<div dir="ltr"><div>All, <br></div><div>Please find attached and below Caela Fenton's review of Cat M. Ariail's <i>Passing the Baton: Black Women Track Stars and American Identity</i>.</div><div>Thanks</div><div>Duncan</div><div><br></div><div>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:115%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif"><span lang="EN">Ariail, Cat
M. </span><i><span lang="EN"><span> </span>Passing the Baton: Black Women Track Stars and
American Identity<span></span></span></i></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:115%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif"><span lang="EN">Reviewed by Caela Fenton, University of Oregon<span></span></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:115%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif"><span lang="EN">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.<span></span></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:115%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif"><span lang="EN">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 <i>Passing the Baton: Black Women Track Stars
and American Identity</i> (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.<span></span></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:115%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif"><span lang="EN">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).<span></span></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:115%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif"><span lang="EN">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 <i>Passing
the Baton’s</i> overarching analysis.<span></span></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:115%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif"><span lang="EN">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.<span></span></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:115%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif"><span lang="EN">“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 <i>perform, but not practice, democracy</i> (116 emphasis mine).<span></span></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:115%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif"><span lang="EN">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.<span></span></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:115%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif"><i><span lang="EN">Passing
the Baton</span></i><span lang="EN"> 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.<span></span></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:115%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif"><span lang="EN">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.<span></span></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:115%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif"><span lang="EN">After finishing <i>Passing the Baton</i>, 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.<span></span></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:115%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif"><span lang="EN">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.<span></span></span></p>
</div><div><div><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature">Remember to smell the roses as you recumber past<br><br>Duncan R. Jamieson, Ph. D.<br>Professor of History<br>Book Review Editor<br><i>AETHLON: The Journal of Sport Literature</i><br>Ashland University<br>Ashland, OH 44805<br>USA<br></div></div></div></div>