Hierarchies of the Human

In the last section, on winning, I mentioned some broader systemic issues that often lurk behind popular narratives about athletic ambition—like unequal access to education, which can make athletic scholarships seem like the only way to pay for college, or precarious employment, which can make the livelihood of people who train athletes dependent on the success of those athletes. Before moving further on sport, I pause here on two overarching concepts that have helped me think about how systemic inequities play out.

The first, developed by María Lugones, is “the coloniality of gender.” The term refers to the way that gender binarism, spread by colonization, continues to dominate after political regimes have changed. Lugones emphasizes that gender binarism fits into a dominant pattern of thinking in hierarchical, opposed categories (meaning that there are two categories, one higher up) and says that the binary male/female accompanies another binary: human/nonhuman (2010, 542). These binaries have worked together in several ways. They create interconnected criteria to sort and rank people—putting white, colonizer and settler-colonizer men on top. They also justify each other, so that adhering to a gender binary became itself part of the criteria for higher status among humans (Robinson 2020, 1677). Overall, as the Migrant Rights Network puts it well, in a post drawing on the insights of writer, speaker, and performer Alok Vaid-Menon, “White supremacy is foundational to the enforcement of the gender binary” (Migrant Rights Network 2023; Vaid-Menon 2020).

The second concept, first described by Achille Mbembe, is necropolitics: “the power and the capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not” (2003, 11). As Namrata Verghese elaborates in Teen Vogue, a great source for accessible takes on hard concepts, “The closer you are to dominant power, the more your life is worth” (2021). Verghese suggests that even if you don’t know the term necropolitics, you probably already recognize its effects. She gives as an example how governmental and social forces contributed to the disproportionately high death rates from Covid among marginalized people.

The broad logics of ranking in the concepts I’ve discussed can help to make sense of some widespread policies in sports that enable the predominantly white-populated upper echelons to control the bodies of athletes, especially athletes of color. These include team owners maintaining the right to trade players, and the rules of the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) that allow educational institutions to exclude athletes from profits dependent on their labor—labor that may well get in the way of the athlete’s own education (Kalman-Lamb and Silva 2024).

You can also find these hierarchies in the racialized measures of manhood that attribute the ideal mix of brain and muscle to white men who meet standard credentials for cisgender, (Thangaraj 2015, 13), lifting them disproportionately into front offices, quarterback positions, and head-coaching slots. It is also crucial to identify the legacies of colonialism and enslavement in the targeting primarily of Black and Brown women, often from the Global South, for investigation, and sometimes medical intervention, on suspicion of insufficient femaleness (Jordan-Young and Karkazis 2019 Munro 2010; Snorton 2017). As Derrick Clifton writes in “Anti-Trans Sports Bills Aren’t Just Transphobic—They’re Racist, Too” (2021), this charge is leveled across a spectrum of embodiments. Black women in sports may be stigmatized, “whether they are cis, trans, or intersex,” especially when they reach the top of their field. Tennis great Serena Williams, Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood, the two trans high-school runners targeted for their victories in Connecticut, and track and field international medalists Dutee Chand and Caster Semenya are prominent examples (Rasool 2018; Schultz 2005; Barnes 2023, 118–36; Webster and Qari 2021; Munro 2010).

Witness, too, the ever-present contrasts in terms of whose lives are respected and depicted as fully human. Even with casual attention to the 2022 Winter Olympics (aside from figure skating), I repeatedly encountered NBC coverage, from mentions to substantial profile pieces, about white skier Mikaela Shiffrin still grieving over her father’s death two years earlier. I couldn’t help comparing that to the punitive dismissal of grief in the lives of Venus and Serena Williams when their sister died in 2002 (Douglas 2012, 135–39), and, more recently, to the treatment of Sha’Carri Richardson. Richardson tested positive for marijuana weeks before the 2021 Olympics in the wake of learning, from a reporter, about the death of her biological mother. There was neither sufficient compassion about her loss nor attention to the unreason and racist history of policing marijuana use (Ocasio-Cortez and Raskin 2021). She was banned from the competition.

Overall, hierarchies in the status of human are a key part of what racialized gender binarism contributes to sport: whose bodily integrity is respected; whose pleasures or grieving matters; whose participation and identities are supported, encouraged, and rewarded. In the next section I take on one version of hierarchizing that affects pairs skating and more: the ranking of some people as fractions of others.