a large and rather inbred family by comparison.
No: if you look at the starting block, and all the people there happen to have very dark skins, it’s because they are – in genetic terms – the fittest examples of the greater moiety of possible human genetic variation. They are, in point of fact: representative humans. As for the weird blanched and spectral figure striding ahead of them, she is indeed a bit of a freak, given she must be far and away the best phenotype of a rather more restricted genotype.
Does any of this matter? Yes, of course it does: so-called scientific racism is the only kind that people hang on to nowadays, precisely because they think of themselves as, duh, “rational”. Black people may not want to talk to white people about race, while white people have a well-attested aversion to being put right on anything whatsoever; but in this particular race – the human one – there are no winners, while the podium is a very crowded location indeed.
