In The Ring

I love fitness. I love sports. I go to the gym, I walk, I run, I cycle. In my youth, I played team games. And everyone said I was good at sports because of my heritage. My Jamaican ancestry. As a child, this confused me - my white British mother was as sporty as my father, representing her county at tennis in her teen years. But my sporting ability - which is enthusiastic rather than particularly gifted - is always attributed to the half of me that’s Black. It feels - and I’ll just say it - racialised, an echo of the ideas that saw things like superhuman strength and endurance attributed to Black people.

Featuring senior lecturer in American Studies at the University of Manchester, Natalie Zacek

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