A year's worth of "anti-racism" in running has been surprisingly helpful, albeit to the wrong people

The only beneficiaries of Wokism are well-off, mostly white folks and "token"-style minorities, and double eyerolls to the surprised

It was around this time last year that a random, personality-disordered runner-turned-nonrunner, upset about a virtual ultramarathon’s simple “no political chatter on our Facebook page” policy, received a generous assist from various media outlets in portraying the race director—who has given ungodly sums of money to numerous charities—as a racist. That the authors of the resulting round of stories admitted in various places and various guises to the “racism” charge being a contrivance did nothing to discourage the attempt to punish Laz Lake in the Wokish summer of 2020, when one set of cable viewers rage-watched looped footage of black people being bloodied by cops and viewers of the other set saw videos of businesses being torched by mostly black Antifa rioters.¹

All of these stories about Laz’s imaginary offense were clickbait—although that is definitionally true of all content generated by online media companies—and all of them were baloney, also usually the case when it comes to ad-supported Internet pages. But some, at least, were built around a kernel of earnest caring, rather than a desire to merely look good by remembering when and why to post a “black square” on Instagram. I believe—and I’ve been wrong about “typical attitudes” before, but this hypothesis seems solid enough—that most everyday people abhor real racism when they see or feel it up close. Most people who want to be a part of human social life, anywhere, are not psychologically constructed to tolerate, much less cheer on, either single ugly events rooted real bigotry or the idea that someone should forever be resigned to an underclass based on phenotype or any other simple accident of birth that says nothing at all about who and what every unique person, and their unique assembly of aspirations and attitudes and capabilities and fears, is.²

But wherever racism by some satisfactory, agreed-upon definition exists and whatever the penetration of its effects, the realities of economics and the demographics of the United States colluded to ensure, from the very start of last summer’s post-George Floyd outrage, that the only real beneficiaries of insult-style, language-control-based “anti-racism” would be the white people most prominently accusing other white people of racism (and often, sexism, transphobia, fatphobia, and other sources of butthurt that whites can more easily personalize and weaponize than racism). This is because most of the people controlling corporations, the media, and every other bastion of American business and culture are white, and in the end, people invariably divert resources toward their own interests, financial and otherwise. Humans are wired to look out for certain other humans, but a group of people working together will always look out of the collective Number One in the room more than they do anyone else, with the inevitable aggregate result being most of the spoils going to the people pulling the control levers. You’re free to try to identify a single successful corporation that has ever behaved otherwise; good luck in your search.

Also, and equally unsurprisingly, many of those most eager to establish their Wokish bona fides are rank narcissists who not only lie but gleefully contradict themselves on a regular basis as long as this, however fleetingly, makes them look even more Woke than other affluent white shitlibs. And like idealistic first-term members of U.S. Congress, a lot of previously independent-enough thinkers have allowed themselves to be whipped into line by Wokism, either to protect their careers or because they favor the discomfort of being cowards over the discomfort of challenging ideas that are plainly stupid but happen to be hyper-ascendant, culturally speaking.

The manic self-interest at work here may sometimes be obscured by sentimental jabber and the frequent mention of emotionally charged events, especially if you dive into these stories buying their typical premise that some white male has done something bad that needs to be “called out.” But this obvious pimping of a genuine societal problem for naked personal gain among running types is nevertheless evident in a variety of ways, at least if you’re not looking at the Wokish train from inside one of its cars. And it doesn’t hurt that some of running’s primary media figures are very liberal—at least in terms of how they identify—and, in their haste to push the often-contradictory ideas associated with the modern left, are often too daft or lazy to cover their tracks.

The scams are blunt-force, not reliant on cleverness whatsoever. On the “punish the offender” side, white people eagerly spending gobs of cash on Robin DiAngelo-style white-guilt seminars (no need for scare quotes there) when that money could obviously go to any number of causes that materially benefit people of color really gives this away, just as on the “reward the victim” end, every move by career nonsense-generators like Latoya Shauntay Snell is brazenly insincere, because the perpetrators of such moves are presently held to no moral standards at all. Both women are power-mad hucksters—entrepreneurs aiming only to line their pockets while Wokism is still at or near its peak; none of what they have to offer is useful, and much of it is transparently destructive.

But “scholars” like DiAngelo have informed a lot of the stupidity being promulgated in the sometimes-jogger segment of the running community, which is largely white, largely affluent, and rife with women who only want to become smaller in mass but larger in stature. And Snell has become a favorite of running-media types who just want to see a black person gain things she visibly doesn’t deserve at the expense of others, perhaps believing this somehow wackily counterbalances countless instances of historical and ongoing anti-black racism elsewhere.

On the surface, I can see why people think this way, especially when they fold their personal resentments into the recipe. Would that life were so simple!

Snell’s addition to the October 11 Boston Marathon field (an event I will inevitably write more about shortly) has pissed off a lot of people, given that there are no good reasons to include her in the race, but to me it really hammered home to me just how much of a joke HOKA ONE ONE and other companies supporting her think “anti-racism” is at its core, and how willing they are to basically abuse someone to show how progressive they are. I’ll unpack that idea below, but it’s worth revisiting the steps it took in a little less than a year to reach this point in running history.³

One of the most ghoulish attempted resettings of norms by the Wokish—and here I’m not talking about recent converts, but the kind of deviants who get advanced degrees in social-science fields despite manifesting academic and overall dullardry with heroic consistency—is referring to “whiteness” or “white supremacy” within institutions. The pretext for this in the running world couldn’t have been flimsier: A black man killed by rednecks while running proved that the running community itself is racist to the point that it needs to be somehow overthrown until the screeching stops, which ot course is never going to happen as long as rewards for being blindly bellicose and illogical outweigh the punishments. So now, we* have a book called The Unbearable Whiteness of Running, which last year was supposed to be out this year, but this year is supposed to be out next year.

If you truly believe that there is something inherent about a person’s race that makes them a bad person, regardless of directionality, then you’re a racist, and you’re not going to fool or gaslight enough people into accepting this position to retain standing unless you work for a shady business that agrees to insulate you from the consequences of this “reverse” racism. By that measure, every ad-supported fitness outlet still in precarious existence has eagerly embraced any number of racist attitudes in the past three years or so, protected from the usual consequences of such deviant behavior by the fact that, in a situation that seemingly could arise in a country as bloated, complacent, and bovine as the U.S., it’s become cool for white people to get on board with black people trashing white people without ever taking a look at what might be justified and what clearly isn’t.

A lot of running’s shitlibs would do well to never mention traditional liberal bugbears like gun violence and the lack of access to affordable healthcare if they’re only going to do so for exploitative purposes. When ten people were shot dead in a Boulder supermarket four months ago, most of the usual clamorheads took the opportunity to mention that a local pro runner was a King Soopers employee and inside the store at the time. Chris Chavez, an amazingly bad writer for someone who’s been attempting to do it for as long as he has as well as an indolent and proud weasel whose departure from running would invigorate the sport overnight, made sure to give his usual lip service to gun control in his newsletter that week. But as no famous runners have since been terrorized by mass murderers lately for the benefit of the running community, he hasn’t said a word about gun violence. I guess I’m just someone who sees pretending to care as worse than not caring at all, but mostly I just detest self-serving, no-account serial screw-ups.

I could go into how the running media ate enormous amounts of crow—however silent the gorge-fest was—after Gwen Berry cajoled her own racist tweets into light of day with a bunch of pouty grandstanding at the Olympic Trials, but there’s no need to; the running media as whole had established itself as a covey of cowards, hypocrites, and morons well before that episode. Similarly, I could also mention how their treatment of Shelby Houlihan’s ban was both demonstrative of their journalistic suckitude and proof of further hypocrisy along various axes. But I won’t, because that would just be suggesting that incompetence and sloth on the part of a reporter in one area tends to spill into other areas, and how fair would that be?⁴

So after a year, what fruits have the running media’s “anti-racist” efforts brought about in the real world? I don’t even need a bulleted list or even a whole paragraph for that: The constant illusion that running is hostile to everyone but white people and therefore in continual need of reformation, but only at the level of feelings-restructuring and word-policing. Anything that actually helps? Someone else’s problem.

Putting a nonstop liar and noise machine into the Boston Marathon isn't an insult anymore to the Boston Marathon, the exclusivity of which has been in decline for years. It's an insult to the unprepared idiot who can't and won't finish the race and, moreover, to people of color training their asses off and not flaming everyone in sight who could have received that bib.

When companies try to show their alleged progressivism by assigning roles to minorities without checking to see if any of their selectees happen to be utter degenerates, it shows how porous and sloppy their commitment to social justice is. I almost feel bad for Snell, now in panic mode, but in the meantime, she benefits. In the revamped court of public opinion, it’s possible the Boston Marathon does, too.

Also, for all the irksome, often laughable examples of bad journalism and just plain bad coverage of the sport, figures like Lindsay Crouse, Chavez, Alison Wade and Erin Strout, and as far as I know publications like Runner’s World (so far in the age of Wokism the least offensive of these, by quite a lot in fact) and the various offerings in the Outside neo-conglomerate of turd-flinging lunacy, have only gained prestige within the increasingly factless world of running communicators.

Here’s one of many realities underscoring why this battle is really being fought and by whom: While women runners or runner-like figures who consider themselves sexually attractive post endless photos of themselves on Instagram meant to advertise precisely this fact, those who think of themselves as less attractive are split between “body positivity,” i.e., learning to accept oneself as fat by making it an unrelenting, in-everyone’s-face personal theme, and “no body talk, period.” From the outside, this all makes a perfect, cold, and sad-funny kind of sense; less-attractive people operating in an ever-more-visual medium who want to make a mark—or merely want to feel less inadequate—naturally want to devalue the currency of attractiveness, whereas hotter but slower women just as naturally want more of the public-attention pie for themselves.

This becomes funny, admittedly in a sort of heartless, even sociopathic way, when reduced to the essential principles of game theory. But given the extent and momentum of the whole retard-ruckus, the only options available to a critic of my own mental constitution are “Persuade foremost, even if acerbically” and “They’re scum and not budging, so have as much bad-impulse-driven fun as possible, including low blows.” For now I seem to be vacillating awkwardly between these two stances.

My various would-be interlocutors think I’m a regressive asshole; I think they’re pandering, stupefied, craven idiots and that, apart in some cases from my arguably unkind choice of descriptors, most people within and outside the running world agree with my major fundamental points, which are simply that lying and one-sided advocacy framed as news have no place in whatsoever in civilized, if not always civil, society. Perhaps people disagree on the importance of living in a world in which truth retains a certain amount of value and lying is accordingly punished; I keep insisting that people with kids and grandkids ought to be more concerned about this than dingbats like me, but apparently I’m wrong.

All of this is a manifestation of the iron law of institutions, wherein it’s more important to any one person to advance their own standing within the group than it is to advance the stated goals of the group. While it’s amusing at a zoomed-out level to see some Internet social-psychology meme realized to the level of utter perfection the running media has attained, it’s more important to emphasize that all that’s happening here, everything I’ve written about on this subject for almost a year now, is for the sole benefit of a limited number of deliriously dishonest religious lunatics.

1. I’m not keeping score in terms of the actual damage done, as if this is possible or even desirable. I’m just underscoring how polarized a news environment now exists in the U.S., and that different channels routinely show viewers completely different perspectives on the same series of events. The reason you argue with your in-laws about politics isn’t necessarily because they, or you, are stupid, hard-headed people; it’s because you continue to trust a lot of ideas you see repeatedly that you shouldn’t be seeing at all.

2. In this area, the most ancient, mistrustful, and tribal portions of our brains are often at war with our conscious concept of what is moral and just in; in fact, in modernity, this conflict is evident in both racism and the Wokish plan for addressing it. But I leave a deeper analysis of that to any cultural anthropologists out there.

3. Note: I’m going light on links here, and maybe permanently, because the Substack metrics reveal that most people don’t click them. I am free to take this as a sign of reader trust in the veracity of any associated claims, but this might also lead to confusion for readers unaware that I have mentioned a few of the same people and episodes repeatedly, even thematically.

4. Paralipsis, often a shrewdly dirty trick, belongs in every polemicist’s rhetorical arsenal.