Rating: 5 out of 5

An excellent book. Well written and well researched. It has made me squirm and celebrate in equal measures. I feel like I’m yet another whites person that Alison has had to educate.

I’m left wondering what I can do. How can I, as a whites person, make the world a safer and more inclusive?

There are some paragraphs in the book that I’ve had to read a few times to really get them

“Attempting to silence us isn’t the answer. What’s needed is in fact the opposite: Every running publication and every brand must feature Black people and other people of color in every issue and online every day, and not just in articles related to racial justice. The more we are seen and heard, the more our voices and bodies are part of the daily running narrative, the faster we’ll move toward normalizing Black people running in our society. In the 1960s and early 1970s, white runners were seen as odd; they were ridiculed, even harassed. But as more people started running, as more runners were featured in media and races popped up in communities across the nation, seeing white people running became an ordinary part of American life. We must now make it normal for Black people.”

And

“Learning and unlearning our history is a necessary part of decen-tering whiteness and widening the circle of inclusion. History is living and breathing in the present. It does not just explain the past, it sets the future. “What we choose to remember, memorialize, and preserve as a society determines how we understand our present and imagine our future,” wrote the curators of an exhibit on the murder of Emmett Till at the National Museum of American History. “When Black history is suppressed or delegitimized, we lose the ability to reckon with systemic racism, from one generation to the next.””

And then this paragraph that made me cry

“My goal and hope is that we can reimagine running as a sport for everyone, making freedom of movement possible for Black people at all times, in all spaces, where Blackness is seen not as a threat or even a statement, but commonplace and normal. Where Black runners feel welcomed and safe at every race. Where our stories and voices are part of history, part of the universal story of what it means to run. Where we feel like we belong. Only then will the sport live up to what it aspires to be-open to all.”

I recognise my privilege. Thank you Alison.

Originally posted to my Goodreads account