Running's "inclusiveness" scramble is a carnival of narcissism, self-contradiction, laziness, and coercion
However serious the "diversity" zealots may appear, they're self-serving preachers whose sermons are no more trustworthy than a televangelist's
An accomplished ultrarunner named Ryan Montgomery is visibly pleased with himself. This is not because of anything he’s done on the trails lately, but because he had a feature, subs-only article published in the November issue of Ultrarunning. His article makes a gushing—and at this stage of Wokism’s stranglehold on fitness culture, practically parodic—demand for running-industry leaders to pour even more resources into attracting people to the sport who pack their social-media bios with acronyms and abbreviations like BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and BLM. To make his case, he interviewed two similarly identity-crazed runners, one a racist, self-contradicting gadabout (and running-media darling) I’ve written about before and the other an ultramarathoner I’d never heard of who is plainly just as unreliable.
Montgomery is proud of this work because he and his interview subjects are convinced that running suffers from insufficient “diversity.” He’s pleased someone took what he calls a cute photo of him. He’s so impressed with his own words that he doesn’t just take a photo of the article; he literally highlights his own words, abstract items he is ineffective at using in practice.
One caveat, though not an important one: I didn’t read the entire article. But I can see the same portions of it you can, and seeing Alison Désir complain at the outset about a dearth of black runners at a trail race in Montana is probably enough to draw firm conclusions about its utility, even absent prior knowledge of Désir’s ongoing race scam.
To review, Désir decided last year that a black man being murdered by white men while on a run implied that the entire running world is a hotbed of literal white supremacy, and plans to publish a book called The Unbearable Whiteness of Running.
Imagine some white activist using a lone account of a white jogger being attacked by an assailant of color as a reason to propose that there was something inherently different about, something organically wrong with, black people—some ineffable but foul quality called “blackness” that its owners needed to work on suppressing. That activist would sound exactly like a mid-19th-century Mississippi plantation owner working on his state’s declaration of secession from the United States, and would rightfully be hectored into social oblivion.
If you think you can make a case for why Désir’s brand of racism, which is straight from the Critical Theory playbook, should be any more acceptable, go ahead. You’d be the first on Earth to succeed, and maybe the first to even try.
This crap is self-evidently destructive. It’s a guarantee that in Désir’s work as a mental-health counselor, she assigns the ultimate blame for any problem any black client faces to “whiteness.” This axiomatic claim of a racial power imbalance being at the root of all conflicts is baked into Wokism/Critical Theory. I’m not exaggerating.
Désir, another coward who blocks dissenting input, also at least passively supports the idea of a world without separate competitions for women and men, yet is considered a “power woman” by Women’s Running—a magazine that already should not exist because of its ongoing antagonism toward the concept in its title, but literally could not exist in a unisex sports world. Yet, as illogical and incoherent an idea as this is, it has lots of company wafting about the joggersphere these days.
Désir, who completed the 2018 New York City Marathon in 4:51:51 and calls herself an endurance athlete, also seems utterly clueless about running and health in general. Why would anyone listen to someone this distant from…I don’t know, getting it?
The other interview subject, Adam Merry, claims on his coaching website to be an elite, multiracial trail runner. He looks about as multiracial as I do—and hey, when all people talk about is their skin color and what they do with their classifiable genitals, it invites a close look—but I’ll trust him on that one. But he doesn’t support his claim of being an elite trail runner with any results, and it appears the reason for this is that he isn’t really an elite trail runner, as fluid as that status appears to be from the outside.
In a recent Instagram post of his own, Merry laments the verdict in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial. I can’t pile on him too heavily for this one, because anyone who watches lefty media outlets has been exposed to a nonstop torrent of bullshit about the case from the very start. I admit that it feels like some teenager who shows up at a protest with a long gun (one he clearly doesn’t know how to handle) and winds up killing a couple of people should wind up doing time, maybe serious time, for something. Especially one whose most oft-used file photo hearkens to generation after generation of pernicious, unregulated, and procreative incest. And of course it was asinine for the kid—for anyone—to be patrolling the streets of Kenosha that night looking for trouble. But the reality is that, in context, Rittenhouse took the actions he did in order to defend himself.
What I’m more nonplussed by is Merry’s insistence that this was a setback for BIPOC people. I understand that the Kenosha protest was about the shooting of Jacob Blake, but of all of the articles I saw that insisted on identifying Rittenhouse as white, not a single one noted that the three shooting victims were also white. If you’re a person of color and feeling especially mortified by this verdict, maybe consider not watching or reading bullshit framed as news anymore, because it is precisely their aim to make you feel worse about absolutely everything in the world so you keep watching or reading. Your choice; govern your input accordingly.
Accepting the legal realities and Wisconsin’s statutes means accepting the not guilty verdict as legitimate. How do Merry and his ilk feel about the case of Andrew Coffee IV, found not guilty of two murder charges on the same day the Rittenhouse verdict came down? Coffee is still facing serious prison time, but does anyone think the jury was wrong to reject his claim of self-defense? I doubt white supremacy was at issue here.
There comes a point where internalizing pain is fully optional even if you’re a member of a group that has historically experienced a wealth of unfair, ugly, sometimes even lethal discrimination. If you’re mad as an ethnic minority that some white hillbilly in the Midwest shot two white people to death, sorry, but you’re a big part of your own problem.
All parties involved in Montgomery’s article claim that within their stew of disjointed, buzzword-laden, accusatory rambling lies a path toward a better running world for everyone, and it involves simply handing cash to nonwhite or non-straight people who run or at least claim to be runners. The reason, according to Montgomery? “It’s the right damn thing to do.”
Maybe Montgomery uses his article to back up his claim in his Instagram post that running race fields and the industry’s leadership both include a lower percentage of minorities than does the at-large U.S. population (at least I think this is what he’s saying—his harried writing makes it hard to tell). But I doubt it, because none of these Wokesters is interested in real metrics anyway. They’re going to keep yelling for as long as people keep rewarding them with handouts. Anyone who thinks that a zealot like Désir will ever look around and declare, “Okay, things are even enough now, enough with the anti-white racism” is laughably deluded. The only thing that will stop people like her is people like us telling them to shove their racist ideas and other stupidities up their smelly asses.
(Incidentally, does Montgomery think he can identify the sexual orientation of everyone he meets on sight? I used to believe I could tell who at road races was most interested in dick, and all that did was get me in trouble. Well, almost all.)
I also don’t think running has ever had an institutional diversity problem anyway. For one thing, have any of you heard of someone ever being turned away from, or otherwise discouraged from entering, a running event as a result of being LGBTQ (I guess everyone at races can tell?) or nonwhite? Me either. When I was forced to live in South Florida, I saw elevens upon dozens of Cuban-Americans at races. In San Francisco, small armies of Asian-Americans (actually a little of everything). Gay Pride Runs have been going on for decades. If no one is being denied entry or the feeling of belonging at races in 2021, looking at demographic trends is all but pointless.
Do any of these three find the preponderance of black people in the NBA and the NFL troubling? Aren’t there far too many Dominicans in baseball? Maybe talent and inclination are driving already natural trends in distance running, too.
So Montgomery’s foundational claim itself, that running suffers from a diversity problem—one so pronounced it requires people to start writing checks to members of alphabet-soup coalitions—doesn’t hold up. I mean, if you’re surprised when your hunt for black trail runners in Montana proves unsuccessful, you really are just a hopeless moron.
But there’s another side to the “throw money at diversity” idea, and it’s that we* have seen examples of this fail spectacularly already. Malignant sleaze-artist Latoya Shauntay Snell has gotten all sorts of free stuff from HOKA and other companies in recent years, all for doing nothing but sitting on her ass, getting fatter on purpose, insulting people, not finishing events, boozing it up as a “recovering alcoholic,” making up excuses, lying, and hiding from those who call her out and whose reputations she has tried to vandalize. She is nothing but a comprehensive asshole who happens to be black, overweight, and difficult to look at without arc welder’s lenses.
So, judging from the lovely contributions to the joggersphere in recent years from avaricious, basically sessile handout-receivers like Snell, it might be a good idea to simply let alphabet-soup folks pay their own race entry fees at signup, just like those of us afflicted with conditions like heterosexuality, the ability to accurately identify human genitalia, and various degrees of melanin deficiency.
I do think Montgomery’s heart is in the right place even if his vision is skewed, and I agree that his pics are indeed fabulous. But the last place industry leaders need to be wasting money in in actively promoting the demented, no-endpoint kind of diversity Montgomery’s article calls for, especially when getting rid of white people is part of the plan. And for Désir, it clearly is—unless there is some other envisioned endpoint in calling yourself a runner and demonizing white runners nonstop, all while being unable to determine why your posterior keeps expanding.
More broadly, it’s clear that Wokism is failing, both as a political strategy and as a public-relations exercise. For evidence of this, look to Democrats’ frustration with U.S. Senator Kyrsten Sinema. It turns out that shit can go wrong even with a geeky bisexual candidate for office, because beneath her personality quirks, she has turned out to be every bit the moderate she promised to be as an elected official from Arizona. And if that’s not enough, have a gander at how Dems managed to lose the Virginia governor’s race; it’s clear that a huge factor was Terry McAuliffe’s general bumblefucking and denying the stuff that has been happening in school classrooms in his state.
Faced with plaintive drama-generators like these folks, most polite, cogent observers I know have two reactions, both of them silent. One is refusing to criticize the ignorance, racism, quota systems, self-contradictions, and basic misunderstandings they see in the bellowing of these diversity champions, because it really does feel wrong to take a swing at someone who’s ostensibly calling for societal positive change, even when you know they’re pimping the message for egoistic needs or merely abusing it. The other is feeling progressively less inclined to personally support any of these supposedly needed changes, including some good ideas, because most people—including longtime left-of-center types—eventually grow weary of being told “You better support us, you fuckin’ sexist bigots!” by people who in some instances are proven bigots themselves and ding-dongs who cut various moral and ethical corners at work and at play.
I have supported the pro-gay marriage (or pro-civil union, when those were a thing) and pro-abortion candidates in every election I can remember voting in. And as someone who despises litter and likes to be outdoors, I am on board with pro-environment principles generally. But at some point, if it’s a political concern that doesn’t affect or help me, I’m not going to give a shit anymore. Having an article about some great people killed for being too white for Outside’s sexist and racist liking was irksome, even though I didn’t have to take it personally after the shitweasel editor responsible, Molly Mirhashem, spearheaded a campaign to falsely portray a different white guy as a racist, all on the basis of dilapidated testimony from a Chinese-American jogger who no longer even runs.
This is why I have started thinking stuff like, “Well, it’s sad that schools are a mess, but I don’t have any fuckin’ kids in ‘em and I already know how to read,” and “maybe the seas are rising, but it won’t be my fuckin’ grandkids living in Maine to escape 120-degree summers in fifty years.” And as much as I continue to agree with “My body, my choice,” another view of that, in the context of a Wokism-ruined Planned Parenthood, is “Your ova, your problem.” Every Wokester expecting people like me they’ve actively been antagonizing for years to keep voting for the stuff they want is simply not very bright or big-picture-focused. But the Wokish seem eager to lose everything anyway. If Joe Biden is somehow still alive in 2024, they Dems will have to run him. That seems nuts, but what’s the alternative? The country hates Kamala Harris even more than it does Biden, who won in 2020 mainly because of a shift in white male voters. If she runs, and Donald Trump doesn’t drop dead himself shortly, Trump will be president again, or maybe some lovable fellow like Josh Hawley. Will that make everyone happy? All of the networks would be overjoyed.
If this gang keeps beating the Wokish drum set, it will get them and a few friends the handouts they want in the short term, mostly likes and publicity. But if they really care about others, they should start thinking about ways to really make distance running more popular and accessible for people of color, rather than just standing up to clap like mad when, say, the Cleveland Major League ballclub changes its name to the Guardians in the name of instantly improving life on Native American reservations. I keep returning lately to this idea:
When I watched The Wire, probably the most captivating crime drama ever produced and interchangeable in many ways with a documentary series, one of my overriding thoughts—bizarre for a randomly chosen viewer, I’m sure, but probably typical for one with a jogging jones—was that countless kids in West Baltimore would never be able to simply leave their homes and go running without a strong likelihood of being attacked. And obviously, Baltimore is just one of a number of American cities with cores that were never built or developed with the idea of running there in mind and, even when relatively free of criminal activity, are not environments in which a competitive runner could flourish.
Far be it from me to actually do anything with this idea, but there must be tens of thousands of kids in the U.S. who could use a supervised park setting and someone to run with i the afternoon as much as they can use donated shoes and gear. I’m sure I’m not the first to think of such a thing, but whenever I bellyache about the twits on skateboards and scooters around here, I remember that if you’re 10 or 11 and living in certain parts of this country, you just don’t have the option of running or really any outdoor sports outside school property. Woods? The hell?
Anyway, since I seem to have lost the plot once already, I’ll do it again: Happy Thanksgiving, pilgrims and natives alike. I was going to sign up for a turkey trot-style race, but the deadline passed as I was churning this post out and now I can’t. Now it’s looking like gobble-gobble and butthurt galore, like every year.