A Race about Race.

I just watched the women’s 4x4 relay final at the World Athletics Championships. The British team consisted of two black girls and two white girls, and they gained a creditable bronze behind the Jamaicans and Americans.

The anchor leg was run by a white girl, and when she crossed the line joy erupted in the team. So then we had the spectacle: two blacks and two whites doing something together as equal partners, and succeeding together, and embracing together, and being joyful, together. And when you think of all the abuse, the cruelty, the shameful exploitation that the white race has loaded onto the black over the past three hundred years – and continues so to do in the more evolutionary challenged corners of the world – thereby shamefully trying to insinuate into them a sense of inferiority, it was pretty damn moving, you know? It was.

This isn’t about flags and national anthems and steps on a podium. It’s much, much bigger than that. Dare we hope that we’re getting there? Together?