The Art of Passing
Some battles just aren't worth fighting
Since my last issue, I’ve been very busy, mostly in a good way. I’ve taken two trips to see motor races: Dara and I took our annual trip to the Indy 500 over Memorial Day weekend and then our first Formula 1 (F1) Canadian Grand Prix in Montreal for our anniversary weekend in mid-June. Both were fun for different reasons: Indy was a far better race; Montreal was more of an adventure since it was, in part, getting to know a new city and country.
Right now, open-wheel racing is an overwhelmingly white sport, particularly of and for white men. It’s not a criticism per se, it’s just a fact. Whether it’s the composition of the teams at the track or the butts in the stands, it’s mostly white dudes. To both series’ credit, F1 and IndyCar are doing outreach and trying to get more women and people of color into the sport. (That said, the racing group chats I’m in are majority women.) That is not to say, however, that there aren’t racism problems on and off track.
In IndyCar, the series that feeds and is named for the Indianapolis 500, racism is less of an issue for spectators because there’s just less reason or opportunity to express it. With the exception of two-time winning Japanese driver Takuma Sato, virtually every winner of the Indy 500 has been white or white ethnic (e.g., Italian or Brazilian) for over 100 years. Some fans wear “Let’s Go Brandon” shirts at races to let you know they’re MAGA people, but any racism derived from that is downstream from Trump’s racism. It’s annoying, sure, but seeing crap like that is just part of being in a red state. Honestly, there was less MAGA gear than I was expecting at the 500 this year, which was a pleasant surprise.
In F1, however, the most dominant racer for more than a decade before 2021 had been seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton, an Black English driver who, incidentally, has been outspoken about the racism he’s experienced since he was a child in karting. Even during the years I wasn’t watching F1, I was pulling for Lewis. Like many Black folks, I root for almost everybody Black until they give me a good reason not to, especially in overwhelmingly white spaces. Even though I am a fan of the McLaren racing team, Lewis is still my favorite driver in the paddock.
But I don’t often admit that to strangers at the circuit.
Over my life, people I don’t know well have felt too comfortable telling me things I’d rather not hear, like their unsolicited opinions on affirmative action, or their “not politically correct” feelings about “the blacks,” or—when they’re feeling really saucy—nigger jokes or even complaints about “that nigger Colin Powell.” While I sometimes felt dark amusement from the stammering apologies after a white person learns they just said “nigger” to a Black person, I started preempting any such embarrassment by letting people know rather early on that, despite my appearance, I am Black. Although that sometimes led to uncomfortable moments of a different sort in both my personal and professional lives, such forthrightness has dramatically reduced—though not entirely eliminated—how often non-Black people drop n-bombs around me. I like it better this way.
It is natural in almost every sport that fans get tired of continued dynastic dominance or what seems like constant success: think Tom Brady’s New England Patriots or how baseball fans feel about the New York Yankees. So that people got tired of watching Hamilton drive away with so many championships is both understandable and predictable. Many of us are going through that now with two-time defending champion Max Verstappen.
But a LOT of people dislike Hamilton for that other reason, even though they might not admit it, even to themselves. I’ve heard it enough to recognize it and avoid it. One sees similar disaffection for (and abuse of) certain international soccer stars: Mario Balotelli, Paul Pogba, Marcus Rashford, and Vinícius Júnior, to name a few. While numerous Europeans visiting the States have told me that they don’t have racism problems back home, each of these remarkable footballers that have played much of their careers there would disagree. (click through for video w/ English subtitles)
This is why we cheer for Black folks.
I go to the track to have a good time and take my mind off of the racism I read and write about. So, the last thing I want to do while I’m there is hear some random guy’s thinly veiled reasons for disliking Hamilton that his winning amplified, but did not create.
So when random non-Black people ask who my favorite F1 driver is, I’ll say Mika Häkkinen or Ayrton Senna, two legends I watched as a kid. I’m not ashamed of my Lewis fandom, but I’m not self-righteous enough to believe I can defeat bigotry and prejudice when and wherever I see it and, frankly, I’m tired of trying. Maybe Ibram X. Kendi’s next book can be How to Be an Anti-Racist at Zandvoort, but for the rest of us who don’t pretend to know how to end racism, just avoiding it is sometimes the most peaceful option.
What I’ve written:
Last month, I published a piece commenting on the New York Times feature exploring how police violence causes Black trauma. With the common caveat that I didn’t write the headline, the takeaway is that the policy choices police departments make affect more than just crime going up and down. Their actions have social costs that they don’t usually consider, and that needs to change.
This morning, I published a post dealing with orienting officer behavior toward serving the community and away from looking to make arrests for arrests’ sake:
New research published by the National Academy of Sciences shows how the language an officer uses when initiating a traffic stop with a Black driver is a reliable indicator of whether that stop will result in a search, handcuffing, or arrest. (The dataset was limited to Black drivers in the “medium-sized racially diverse U.S. city” because “97.8 percent of the drivers who experienced one of the three escalated outcomes were Black.”) The research shows that the first 45 words from the police officer—occurring within the first 27 seconds of a traffic stop—set the tone and more often than not predicted whether the stop would escalate to something beyond a ticket or warning. According to the authors, “the initial words an officer speaks during a car stop can presage an escalated outcome suggests that…stops that ended in escalation often began in escalation.”
When it comes to traffic stops, more officers should heed, “Don’t start none, won’t be none.”
My semi-solicited opinion on affirmative action:
Caroline Burke of Katie Couric Media reached out and asked me about the historical role of affirmative action in higher education. I’m rather ambivalent about affirmative action as practiced. But my gripe that caught their attention in a tweet last year was that the Supreme Court made it impossible to defend the policy for what it was meant to do.
According to Bakke, the 1978 case eliminating racial quotas at UC-Davis medical school, the Supreme Court held that colleges could consider race in the interests of diversifying the student body. That is why every amicus brief and legal defense of what elite colleges do now highlights how their actions improve diversity. While diversity is well and good, improving diversity isn’t the same thing as remedying past and ongoing disadvantages.
Now, race is a deeply imperfect tool to fix these problems. As just one example, Black Harvard students started a Generational African American Student Association because Black immigrant children seem to outnumber American slave-descendant students, strongly suggesting those most likely to be disadvantaged aren’t benefitting from affirmative action as implemented. Law professor David Bernstein suggested, inter alia, making slave descent rather than race the constitutionally permissible metric colleges use to remedy past wrongs. While that is probably an improvement, it doesn’t fully capture the problems that many slave descendant students will face.
Almost every major U.S. city and many of its smaller ones have poor Black neighborhoods. These places didn’t become segregated by accident: policy choices by both private actors and governments shaped these places:
One of the great strengths of [Richard] Rothstein’s account [in his book on segregation, The Color of Law] is the sheer weight of evidence he marshals. A research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, he quite simply demolishes the notion that government played a minor role in creating the racial ghettos that plague our suburbs and inner cities. Going back to the late 19th century, he uncovers a policy of de jure segregation in virtually every presidential administration, including those we normally describe as liberal on domestic issues.
Most public schools draw students based on geographic lines, meaning poor Black neighborhoods feed poor Black schools. Those children have fewer educational opportunities, many of them have poorer health and nutrition than their crosstown non-Black peers, and their neighborhoods—and they themselves—are policed differently and usually more aggressively. The disadvantage isn’t just the great-great-great grandparents’ servitude, it’s the world they live in today, and they live where they do because of their race.
One remedy to the segregation problem involves favoring students from certain ZIP codes. If relying on race to remedy racism is bad, imagine relying on segregation to remedy segregation.
Whether or not elite schools find ways to help the best and brightest students in these areas, to my mind, that segregated ghettos still exist and contribute to American poverty and inequality is a far larger policy problem than a handful of kids getting into Harvard.
That said, you can miss me with all the celebration of the SCOTUS decision as some great victory for liberty.
More from me soon.
Thanks for reading. I always appreciate feedback, on the newsletter or my writing generally. If you have any questions, leave a comment or email me.
Until next time, wishing you peace, love, and soul…
-JPB