For years, UCLA gymnasts have tumbled throughout our screens. In viral movies of their flooring 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 typically seemed to be overwhelmingly white.
The routines painted an image of an area that gave the impression 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 faculty 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 because the fall, the group had been coping with the fallout from Alexis Jeffrey, a gymnast who just isn't 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 yr, Jeffrey transferred to Louisiana State. However the gymnasts remaining at UCLA had been sad with how the group and the athletic administration dealt with the whole lot, together with that coaches informed the gymnasts to be tolerant of Jeffrey as a result of they feared for Jeffrey’s psychological well being and informed some Black gymnasts that Jeffrey was “scared” or “intimidated” by them. Margzetta Frazier informed the Los Angeles Instances 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 carrying shirts with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s well-known “injustice wherever is a menace 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 obvious.
It felt stunning due to the fame UCLA had constructed over the previous few years, nevertheless it shouldn’t have been. UCLA just isn't even the one school program to have confronted studies of racism from Black gymnasts not too long ago. 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 lots like its elite counterpart, a sport nonetheless coached and managed by predominantly white staffs.
None of that is new. That is at all times what has made it a tough sport to exist in as a Black woman.
Gymnastics has a protracted, fraught historical past in the case of racism. We all know this properly as a result of for the final yr, we now have been tracing the historical past of Black ladies in U.S. gymnastics with a view 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 in regards to the methods during which 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 in regards to the methods during which these Black gymnasts have used school gymnastics to carve out an area for themselves in a sport that always requires them to verify their tradition on the door.
The game of gymnastics is nothing with out its expectations and exactitudes which might 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 not too long ago, an area nearly completely dominated by whiteness. White athletes had been thought of the usual. Ground music got here in two varieties: classical and elevator.” Faculty 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 might stroll via and so they did.
Sophina DeJesus created her 2016 routine, one of many earliest to go viral, along with her mother, Maria, at their house. When she carried out it, along with her curly ponytail shiny blue, she informed 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 along 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 informed us, “I felt like, me being very L.A. and being very pleased with my Blackness, I needed to deliver all of that into the choreography and the routines that I did.” The truth is, Mossett in all probability choreographed one in every of your favourite routines. She informed 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 in the event you 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 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 included her dad’s love of stepping. Whereas watching the latter and speaking to us about that have, Dennis stated, “Black tradition in gymnastics just isn't frequent. It’s not likely acknowledged. And that’s what I needed to do [with that routine].”
As these routines grew to become extra frequent, folks have identified that UCLA participated within the commodification of those routines, of the Blackness of them. The truth is, the embrace of Black gymnasts typically appears conditioned on the power to commodify and capitalize on their labor and their Blackness. UCLA’s current reckoning round race and racism of their program reminds us of this reality. The seeming contradiction between the variety in this system and the current revelations just isn't one in any respect as a result of the looks of Blackness on the floor not often, if ever, signifies systemic change beneath. It doesn't require a regime change.
However make no mistake, these athletes aren't naïve. Black gymnasts stay resolute of their want to deliver their complete 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 flooring 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. steadiness beam champion, stated it greatest after we spoke to her: “It’s only a great feeling for me to see extra sisters and younger women of various cultures which might 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.
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