Women's Running continues shilling for a race-grifter
The most recent unspooling of Alison Desir's "accomplishments" is an unwitting admission of her relentless fraudulence
I’ve been tough on Erin Strout. She has assumed the difficult dual role of Wokish-American feminist sports journalist and relentless but meek in-group status-seeker. This has forced her into a variety professional conflicts and anti-rational stances, such as promoting the inclusion of transfemales (i.e., males) in female running events while also writing carefully partitioned profiles of those athletes’ female competitors—having often helped silence the latter by portraying any contra-”inclusion” opinions as “transphobic”; stressing the need for useful drug-testing while also writing ultra-soft stories about athletes caught doping with whom she happens to be friendly; and recognizing herself as a vital journalistic voice while occasionally shielding her tweets from antagonistic eyes and announcing her intention to delete tweets of a sufficiently ripe age.
Strout announced late last year that she had left her full-time propagandist-at-large position at Women’s Running to embark on a freelancing career. That career thus far seems to include approximately seven articles, all for Women’s Running. By now, this necessary but unusually macabre member of the Outside clickbait-empire may or may not have replaced Jen Ator, the editor-in-chief who left or was sacked at around the same time Strout declared she was finito there.
Strout’s latest advocacy for the absurd is a rundown of the accomplishments of race-grifter and alleged jogger Alison Desir, the mental-health counselor who is thrown into mental-health crises by misspellings of her name and is occasionally seen fruitlessly hunting for black trail runners in the remote reaches of Montana. Desir was prepared two years ago to write a book slated for publication in 2021 titled The Unbearable Whiteness of Running, although, as you’ll see, that plan has undergone some unexplained tweaks.
Desir rose to prominence in 2020 with the aid of running’s game but enfeebled media ranks by capitalizing shamelessly on the murder of Ahmaud Arbery. Desir accused the white running community—on no evidence, but sagely expecting, and receiving, no pushback—of being insufficiently moved by the tragedy, while she herself was already busy preparing to monetize it.
None other than Strout described Desir’s initial moves in this area a little less than two years ago, wherein Desir literally called for the media to amplify citizen fear around race relations. That Strout reports this and similar details with naked admiration shows that she not only represents the media badly, but also doesn’t understand what the media are and are not supposed to do.
Stoking fear in one’s target audience is not always a grifter move—in fact, it’s a longstanding everyday operating principle of the American government, for reasons of control rather than material resource extraction. But almost all successful grifts are, upon their basic reverse-engineering, found to be rooted in eliciting fear and other uncomfortable emotions, notably guilt, in their marks—feelings that, according to the ghoulishly authoritarian-religious “antiracist” doctrine every online persona is now abiding by, only certain action patterns dictated by members of historically oppressed groups can alleviate.
What are Alison Desir’s required action patterns? Repeatedly agreeing that every imperfect thing in anyone’s life is at root level the result of racist forces, and donating money (or at least the occasional amplification of a black square from blue-checkmark Instagram) to black people or, more often, their proud white media, Zoom-seminar, and book-circuit stewards. Obviously, this is a hyper-incentivized and inherently endless process, because whiteness and white supremacy, per the school of Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi, can only be relentlessly examined and condemned within, and thus managed, never purged.
The spring 2020 wave of quasi-liberal-runner righteousness triggered by Desir’s plaintive outcries included the energetic, semi-coordinated smearing and suggested boycotting of race director Gary “Laz Lake” Cantrell for the high crime of agreeing in principle with the liberal stance on race American race relations, but refusing to make an exception for Black Lives Matter to the existing “no political chatter” rule on one of his Facebook pages. (The principals of BLM, by the way—and I mean BLM, Inc., not “the ethos”—are running a truly massive and easily anticipated scam of their own. Kudos to the NY Mag writer for even Going There, but he has a basic reasoning problem. People shouldn’t avoid dishonesty in social campaigns because it arms the opposition; people should avoid dishonesty in social campaigns because dishonest campaigns are categorically and inherently wrong. What is this guy, a fuckin’ lawyer?)
Strout wrote more about Desir for Women’s Running later that same month, then more in September and in October and in January. Each time, various other names were mentioned, but the whole point was to portray Desir as a uniquely effective, smiling, positive-thinking game-changer.
There are many angles of critical approach here, but an effective starting point might be suggesting that someone in favor of eliminating sex categories in sports is by absolute definition no friend of women’s running. It requires pronounced mental shortcomings to believe otherwise, though only a reduced conscience to feign otherwise. I’m certain that if Laura Ingraham donned her most troubled cunt-lipped expression and called for the same sexless athletic environment, Strout and her ilk would not be so casually dismissive, and in fact would be apoplectic. Why? Because cunt-lipped Ingraham and aw-me Erin Strout are both the same feminist at core level. Even the hopelessly blinkered can be made to comprehend that without male and female sports divisions, girls and women would never win anything, and a solid eighty or ninety percent of them would be driven into terminal non-participation in sports. Parents of girls, finally, welcome to the utopian world we all wanted for you—full equality of opportunity!
Strout’s latest maybe-freelance article represents a textbook example (what people used to write instead of “masterclass”) in artless persuasion. Even though Strout’s job for this outlet is technically to churn out keyword-driven patter to be crawled and boosted as avidly as possible by search bots, she puts embarrassingly little effort into crafting her arguments, although in her defense she often chooses positions even the most astute essayist couldn’t convincingly defend.
Strout’s first few paragraphs are an unintentional reminder that the men responsible for Arbery’s death targeted him specifically and are now serving life sentences, and that any relationship of these events to the fact that Arbery had left his house to go running is entirely tangential. Had he been attacked outside a CrossFit gym by the same men, would the CrossFit community have become a target of “antiracist” activists? The logic is the same.
Some called it 'an awakening' among the mostly white people who participate in American distance running recreationally or as elite-level athletes.
Who were these "some"? Grifters like Desir. You'd have to be blind to ignore the number of nonwhite runners participating all levels of running. And it’s not a new thing.
As for “mainly white people,” as sad a fact as it may be, most people in the United States are white. And some places remain extremely white, meaning that it’s simply unlikely to see a lot of nonwhite faces at events there. For the same reason, a lot of parks and playgrounds in large American cities feature few white faces. Unless these activists are in favor of making every U.S. municipality approximately 14 percent black by forced relocation, this natural reality will continue.
It had occurred to so few that runners of color face threats and fears any day they step outside to train, that they often didn’t see themselves reflected in the sport or welcome in its spaces.
Based on what evidence have the rest of us never considered this, other than mind-reading?
Here’s a story that’s been repeating itself in my head at least once a week for decades. Every time I pass a solo woman runner on one of the local paths after dusk, it instinctively occurs to me that I am safer than she is, and that if I am out ambling rather than running—especially dogless—then that woman probably instinctively perceives all 140 looming pounds of me as a threat to her safety when she sees me coming, with nothing but a high fence on one side and a creek on the other. Maybe only momentarily, but these paths are laden with various shambling characters of unknowable intent after sunset, and this runner and her thousands of sisters across the country probably go through this momentary adrenalin rush multiple times a day. I have experienced this unanticipated inner narrative-on-the-go since at least my college days.
Is that a start in the direction of the correct form of awareness, or is that merely a noble brand of male chauvinism—folly just as up for contempt as any other observation lobbed from a stipulated perch of privilege?
Running has always been advertised as “accessible to all.”
And it is. More so, I’d wager, than most other shared activity spaces. I have always seen all kinds of people at races and fun-runs everywhere, reflective of local demographics.
In the summer of 1994, I was living in Atlanta and training for my first marathon. In those micro-Internet days, it was typical to learn of upcoming races from flyers left on registration tables or the windshields of vehicles at other races. This is how I learned of a 5K in a city called College Park, a fundraiser event for an elementary school, and my training partner Mike and I put it on our calendar.
College Park is south of Atlanta and includes portions of Hartsfield Airport. I see that it is now 79 percent black and falling, as is the overall total population. In 1994, it may have been closer to 100 percent black. When I got out of the car that morning at the race site, I saw no other white people. I did see one Korean-American man getting ready to run—my friend Mike.
There was nothing uncomfortable or even unusual about the experience. There were volunteer kids laughing at the water stops and fighting to be the one who hands the cup to the leader. Ladies questioning with a grin whether I really needed a size XL T-shirt. A reminder to please stay for the awards ceremony. I won the race in 15:55, and talked to the same kinds of interested strangers in the aftermath as I would have anywhere else given a similar result. Their questions were the same; they just came from mouths in darker faces that produced words in English with different accents and flourishes than my own. (I don’t really sound like I’m from the Boston area, but to someone who’s never been there, well, I think I sort of do, especially when drowning in coffee and feeling expansive. I can only imagine what these kids—most of the runners were quite young, befitting the cause—thought of my own cultural imprint on the day.)
Look, even a committed racist serious about his or her running would be upset to see any kind of openly racist or racialist activity at a public running event, anywhere. Even if only because he or she didn’t want anything to interfere with the fucking race. That includes anyone boasting a swastika on a kit, which I have never seen (but cannot rule out having happened, somewhere), or even coercive attempts to discourage nonwhite runners from registering. Hell, for those of us raised in 1980s New Hampshire, higher-level regional track meets were about the only chance to even interact with black people in significant numbers. Listening to Run-DMC while waiting to race a pack of five-minute milers from Timberlane Regional High School didn’t cut it.
But I have lived and trained and raced in a lot of places since, from Atlanta to Roanoke, Virginia to San Francisco to the Denver metro area. As a past graduate of various sobering-up environments, including the hoosegow in my headier days, I was often a member of a racial minority, or in so ethnically mixed an environment with so non-racialized a purpose that no one gave two fucks how many of this was what. But if you want to see some real racists, people incapable of hiding it even if struck by the inspiration to project false humanity, get yourself arrested for something stupid on a Friday night, so that you can’t see a judge until Monday and get three nights in lock-up, exceeding the two days you then receive for a public-intoxication rap. I know multiple felonious crackers I’m convinced have never encountered a black person in real life, yet foment catastrophically racist ideas anyway, as if victims of Clayton Bigsby syndrome-by-proxy. Any jail in the country is like this, I bet.
But how I meander. Put plainly, poor black people are just not clamoring to run marathons in large numbers any more than they are to purchase season passes to Aspen ski resorts. I will agree—though I’m not sure Desir has happened across this point herself—that white or mostly white entrepreneurs, notably those leading the Competitor Group and its mega-beshitted Rock 'n' Roll Marathon Series, have helped make the road-racing experience both more expensive and less pleasurable over time, and impressive feat of profiteering that could only work on a “ME! ME! ME!”-powered citizenry. (I think some of those white people have been the Chinese-billionaire kind, but at some point, those folks seem to have sold off their stake in the Ironman Group.)
Arbery’s murder was a senseless and tragic way to learn (or be reminded) that it has never been safe for everybody.
This tries so hard to say something. But if these safety issues are, sadly, as mundane as Strout depicts, then what exactly has changed to position a self-contradicting, self-dealing gadabout as a rescuer of oppressed black running America?
Then the Desir hagiography commences.
Alison Mariella Désir, a runner, activist, and mental health advocate who lives in Seattle, was the first to question the silence among runners after the circumstances and a video of Arbery’s murder became public.
Right off the bat, readers are again asked to accept a shaky and unprovable claim: Runners were too blasé. Based on what metric? And if measurable, how much outrage would have been enough? I remember a great deal of dismay over the murder among my fellow runners, my own included, but apparently it only amounted to a uncaring ripple at best.
She was the first to ask why nobody was talking about it and why the sport’s media wasn’t [sic] covering it.
See above, and add that Arbery’s murder was not a tragedy driven by inherent shortcomings within running culture. While those may exist, they are unrelated to what happened in northeast Georgia that day. Arbery’s life was ended by three vicious assholes who will spend the rest of their own lives dodging the meat-lance in (one presumes) a dismal pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
The sport's media weren't covering the murder as symptomatic of a greater problem within running because it wasn't, and still isn't. If running had long been a cesspool of inherent exclusion, someone smarter than Alison Desir would have started addressing it long ago. I’m not saying her anger isn’t real or her cause entirely without merit, but this is opportunism incarnate. And portraying running as inherently hostile is damaging to the institution of running, in part by being precisely opposed to the very “inclusion” goals Desir ostensibly aims to achieve. (Strout and Desir both operate in accordance with “the Iron Law of Institutions of the Left”: It’s more important to them to improve their standing within the running community than to achieve that community’s external goals.)
She was the first to call on white runners to consider their privilege, to understand the concept of systemic racism and how it pervades not just society at large, but the running experience for all.
Notice the gushing superlatives—the first this, the first that. Here, these superlatives are praising Alison Desir for herself weaponizing a newly cool, flipped-script brand of racism, with the use of white guilt as C-4 and the recent murder of a young black man as its detonator.
This is all about what a savior Desir allegedly is, not about the problem itself, and that the problem is again emphatically speculative. Swallowing and propagating Desir’s spurious linking of Arbery’s murder to a greater racialist shortcoming in the running community is just Strout being Strout, churning out shitbait and doing a bad job of hiding her—and her subject’s—strongest motives.
One old quote from Desir revisited in this story puts an exclamation point on how quixotic and baseless her glory-chasing is.
“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.”
I just took a road trip through Western Colorado, easternmost Utah, and the northern fringes of Arizona and New Mexico. Over those eight days, I found myself in a string of public places where everyone was white or “mostly white,” whatever the fuck that is. Actually, the hotel clerk in Durango when I checked in was black. Mostly. Otherwise, I and everyone I saw was, in Desir’s view, perpetuating a problem. And I thought I was living my life as unobtrusively as possible.
I would ask her, “What in any of those moments would you have asked me to do to address the problem? Scroll through your Instagram page?” But there are no such questions, because there are no real answers. Desir’s whole production is aggressively nonsensical.
A side of word salad, if you’re not satiated yet:
“There is a feeling that there’s more of a shared language and a recognition by many people in the industry that Black, Indigenous, and people of color may have different experiences than they have as white people,” says Désir, author of Running While Black (coming in October; available now for pre-order).
In Strout’s previous articles about Desir’s upcoming book, which was originally to be published sometime last year, its title was listed as The Unbearable Whiteness of Running. I’m pretty sure Strout remembered this while patching together this latest tribute, but there is no mention of the title change and hence no explanation for it. You’d think that even an openly racist title could easily find a home with a semi-serious publishing house in this ferociously degraded literary environment.
And yeah, Desir has fucked with language norms. She’s among the many reprehensibles seeking to normalize terms like “white supremacy.” Good for her.
Desir, I should interject, has no understanding of basic nutrition despite multiple degrees from Columbia University. To be fair, morons assigned white at birth (AWAB) such as George W. Bush have long been spectacularly failing upward through the educational system and beyond, and will continue doing so—albeit more quietly than before—for as long as rich, dumb white people exist.
The piece goes on to chronicle Desir’s traveling scolding circus. Naturally, she leads forced diversity training sessions, empirically shown to do more harm than good for obvious-enough reasons.
Words like systemic racism, white supremacy, and white privilege were stumbling blocks for the group, mostly because the white members were uncomfortable with the concepts or didn’t understand the myriad ways they are intentionally and unintentionally perpetuated in running—acknowledging that also came with guilt and shame.
Those terms upset people because people of sound mind, made to sit in a room with a muddle-minded racist, don't like to be labeled what they're not. So, Desir shames them into pretending to agree with her using corporate backing and the knowledge her “trainees” are effectively or literally operating under a workplace gag order. Fuck her.
Back in Georgia, lawmakers have passed a bill annually designating February 23 as “Ahmaud Arbery Day,” encouraging community members to once again walk or run 2.23 miles as a show of advocacy for racial justice.
That’s something, but is unlikely on its own to lower, say, black incarceration and poverty rates.
Let’s take a step back. In 2020 is that the country was already reeling from the onset of covid, which we all knew would pass quickly, and the footage of George Floyd dying under police restraint in the middle of a daytime street was absolutely horrifying, made worse by the portrayal of Floyd as blameless or at worst a minor criminal. And a lot of white people who had ever told or laughed at a racist joke, used the N-word for sport, or convinced themselves of genuinely wrongheaded and bigoted things examined their own histories and found a lot of things wanting. Most of this stuff, even from Strout, had and continues to have seeds in genuinely good intentions.
How bad are things really? As imperfect as they are, an irreparably broken corporate media has convinced liberal Americans that things are orders of magnitude worse. And since “orders of magnitude” means “powers of ten,” I am again being literal. For example, this piece by Wilfred Reilly for the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism (FAIR) reveals that “the average ‘very liberal’ American believes that between 1,000 and 10,000 unarmed black men are killed annually by cops.” In 2020, the number was 17. If this discrepancy doesn’t meet the conventional criteria for public hysteria, it should.
That piece by Reilly and this equally thoughtful one by Glenn Loury, who is also black, shed considerable light on how bullying and deceptive media narratives have propelled so much of this lunacy. Rather than see such pieces as efforts to sweep vicious realities under the rug, everyone should be encouraged to learn that things are not as bad in the realm of race relations or police thuggery as people are curiously enamored of believing. It should be taken as great news that law officers are not nearly as inclined to invoke lethal anti-black violence—I mean, not even remotely close—as public opinion polls imply. But anyone who refers to even the hardest statistics in this area, white or black, immediately earns the “r” label on principle.
Desir has started some materially good programs, such as Harlem on the Run, and there is only so much that even one ambitious person can do to effect change besides yammer and preach in a world controlled increasingly by a smaller number of people with a growing amount of power. Virtually all of them are white, to anyone’s knowledge.
But she is a menace anyway. All of this Wokish reprogramming represents an authoritarian totem you should take the opportunity to defile and shit on every chance you get, just as you would a Nazi symbol. Racism is not and never can be a tonic for racism, no matter the historical context, the personal backstory, or the hand-over-fist justifications. Wokism is the kind of shit that you have to keep flushing because it stinks worse than usual and leaves mad streaks all over the bowl besides. But please, keep pushing the handle anyway, because nothing else seems to be working to lessen the impact of those misguided hate-vendors and their wall-eyed media allies.
[2/24/22 3:49 p.m. MST update: In a routine yet still improbable upping of the irony stakes, Erin Strout is now offering tips on how to be a discerning news consumer.
That Strout routinely serves as just the kind of source OnTheMedia.org advises against trusting needs no detailed explanation.]
I’ll end by paying homage to Strout in the form of Twitter imagery that crisply encapsulates her worldview. Bear in mind that there are no detectable traces of intentional irony in this outburst.
