Commentary: Black gymnasts, including UCLA’s biggest stars, grapple with sport’s racism

For years, UCLA gymnasts have tumbled throughout our screens. In viral movies of their ground routines, the group’s melanated gymnasts flip and dance to the music of Beyoncé, Janet Jackson or Rihanna as their teammates within the background do their choreography and the packed crowds in Pauley Pavilion cheer thunderously. UCLA’s program has been praised for embracing Black athletes and music in a sport that has usually gave the impression to be overwhelmingly white.

The routines painted an image of an area that appeared to be in such contradiction to elite gymnastics, the extra conventional (and for a lot of, the extra boring) model all of us watch each 4 years on the Olympics. By the lens of UCLA gymnastics, the school model seemed like a spot of camaraderie, jubilant expression and freedom.

However in January, we had been all reminded that UCLA gymnastics remains to be part of a sport with a protracted historical past of exclusivity. Information broke that for the reason that fall, the group had been coping with the fallout from Alexis Jeffrey, a gymnast who shouldn’t be Black, reportedly singing lyrics that included the N-word. When her teammates approached her about it, she denied any wrongdoing and refused to apologize. Earlier this 12 months, Jeffrey transferred to Louisiana State. However the gymnasts remaining at UCLA had been sad with how the group and the athletic administration dealt with every thing, together with that coaches instructed the gymnasts to be tolerant of Jeffrey as a result of they feared for Jeffrey’s psychological well being and instructed some Black gymnasts that Jeffrey was “scared” or “intimidated” by them. Margzetta Frazier instructed the Los Angeles Occasions the administration’s response was “summary conversations that didn’t particularly deal with racism on the group” and that “her requests for assist … ‘had been uncared for and brushed underneath the rug.’” The price of all of this was apparent at occasions within the gymnastics itself, particularly at their season opener in January, when the group rating was the lowest in seven years.

As information about Jeffrey and the way the varsity responded was rising, the UCLA gymnastics program amplified their Black Lives Matter meet with pictures of gymnasts sporting shirts with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s well-known “injustice wherever is a risk to justice in every single place” quote. The sharp distinction between the varsity’s inner dealing with of racism and the group’s exterior proclamations of antiracism had been obtrusive.

It felt shocking due to the popularity UCLA had constructed over the previous couple of years, nevertheless it shouldn’t have been. UCLA shouldn’t be even the one school program to have confronted reviews of racism from Black gymnasts lately. In the summertime of 2020, Black gymnasts from Alabama, Florida and Nebraska all revealed the racism they confronted on their collegiate groups. It seems school gymnastics remains to be loads like its elite counterpart, a sport nonetheless coached and managed by predominantly white staffs.

None of that is new. That is all the time what has made it a tough sport to exist in as a Black lady.

Gymnastics has a protracted, fraught historical past relating to racism. We all know this nicely as a result of for the final 12 months, we’ve got been tracing the historical past of Black ladies in U.S. gymnastics with a purpose to inform the story of how they’ve gone from the margins of the game to its core. For our new podcast, “American Prodigies,” we talked to gymnasts, judges, coaches and choreographers concerning the methods wherein Black ladies’ our bodies are judged extra harshly, their hair scrutinized, their music selections critiqued and their experiences discounted.

We now have an episode on UCLA gymnastics that we’ve been engaged on for months, lengthy earlier than this information broke. In it, we probe the genesis of those viral routines. What we realized is that these viral moments reveal much less about school gymnastics itself and extra concerning the methods wherein these Black gymnasts have used school gymnastics to carve out an area for themselves in a sport that usually requires them to test their tradition on the door.

The game of gymnastics is nothing with out its expectations and exactitudes which can be policed so closely at each degree of the game, however particularly so on the elite one. A lot of the sports activities aesthetic traditionally has been white. As Rebecca Schuman wrote at Slate, “ladies’s gymnastics was, till pretty lately, an area virtually solely dominated by whiteness. White athletes had been thought of the usual. Flooring music got here in two varieties: classical and elevator.” School gymnastics, spearheaded by UCLA, emerged as a counter to the stuffiness — the whiteness — of elite gymnastics. It was, as a substitute, a spot that emphasised group unity, showmanship and creativity. It was a door left ajar within the sport, one which these gymnasts may stroll by means of they usually did.

Sophina DeJesus created her 2016 routine, one of many earliest to go viral, together with her mother, Maria, at their dwelling. When she carried out it, together with her curly ponytail shiny blue, she instructed us “it was like an out-of-body expertise, like my Olympic second.”

Hallie Mossett had her viral second in 2017, when her routine began together with her mendacity flat on the ground, one leg behind her head, a fist up within the air. The primary beats of Beyoncé’s “Formation” set the tone. Mossett instructed us, “I felt like, me being very L.A. and being very happy with my Blackness, I needed to convey all of that into the choreography and the routines that I did.” In reality, Mossett in all probability choreographed considered one of your favourite routines. She instructed us she choreographed shut to twenty in her 5 years at UCLA. Her favourite half was working with the gymnasts and asking them, “Do you want this? Hey, inform me for those who don’t like this transfer. If this makes you’re feeling uncomfortable, we’ll change it.” She remembers that their eyes would mild up when she’d ask. “It fills me with a bit of little bit of pleasure,” she stated. “Realizing that they’ve selections and that their voice issues. So many gymnasts’ voices didn’t.”

Nia Dennis had two viral routines, her first in 2020 and one other in 2021. The previous routine was impressed by Beyoncé’s “Homecoming” efficiency at Coachella and integrated her dad’s love of stepping. Whereas watching the latter and speaking to us about that have, Dennis stated, “Black tradition in gymnastics shouldn’t be frequent. It’s probably not acknowledged. And that’s what I needed to do [with that routine].”

As these routines turned extra frequent, individuals have identified that UCLA participated within the commodification of those routines, of the Blackness of them. In reality, the embrace of Black gymnasts usually appears conditioned on the flexibility to commodify and capitalize on their labor and their Blackness. UCLA’s latest reckoning round race and racism of their program reminds us of this reality. The seeming contradiction between the range in this system and the latest revelations shouldn’t be one in any respect as a result of the looks of Blackness on the floor hardly ever, if ever, signifies systemic change beneath. It doesn’t require a regime change.

However make no mistake, these athletes should not naïve. Black gymnasts stay resolute of their want to convey their entire self into the game they love. When Sekai Wright rocks her Afro whereas she tumbles throughout the ground at Pauley, she’s persevering with a protracted line of Black gymnasts at UCLA and past who proceed to push boundaries of their sport and compel gymnastics, one ground routine at a time, into the long run the place all gymnasts can discover freedom within the air.

Or maybe Angie Denkins, the 1986 U.S. stability beam champion, stated it greatest after we spoke to her: “It’s only a great feeling for me to see extra sisters and younger girls of various cultures which can be up there and are actually doing the doggone factor. … Embrace it. It’s inevitable. We rattling good. So transfer over. Go sit down and benefit from the present.”

Amira Rose Davis is an assistant professor of historical past and African American research at Penn State College and Jessica Luther is an investigative journalist. They’re the showrunner and producer of the brand new season of “American Prodigies.” Davis and Luther are each primarily based in Austin, Texas.