Sha’Carri Richardson Debacle is Peak Ableism
When Sha’Carri Richardson blew down the track, then pointed prophetically to the clock. I had chills. In my mind’s eye, I can picture her orange hair, her multicolored suit, and her arms aloft in triumphant joy. Yes, queen.
I, like many others, watched her run the 100m dash dozens of times. Now, under the shadow of a month’s suspension for testing positive for THC, Richardson’s running takes on new meaning. She lives in the crevices of a history that dangerously ascribes super-ability to Black bodies. If you thought this was just about race and gender, you are wrong. This is misogynoir and ableism at its finest.
Richardson has recently drawn comparisons to Florence Griffith-Joyner (“Flo-Jo”) because of their speed and unapologetically Black self-styling. But, because both Richardson’s supporters and detractors draw on ableism and racism, there is another Black Olympian who is a historical touchstone for Richardson: Jesse Owens.
Those familiar with Olympic track and field history understand Owens’s 1936 track victories as a slap in the face to Adolf Hitler’s vision of white supremacy. That is only part of the story. As documented in PBS’s documentary Race: The Power of an Illusion, Owens’s Olympic glory upturned internationally prevailing ideas about Black bodies and set the stage for current conversations about Richardson.
According to Ellen Samuels’s book Fantasies of Identification: Disability, Gender, Race, the ideas we currently have about race, gender, and ability were actually in flux during the nineteenth century and part of the early twentieth. As a backlash to emancipation, common wisdom was that Black people were mentally and physically unfit to survive without white control. Students of history will remember that eugenics, the popular science of the time, garnered worldwide appeal because of how it buttressed white supremacy. It championed a genetic tower of Babel, wherein the human race could achieve a pinnacle of itself through strategic reproduction and systemic annihilation of undesirable traits. Of course, eugenics preached Blackness itself as a disability.
When Owens trounced white Olympians, the prevailing wisdom about Blackness shifted so that Blacks were understood as physically superlative even if cognitively impaired. These ideas revised antebellum wisdom about Black bodies. After all, Black physical prowess when enslaved was manageable, Black superlative ability combined with legal rights required degradation. The through-line between antebellum ideas about Black bodies and minds is circuitous but clear: whatever separated the races triumphed, so long as Blacks were decidedly at the bottom of the hierarchy. Bestial but benighted Blackness suited these purposes just fine.
The swirling discourse around Richardson draws on these ableist ideas, expecting her to be superlative in body and impervious to psychological pain. This combination of racism, misogyny, ableism should be familiar in the stereotype of the strong Black woman. Some people take pride in this myth as an ideal, claiming it as a set of characteristics that allow Black women to weather the onslaught of racism and misogyny. Yet, the pernicious underpinnings of this idea are tied to its ableist origins. This myth inhibits Black women from demonstrating a wide range of emotional and physical responses and needs. Embracing the myth requires that one willfully ignore Black women’s vulnerability.
In Richardson’s case, that vulnerability shows up in how she coped with the pain of her mother’s death. A reporter shocked Richardson with news about her mother’s passing. That reporter’s question forced Richardson to process her maternal loss in real time. As those of us grieving significant losses know, grief wallops your sense of time, place, and self. For Richardson’s nay-sayers, this grief should have been superseded by her inherent Black woman strength and dignity. They imagine her as inoculated from the need to grieve in ways that might not be respectable. Richardson’s supporters have noted that denying her the opportunity to grieve in private and attempting to circumscribe her grief all attempt to invalidate her emotional pain. Richardson isn’t playing that game though. Her own responses highlight her emotional needs.
Richardson admits to smoking weed so that she could cope with stress and anxiety related to her mother’s passing and how she found out about it. The United States Anti-Doping Agency’s (USADA) official statement averred Richardson’s ban would only be one month because she used the drug out of competition and because the drug was unrelated to sport performance. Despite Richardson’s intent and the official statement, some harangue her for making a poor decision, in effect penalizing her for being vulnerable. The underlying logic is clear: she should be able to withstand the intensity of international competition, overpowering grief, and the shock (and I would add cruelty) of the reporter’s question.
The ableist myth of the Black superwoman not only ignores emotional need, but it also attributes physical characteristics to a Black woman’s body that are simply not possible. For instance, both caveats from the USADA indicate that she didn’t break the rules of ingesting the substance in competition and did not enhance her performance. Yet, Richardson’s nay-sayers insist that her ingestion of THC had performance enhancing qualities, which defies what we know about how cannabis works in the human body.
To be fair, cannabis in sport is one of the most controversial topics precisely because research about its performance enhancing qualities is still inconclusive. On the one hand, smoked cannabis can decrease anxiety, fear, depression, and tension, which enhance performance. Yet, cannabis diminishes rational, deliberate decision-making, and reduces motor control, effects thought to be performance inhibiting.
Officially speaking, the World Anti-Doping Agency chooses to prohibit drugs based on whether it fits two out of three criteria: 1) the drug has the potential to enhance performance; 2) the drug risks the health of the athlete; and 3) the drug violates the spirit of the sport. Cannabis is principally understood as a violation of the third criterium. THC, a compound in cannabis, is prohibited in-competition because of its potential to alter the mind or behavior, thus violating the second criterium. If even the official organization does not understand cannabis as performance enhancing, why do others?
Further, research in this area has been limited to temporary effects of the drug, indicating limited knowledge about situations like Richardson’s. In a 2011 study published in Sports Medicine, researchers observed that smoking cannabis improved the movement of oxygen through the blood, suggesting that the drug could shorten an athlete’s recovery time. These researchers also relied on anecdotal evidence from athletes suggesting that improved mood aided in the quality of their performance. However, this study focuses on the temporary effects of cannabis, which may be limited to hours after the drug is ingested. What’s more, researchers are not clear on how all of these effects interact on a person, which suggests limited knowledge about the outcomes of cannabis use in sport. Those supporters joking that she smoked the competition with weed lungs are grasping at a fallacy. We are back where we started: Plainly put: it is ableist to believe that THC operates differently in Sha’Carri Richardson’s body such that it was performance enhancing for her even when it is not for anyone else.
Sha’Carri Richardson, for her part, seems to be taking these issues in stride, pointing once again to her bright future. Yet, like many ableist ideas, the myth of the Black superwoman persists. Her reaction suggests one way to undermine the swirling ideas about Black superwomanhood. Richardson’s tweet rings less as mea culpa and more as a sobering reminder, “I am human.”
