• And talking about them •
[2 MIN READ]
As circumstances would have it, the make up of GGR has been shifting in the last months. I can claim no direct influence on that shift. I’m just an observer and commentator.
In this case, I’m talking about a shift in the direction of Asian-ness that began in June. Since then, without naming specific individuals, the club has welcomed runners of Chinese, Filipino, and Korean descent. Before that (and even continuing, occasionally), I know of other runners of Burmese and Indonesian descent. And before that, even, I can point to myself: (American-born) Chinese. To me, the shift has become so noticable that I observed, only last week, representation very nearly reaching parity with that of European-descendant runners.
Eye, eye, eye: bug, bespectacled, and blunk
Perhaps more compelling is my willingness to talk about it. When the runner representation included Black, I wasn’t as verbal about my observation. It’s easy to say that I’m willing, now, because I’m a member of the representative group. But I don’t think that’s the reason. I think it’s more likely that I’m reacting to an unconscious bias about tension around Black-ness; a tension that I don’t like, but that seems to be real. When I’ve written about GGR’s traveling team going to Black Men Run (on the 5th Wednesday of every month with 5 Wednesdays), my own language has hovered around community in ‘less familiar spaces’. It feels decidedly more sensitive to state explicitly ‘Black community’. When I’ve talked with the other Asian-descent runners about Asian representation, commenting about the representation being a future majority sounds intriguing. It’s difficult to imagine a similar conversation among the Black runners sounding anything other than..I dare say…subversive. Note: Without additional evidence, I’m accepting the possibility that these observations might be singularly mine; I just don’t think so.
I might like to talk about representation a lot more than the average runner. I might be able to do it more comfortably with a wide variety of people. But that doesn’t mean I do it particularly well. And I suspect I’ve done a poor job of contrasting representation of historically marginalized populations in this context. Still, in my own little way, I hope my doing so gets runners to think about their own unconscious biases, including me, and hone more effective ways of tackling them by talking. I’ve been doing it since well before running with Black Men Run. And I’m going to keep at it, even if the point of focus is a population that is one I’m inherently comfortable discussing.
-CtCloser (Calvinthe), “Negative split or positive splat” #dothedue
FINE PRINT ¶Text and photos (unless otherwise stated): Calvin Wang (Wäng), CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. ¶Cross-posted: (1) Facebook JRC Growlers Group Run (2024’10’09’W Run Message), (2) GGR email list, (3) Cerebruns by CtCloser. ¶This website posting: Cerebrun with added caption and picture.
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