RECAP

for the past week, we have been working on a couple of documents around the themes of
racial inequalities and discrimination.

so, for starters, the Olympics Games is a sporting event that is held every four years.
Numerous athletes from foreign countries gather to compete against each other in various
sports. The Olympics games preach values such as peace, friendship, respect and equality.

Despite those values, during the Olympics games in 1936 in berlin, a dark-skinned American
man named “ Jesse Owens” decided to participate despite knowing the political context. At
that time the chancellor was Hitler and ill-treated and ostracize lots of minorities ( jews,
blacks and gipsies…) due to his ideology. Nevertheless, Jesse Owens managed to
embarrass the German chancellor by winning the race and proving that politics shouldn’t
influence the way we play sports and that black people are capable of doing the same things
as the Aryans race.

Moving on, back in America, the black community is confronted with the jim crow laws, in
which those laws were based on race and enforced segregation between black and white
people in public places and made it hard for them to vote. For instance, in Florida, black and
white children were taught in different schools. Hence, the notion of equality doesn’t exist
and white supremacy prevails in the US. As a consequence, lots of protests were done and
those horrible laws ended with the passage of the civil rights act in 1964.

4 years later, in 1968, during the Olympics games in Mexico City, 2 afro American athletes
Tommie Smith and John Carlos won the gold and bronze medal in the 200 meters sprint.
However, instead of being rejoiced and proud of winning the race, they instead, after
obtaining their medals during the ceremony, raised their black-gloved fist to criticize the
American society and how they were lagging socially compared to other countries.
They used multiple metaphoric symbols to express their revolt by looking down and wearing
a shirt covering the American flag to show that they were ashamed of being American.
They also wanted to show that black people lived in poverty by not putting any shoes on
because they wanted to stress the fact that black people struggled to afford shoes because
they’re weren’t paid the same as their white peers. they were sick and tired of this injustice
As a result, the crowd was speechless and shocked by their actions and they received huge
blacklash.

My feeling on the subject is that those people took the opportunity to use the Olympics
games to denounce societal problems, in those cases Racism and bigotry. And it shows that
sport has a huge impact on the political and social field.