[ARETE] Ariail, Passing the Baton

Sat Feb 27 10:03:02 CST 2021

All,
Please find attached and below Caela Fenton's review of Cat M.
Ariail's *Passing
the Baton: Black Women Track Stars and American Identity*.
Thanks
Duncan

Ariail, Cat M. * Passing the Baton: Black Women Track Stars and American
Identity*

Reviewed by Caela Fenton, University of Oregon

In the summer of 2020 and the wake of the death of Ahmaud Arbery, an
unarmed Black man shot while out for a run in Glynn County, Georgia, there
has been extensive discussion of what activist Alison M. Désir has termed
“the unbearable whiteness of running.” In distance running and road racing
in particular, attention to the lack of diversity among participants is
crucial. In fact, in 2020, when Aliphine Tiliamuk and Sally Kipyego made
the podium at the US Olympic Marathon Trials, it marked the first time that
the USA will be represented by a Black woman in the Olympic Marathon.

However, the sociocultural history of distance running and its sibling
sport of track and field are not identical, particularly with regard to the
way that race has refracted through the history of each sport. Rather than
lumping all of running in together, Cat M. Ariail charts a meticulous
history of Black American women track athletes in *Passing the Baton: Black
Women Track Stars and American Identity* (University of Illinois 2020).
Honing in on a temporal period of approximately 20 years post-WWII allows
for a deep dive and deserved attention to individual athletes—including
those who have been traditionally excluded or ignored within athletics
history. Ariail’s monograph offers comprehensive coverage that previous
articles and chapters, such as Erin Lea Gilreath, Dagny Zupin and Lawrence
W. Judge’s “From field days to Olympic Gold: how black women revitalized
track and field in the United States” (2017) and Susan Cahn’s
“‘Cinderellas’ of Sport: Black Women in Track and Field” (2004), are
prohibited from providing due to length.

Among Ariail’s research questions are: who can be an athlete? Who can be an
American athlete? Who can be American? These were the questions that Black
women’s presence in track and field raised. The relay race metaphor—that
Black women track athletes have a rich heritage of agency and power that is
“handed” from generation to generation—dovetails with the text’s
overarching thesis, that “women’s track and field was [...] consigned to
the farthest margins of American sport culture, bound to irrelevancy due to
ideologies and realities of race and gender—except that black women track
athletes would make themselves relevant” (5).

Each of the five chapters covers a span of 2-3 years; the first, “Raising
the Bar: Alice Coachman and the Boundaries of Postwar American Identity,”
focuses on Alice Coachman, the first Black woman to win a gold medal at the
Olympics (1948 Olympics, high jump). Coachman’s success challenged the
“ideal” of the American athlete and correspondingly, American identity.
While the mainstream white media ignored her accomplishment, Black sport
culture and media celebrated her, but was careful to present Coachman
within conventional gender roles. This attention to the intersecting
pressures of race and gender that Black women constantly faced (and
continue to face) in the sporting sphere is essential to *Passing the
Baton’s* overarching analysis.

Chapter two, “Sprints of Citizenship: Identity Politics and Black Women’s
Athleticism” focuses on the 1951 Pan Am Games and 1952 Olympics,
specifically the rise of sport as a propagandistic tool for communicating
American democracy’s superiority in the early Cold War. The third chapter,
“Passing the Baton Towards Belonging: Mae Faggs and the Making of the
Americanness of Black American Track Women,” argues that the 1955 Pan Am
Games and 1956 Olympics are when Black women athletes are fully inserted
into the “image of Americanness.” This chapter also puts a spotlight on Mae
Faggs, among others. Ariail draws upon sociologist Aimee Meredith Cox’s
theory of “entitlement,” which reconceives entitlement as “an empowered
statement that disputes the idea that only certain people are worthy of the
rights of citizenship and the ability to direct the course of their lives
(Cox qt’d in Ariail 99). This compelling argument for understanding Fagg’s
athletic performance in terms of this sense of entitlement could have been
developed further and/or been a theoretical lens woven more completely into
other chapters as well.

“Winning as American Women: The Heteronormativity of Black Women Athletic
Heroines,” the fourth chapter, focuses on the US Soviet Dual Meet in 1958,
arguing that as Black women garner more attention is sport, there was even
more pressure on them to conform to white defined heteronormative gender
expectations. Chapter four also delivers this absolute punch: “The
symbolism of the likes of [Isabelle] Daniels, [Lucinda] Williams, [Barbara]
Jones, [Margaret] Matthews and soon thereafter, Wilma Rudolph, permitted US
sport and society to *perform, but not practice, democracy* (116 emphasis
mine).

Chapter five, “‘Olympian Quintessence’: Wilma Rudolph, Athletic Femininity,
and American Iconicity,” focuses primarily on Wilma Rudolph, building on
Ariail’s previous scholarship on the athlete. This chapter demonstrates how
Rudolph’s cultural meaning and image was made malleable by the sporting
media. Rudolph’s pregnancy was rendered invisible, and her beauty,
singularity and ‘overcoming’ of childhood polio were emphasized in order to
protect the nation’s prevailing racial and gender order by presenting her
as not only an exception, but also ‘proof’ that Black success comes from
perseverance and hard work alone.

*Passing the Baton* shines in its clarity, readability and astute
incorporation of primary evidence, mostly in the form of incorporated
newspaper quotations, which then undergo discursive analysis. The clear
chronology prevents the reader from getting lost in the number of names and
dates presented—the text succeeds in showing the intricate interconnection
of these women (and select men, including the Tuskegee Institute coach, Ed
Temple), as they ‘pass the baton.’ Ariail’s book would serve well as
assigned or recommended reading for students in courses related to sport
history or gender/race/nation and sport.

At the end of the book, I was left wishing that Ariail had taken the relay
race metaphor up to the present day, or at least alluded to it in the
conclusion. There is a reference to Serena Williams on the final page of
the text that feels misplaced given all the accomplished, activist Black
women track athletes currently active and enacting their “entitlement” with
the baton in their hands. A turn to someone like Allyson Felix, or Alysia
Montaño would have carried the conclusion’s momentum further.

After finishing *Passing the Baton*, and as I do when I have
running-related topics to discuss, I went for a (masked and distanced)
visit with my coach, Tom Heinonen, outside of the University of Oregon’s
Hayward Field. I excitedly ran through what I had learned about Coachman,
Faggs, McDaniels, Tyus, Rudolph, as well as the Tuskegee Tigerettes and the
“Temple Way.” Tom patiently waited until I was finished and then, as he
always does, completely one-upped my retelling with his own personal
anecdote about how Margaret Bailes (formerly Margaret Johnson) was
discovered by Wendy Jerome after happening-upon an all-comer’s meet at
Hayward Field as a young girl. Trained by Jerome, Bailes went on to win a
gold medal in the 4x100m at the 1968 Olympics at only 17 years old. Years
later, Tom’s wife Janet Heinonen put forth a petition to have a new track
facility named after Bailes, to rectify the fact that she had been
oft-overlooked in Eugene’s running history.

Naturally, I opened up the book and began scouring for mention of
Johnson/Bailes. Her career fell just outside of the text’s temporal
parameters. Here’s hoping that Ariail or others advance their own relay and
continue documenting the passing of the baton from generation to generation
of Black women track athletes, so that we can read all the way up to the
present.
Remember to smell the roses as you recumber past

Duncan R. Jamieson, Ph. D.
Professor of History
Book Review Editor
*AETHLON: The Journal of Sport Literature*
Ashland University
Ashland, OH  44805
USA
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