Promoting a racist, destructive slug as a progressive, visionary runner seems unwise
Alison Desir's intentions are not merely devoid of decency, they're pregnant with malice, as she seeks division and ruin rather than unity and flourishing
If you follow running via social media, you may be familiar with Alison Desir, who frames herself as a scholar, runner, and social-justice advocate fighting to keep running free of racism and safer for everyone. Because running media outlets and companies have uniformly amplified Desir’s vainglorious and endless publicity campaign, you may be aware that her long-promised book recently became available, albeit without its original openly race-baiting title.
If you’ve been a regular reader of Beck of the Pack for a couple of years, you know—or at least have been offered irrefutable evidence—that what Alison Desir embodies, in fact, is the opposite, and intentionally so. She represents anti-intellectualism, racism (actually, a whole raft of “isms”; her racism is actually incidental to her greater mission to “disrupt”) and cowardice. She’s desperately uneducated despite being a product of prep-school and Ivy League privilege.
As a former sub-four-hour marathoner turned excuse-spraying slug who allows herself to be called an elite runner, Desir is the last person anyone interested in bettering herself through exercise would enlist as a mentor, mental-health counselor, or life guide.
Yet despite having advertised the deterioration of her own running fitness in concert with extolling deeply unhealthy notions of physical and psychological wellness—both aims being congruent with her rigorous Critical Race Theory training at Columbia University, which essentializes the externalization of blame and the demolition of existing “white” standards—Desir has launched a lucrative career out of sowing and amplifying specific forms of endless social discord, all while no longer even qualifying as a distance runner and despite the allegedly “anticapitalist” aims of eradicating “whiteness.”
A certified mental-health counselor despite being a next-level preening snowflake, Desir once ran seriously, claiming the activity saved her life. After putting on what looks to be well over fifty pounds since her sub-four-hour-marathon days of 2015, Desir—having already capitalized on the 2020 murder of Ahmaud Arbery to condemn the entire running world as racist—decided to write her book. And various running types who probably didn’t read a single full page of Running While Black (original title: The Unbearable Whiteness of Running) are dutifully sounding off about what wonderful and seminal work Desir is doing.
A variety of independent tragedies contribute to this panoramic horror show. These include:
Desir is herself committed to deep racism, no matter her or others’ efforts to justify her terminology. “Whiteness” is racist—so blatantly so that it’s meant to be confusing, in just the way “trans women are biological women” is.
Despite her visibility, Desir visibly does nothing on behalf of poor black Americans today, or even acknowledges their real plight; it’s strictly the Alison Desir Ego Show. Her privilege and narcissism animate her more than her heritage does—in fact, her persona reminds me so much of Lindsay Crouse’s that I instinctively visualize Desir as a spoiled white girl rather than someone born in Haiti.
This is a critical flaw and the one that best exposes the illegitimacy of her motives as well as her supporters’ lack of intellectual curiosity and concern for genuine social justice.She, like anyone who advises people to blame a cruel and unjust world for any emotional pain they experience, or anyone who advises people in crisis to avoid introspection, is not equipped to give mental-health advice to anyone. Assuming such a role is part of Desir’s mission to get more people of color to blame white people (including Asians) for their problems and to hunt for problems where none exist, e.g., the dearth of black trail runners in the state of Montana.
She refuses to engage serious criticism, blocking dissent and appearing only in a series of hilariously friendly podcasts and dopey PR-style profiles. Like all Wokish people, she is a unidirectional keyboard warrior who counts fundamental weakness among her prevailing traits.
Desir no longer even qualifies as a runner, at least not one who sets an example of how running produces detectable physical and mental-health benefits. Yet not only did The Cut call her elite, Oiselle, which ostensibly operates within the running industry, has classified her as an elite runner—not Oiselle’s first mistake in this area.
Desir’s grifting and hate-spreading messaging by definition has no endpoint. This is baked into “social justice” training: “Whiteness,” like diabetes, cannot be purged, only managed for life until you die of its complications. Therefore, anyone who commits to “allyship” of any sort with Desir is trapped for life. These folks can expect to be providing regular “boosters” to this scammer and her ilk forever.
Per Wokism, she favors not only trans-”female” participation in female sports, but the ultimate abolition of gendered sports altogether. This is despite her founding a running club specifically for girls and despite Trail Runner naming her as a “power woman” of 2022, copying Women’s Running’s move two weeks earlier.
There is no discernible content in her whining and rambling, just Critical Theory keywords and racialist overtones. She’s not…an intellectual. She doesn’t even comprehend the mechanics of weight change.
Despite this farrago of blistering character and operational shortcomings, she has universal support among “name” people and entities within the running community. Although this is hardly consoling, the phenomenon is hardly unique to running or the fitness sphere.
Plenty of those same “name” people, plus a horde of everyday runners, unquestionably recognize that this is an utter, destructive sham and refuse to say anything about it owing to a combination of fear of cancellation and the ESG/DEI financial incentives attending the still-ascendant Wokish cultural demolition. No one dares call a person of color racist, especially one who expertly, even automatically, exhibits glistening victimhood with every enfeebled, shuffling, pouty move. And especially when every incentive besides self-respect points toward submitting to the fear of resisting and actively promoting the mess.
I don’t know Desir and won’t be reading her book, but her social-media activity and the interviews are enough to confirm all of this, within the limits of debatable adjectives. This post probably represents my deepest dive into any material claims Desir has made, and for non-link-followers, here’s a sample of her wisdom:
If you, as a white person, ever find yourself in a place where everyone is white or mostly white—including at your workout—then there is a problem and you are perpetuating it.
You can find lots of fresh stories and tweets about Desir, but I’ll focus on an interview that appeared in Outside Online on October 18. Happily, the interviewer, Emilia Benton, is also a bigoted dimwit of color. I say “happily” because the resulting piece perfectly exposes the raucous avarice powering everything Desir publicly does, relating to item #2 in the above list.
A little about Benton, because a little is all there is. She was among the harpy-members of the Marathon Investigation Facebook group who railed at Derek Murphy two years ago for the crime linking to this post, wherein I continued to call out assholes who were then causing problems for Gary Cantrell.
Benton and other harpies placing the quality of my writing beneath their own because some of it is on Substack was funny at the time. For one thing, I wrote for the same publications that are now featuring Benton’s work for over twenty years. For another, Benton herself supports writers and “writers” who use Substack, among them Chris Chavez.
For a third, Runner’s World is not credible. Just yesterday I provided an example of how they deleted one of my articles and replaced it at the same URL with a contradictory one. That’s as dismal as it gets, even when the topic is dumb. And RW also put polyfraud and unstellar human Latoya Shauntay Snell on its cover.
These should all be sources of burning shame, of course, and they omit Benton’s patent racism and sexism. And it all became funnier when I looked into what Benton has written and happily listed on her personal website.
Credible journalism in credible outlets.
And like Desir, Benton is not pro-human; she’s anti-white. This would be more evident in both cases if these goons were not riding a damaging sociocultural tsunami, chortling down at their betters from its not-quite-ephemeral crest.
Maybe Benton should say “not all white people” while riding down an escalator announcing her candidacy for the Queen of Pooping.
Benton will likely never understand why all of this makes her look like the subject of a rejected “Local Woman Does Such-and-Such” story in The Onion. But being inept as well as apparently agnostic toward non-personal social-justice aims, she was perfect for the role of exposing what Desir is not about, as what she claims to be about is repetitive, incoherent, and droning and has been available to nose-holding Internet surfers for years.
I don’t want to add a part 2 to this, but I invite you to scan that interview by Benton of Desir and search for evidence of Desir even being aware of the swarm of problems that have gotten worse for black America since she started gaining serious traction. Here’s an essay on how Black Lives Matter has likely cost black lives, and if Desir has been paying no attention to inflation, the abolition of the Child Tax Credit, and various other forms of active neglect that have had disproportionate effects on black people, it’s because these don’t affect her personally. All Desir cares about is herself, and all people promoting her care about is their own in-world reputations.
(Useful reference: Keep Your Wokal Distance.)