Ivy League sprinter looks at the closet he left behind
Withers: Ivy League sprinter looks at the closet he left behind
We’ve been a little sporty at 365 recently. Last week we looked at the Sports Illustrated story on rugby star Gareth Thomas (we’ll have an interview with writer Gary Smith on Friday). Today our spotlight is onCory Benton. The Columbia University sprinter, who is gay, wrote an essay for Outsports about the combination of sexuality, race, and athletics.
Benton begins his essay when he is at the starting line of a December 2007 race. He had just come out to his team, and it was the first time he competed without the burdens of the closet.
“Did I have something new to prove? What if I did not run well? Would my teammates attribute a bad race to my homosexuality?”
Looks like Benton always felt he had something to prove, some of it not connected to sexuality. He grew up in Long Island, and had to waste too much time proving, to other blacks, that his melanin count was pure enough. Some of his peers thought he had too many white friends and talked like them also. These two facts transformed Benton as white, and gay, in the eys of his black classmates. This rigid racial classification made it impossible for the young man to fathom living his high school years minus any secrets.
“There is this stigma that comes with being gay, and an additional cultural stigma attached for being African American and gay, so coming out was not an option for me in high school, although many people already assumed I was gay. I knew no other African-American gay athlete to seek support from, so I made the conscious decision to continue hiding my sexuality and become something I wasn’t.”
The narrative among many 365 readers is that I’m the Khallid Abdul Muhammad of the site, always coming to the defense of blacks and calling whites evil saltines. One of our readers opined, without an iota of proof, that I was anti-white. He came to this spellbinding conclusion after I mocked Roseanne for her Marie Osmond wreckage. Hopefully what follows will dispel that narrative, but I’m not betting cash on it.
If you are black, and still use the “not black enough” card, please get a tin foil hat and mingle with those who think Obama was born in Kenya. Yes, Arizona. I’m looking right at you! The thugs who dragged James Byrd, Jr. to his death have no time for this esotroic racial calculus. In their view, everyone not like them is too black and deserves a lynching.
What irks about folks who are certain they know what is black or white, is that they never explain what the terms mean. If Benton’s high-school peers thought he sounded white, what must they think of W.E.B. DuBois? If he fails some black test we all are in trouble.
Ultimately though this game is a brain dead repudiation of our freedom struggle. From the moment our feet touched these shores, our history has been a constant clash against preconceived beliefs about our identity. Blacks have always been told what we were, and what we were not.
The use of the same logic that is a pillar of American racism is to lovingly put shackles on our feet.
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