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What Threatens Us So Much About the Superb Black Female Athlete? Musings from a Woman Just Glad to Share the Same Air with Goddesses
Simone Biles makes me cry. There is something about watching almost freakish athletic ability that sends my heart soaring so high that it’s impossible to watch.
Yet she barks at herself for a single mistake. A mistake, that had she even had multiple mistakes, wouldn’t have kept her from winning another gold medal.
She is outlandishly talented.
Yet people actually had the nerve to go after her about her hair. Her hair.
After she just did what no gymnast has ever done in the history of the sport, what, are they going to go after her nose? Her nails? Her choice of breakfast cereal?
What frightens people so much that they would go after a goddess about her hair?
She didn’t just nail her routine. Her landing. She nailed a place in history. And we got to watch.
Caster Semenya makes me cry. She is incredibly talented, super-humanly fast. She happens to inhabit a body that naturally provides her with the ability…