In The Ring
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I was travelling recently in a country that doesn't possess a large black or mixed black population. Something strange happened.

I noticed the people I came into contact with, often during mundane interactions like being waited on at a restaurant or ringing up some sun cream at a pharmacy, were entranced by my arms. "Strong," said the girl at the pharmacy's till, pointing to my biceps. The statement was echoed by a waiter who joked my guns were bigger than his. They weren't. Then a masseuse, the hotel receptionist, a tour guide.

All of this made me feel like Arnold Schwarzenegger, which is quite a feat for someone 5'1" who doesn't lift individual weights heavier than 10kg. I love fitness. I love sports. I go to the gym. I walk. I run. I cycle. In my youth, I played team games. And everyone always said I was good at sports because of my heritage.

my Jamaican ancestry. As a child, this confused me. My white British mother was as sporty as my father, representing her county in tennis in her teen years.

But my sporting ability, which is enthusiastic rather than particularly gifted, is always attributed to the half of me that's Black. It feels, and I'll just say it, racialised. An echo of the ideas that saw things like superhuman strength and endurance attributed to Black people. I'm Moya Lothian-McLean, a journalist on the journey to discover the truth about Britain's slaving history. This is Human Resources.

Hello, Human Resources listeners. This is Renee Richardson, producer and co-creator of the Human Resources podcast. I'm popping in to let you know that even though the podcast has ended, Arisa Lumba, who was a researcher on the podcast, and I have written a new book called Human Resources, Slavery and the Making of Modern Britain in 39 Institutions, People, Places and Things. And just like the podcast, the book...

takes modern Britain items and traces their roots back to slavery. We're introducing new topics that weren't quite covered in the podcast, like accounting, the Church of England, the colour indigo, denim blue jeans, sugar, Lloyds of London. But we also revisit some topics from the podcast and go a little further, like the Bank of England, chocolate and the Green King Brewery, which was in our pubs episode.

We'd love for you to support the book and get a copy. I hope you enjoy it. It's for all ages. And just as the podcast focused on accessibility and making this history accessible, the book does the same. And we hope it encourages conversations between different generations and helps people get a step into this history and encourages more research and more reading on this subject. Thank you.

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When we think of enslaved people, what we think of is that they were forced to labor for long hours almost every day of the year. And how would they have had time and how would they have had energy to participate in any kind of sports or leisure activities? I'm talking to Dr. Natalie Zarchek, a senior lecturer in American Studies at the University of Manchester.

Natalie specialises in colonial America and the Atlantic world, she tells me, particularly the Caribbean where her research looks at slavery, race, gender and material culture. We know where those bio-essentialist ideas about race and physique emerged from, but how did they get linked to sporting ability? I've asked Natalie about sport, alleged a pursuit we don't tend to associate with enslaved black people,

I wanted to know what sporting culture may have been present during this period. And we started with the plantations of the American South. A plantation might be hundreds of acres, but there was an active social life among the whites of neighboring plantations. And while in the period of enslavement going up to 1865...

People of any race did not have organized sports such as baseball, basketball, American football, soccer, etc. But certainly there was a great deal of sport around horses, whether it was amateur competitions, usually between young men just racing against one another and boasting about their skills as riders and the superiority of their horses.

And when plantation owners went to town, which most of them, particularly the more affluent ones, did often because they needed to purchase supplies to do business. But they also went for social purposes and especially if they had children in their teens or early 20s to find appropriate spouses for them. Quite often, people would gather together at racetracks. Reminder, we're still talking about American plantations here.

In the pre-Civil War period in the United States, racing is almost entirely a Southern institution, but especially Richmond, Virginia, Charleston, South Carolina, and New Orleans, Louisiana were racing centers.

The races in Charleston, which occurred for a week every February from the 1790s up to the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, huge numbers of people attended the races, many of whom were passionate about the sport, but others who cared nothing for it, but simply because

Race Week, both the races and the affiliated social events such as balls and parties, was known as the Carnival of the South.

So if you wanted to have any kind of fun, race week was your time and place to do it. And again, if you wanted to borrow some money, if you wanted to engage a lawyer, if you wanted to find a spouse for your son or your daughter, or just if you wanted to meet up with friends and kin beyond your immediate social circle, you had to go to Charleston and you had to go during race week.

And how are enslaved people involved in Race Week? Almost every jockey would have been a man of colour. In many cases, they were enslaved. In other cases, they may have been freed by their owners with the condition they would continue to ride as their owner's jockey.

It was very rare until about the 1880s to have white men as jockeys at the highest level of competition. Most of the people who attended to the horses, the ones who exercised them, the ones who cleaned them and kept them looking good, not the veterinarians themselves, but the ones who tended to their ordinary minor illnesses and afflictions, those would all have been African-American men, probably slaves, but in some instances free.

Many enslaved people went to the races with their owners' families. They might be the drivers of the carriages that took the family to the course.

Or they might be inside or on top of the carriage, brought along as ladies' maids to help out the women of the family, keep them looking good, and to provide them with respectability. Pretty much everything would stop during racing week. The law offices would shut down. The schools would be out. The businesses would be closed. Everybody would be making their way toward the racetrack.

Some enslaved or free people of color might have worked in food services. There were often small booths within the racetrack grounds that sold food and drink, usually to the less elite white people. The wealthy whites basically had what we would today call a tailgate picnic. Their slaves would cook and pack food.

lavish meals for them, which they would eat usually within their carriages or immediately outside them on tables enslaved people had brought with them. But less elite people who came to the races on foot or by some form of public transportation wanted to eat as well. Some brought their own food, but others wanted to enjoy the day by eating snacks. And those were often made and sold by people of color. What about other sports?

Well, there weren't really any other sports at this time. People might engage in individual sports, for example, such as archery or swimming. But in terms of sports where people gathered in a prearranged venue and tickets were sold, the only comparable sport was boxing. Was there a similar culture around boxing as there was surrounding horse racing? Boxing was not respectable.

Wealthy men might attend boxing matches, but it was generally rather frowned on. It wasn't something they would boast about in polite society. Women, even women of color or sex workers, would not attend boxing matches. I was quite annoyed when watching the first

episode of Bridgerton when our heroine, who is a very elite young white English woman, and her brother go to watch a boxing match. It wouldn't be surprising that the young man, who is unmarried and clearly rather rakish and fun-loving, it's not surprising that he would attend, but it's very surprising that he would take his sister, who was a respectable young lady trying to make a good marriage, her very presence in

at a boxing event would make her unrespectable, be a source of terrible scandal. And her brother would get himself in a lot of trouble with his family for even thinking of taking his sister to such a venue. There were quite a few famous Black men who made their names and fortunes in boxing at this time, though. Were they freed men or enslaved?

Indeed, one of the most famous boxers on both sides of the Atlantic in the early 19th century was a formerly enslaved man named Molyneux from Louisiana. He managed to win his freedom and then he went to England where he became one of the leading boxers of the 1820s.

Certainly there are rumors that for their own enjoyment, a plantation owner, particularly if he had friends or male kin visiting, might force big and muscular young male slaves to fight one another, whether as boxers or wrestlers or just in a kind of a free-for-all. And there certainly were ex-slave men or Black men born into freedom who were involved in boxing.

But as I said, boxing, even though it's popular, is also quite socially marginal throughout the entire 19th century. Not only should women, even women who are seen as low class, should never attend, but any man who wants to think of himself as respectable should not. You know, it would be shocking to see a lawyer or a minister or a university professor at a boxing match. It's basically for sort of raffish young men.

Researching this episode inspired a spin-off podcast series, Physical Capital. The first season is available exclusively to Human Resources Plus subscribers. Looking at the history of boxing, including episodes exploring the lives of freed slaves Tom Molyneux and Bill Richmode, who was also credited as being the first celebrity boxer.

Boxing today is a billion pound sport with boxers commanding a huge level of respect. But there's still an association with, say, less respectability than horse racing, despite both sports arguably pulling in similar demographics. Boxing is particularly popular with young people. You've got a raft of savvy influencers like Jake Paul and KSI who've realised there's money to be made from staging exhibition matches.

You know, it is part of more sort of celebrity culture and the world of sports than it was 100 or 150 years ago. And certainly, you know, on both sides of the Atlantic, there have been many, many Black men, you know, who have been champion boxers. Although that's been much more in the post-World War II period that, you know, it's okay for the heavyweight champion of the U.S. or the world to be a Black man. Whereas...

In the early 20th century, there was the famous boxer Jack Johnson, a Black man, although he'd been born after the end of slavery, and he was a tremendous boxer. But even though people admired his sports skill, he was widely hated by white sports fans.

because they didn't like to see white champions defeated by a Black man, even if the Black man fought fairly and won because of his superior skills, not through any kind of cheating. And also, Jack Johnson knew he was hated and threw it right back at white people. He wore very expensive gaudy clothes, such as fur coats and diamond jewelry. He dated a string of white women, and he refused to ever be subservient to white men.

He was a dark-skinned Black man, and he refused to kowtow to white ideas of how a Black man ought to behave. And then there was Joe Louis in the 1930s. And Louis eventually did become celebrated by white as well as Black fans, but for a long time. And I think really only when

The Second World War broke out and Nazi ideologies about race made certain forms of racism not very publicly acceptable. Only then could Lewis be welcomed as the great American boxer, not just the great black boxer.

In fact, following what many dubbed at the time "the fight of the century" where Jack Johnson defeated white boxer James Jeffries to win the World Heavyweight Championship in 1908, race riots broke out across America, sparked by the outrage of some white people at Johnson's win. The exact number of deaths is not known but it's estimated to be around 30, with hundreds more injured during the violence.

Boxing is an extremely physical sport. We've already covered some of the racial myths that were created to retrospectively argue that black Africans possessed unique physiology that made them suitable for enslaved labour. I asked Natalie, was the black participation in boxing at this time allowed as an extension of these ideas?

Boxing in the mid-19th century is very different than it is today. Boxing now has many rules and regulations, but it was really just a slugfest back then. A contest could basically, it could go 40 rounds.

It went until somebody either was knocked out or, you know, was too badly injured to continue. So there wasn't really the idea of boxers having what people call science. You know, now a boxer, you know, has to be very physically strong and have good reflexes. But, you know, the sense is there was a lot of mental work going on, too.

I don't think most people would say that Tyson Fury is an extremely intellectually gifted man, but I think most people would say he doesn't just get out there and start punching people. He has strategy.

And he trains not just his muscles, but his mind. And he watches old bouts of Hez and of other peoples. And he thinks about the different fighters and how he might fight one person in this way, but another fighter in a different way. But in the 19th century, across racial lines, it really was just who could punch harder and who could take more punishment.

So if you had an enslaved man who was a large, well-built man, and of course, they were already used to doing extremely hard physical labor and often endure harsh punishments. They had a lot of endurance, and especially if there was the promise that if they won, they might become free or at least their living situation might be improved or they might be given a small part of the money that they had won.

But these were really sports where, you know, the Black body was much more important than the Black brain. You know, there's a lot of discussion, some of it unfortunately shading into racism, about Black bodies. Do Africans or people of African descent allegedly have

better coordination than people of other races? Are they physically stronger or more enduring? Allegedly, Black people dance better, that they're more coordinated and, you know, better at moving their bodies to music.

compared to other people, particularly white people. And there's a little go back to slavery. One justification for enslaving Africans was, well, they're big and strong. Even the women are big and strong and they can work for many hours and hard labor under a hot sun and they don't faint or get sick. Whereas the belief,

was that, you know, white people, especially white women, but even white men simply did not have the strength and endurance and they would not be able to do these jobs. It was believed that black women could keep working until they were almost ready to have a baby and they could lie down and have the baby. And then two days later, they would be back in the fields working as hard as they had and just taking a break every couple of hours to quickly nurse the baby.

Which, of course, is a complete bioessentialist myth. But let's go back to horse racing in America for a moment. How were jockeys selected? It sounded earlier as if they were treated akin to the horses themselves. In North America, it was harder and more expensive to purchase new enslaved people. So there was an incentive, not necessarily of humanity, just of practicality, to give the slaves a somewhat materially better life.

so that you would not need to keep buying new people to replace the dead or sick. If you had a boy or a young man who was the winning jockey, you would really want to keep that person pretty happy. Because if they were traveling around, they had opportunities to run away. You know, if you took your jockey to Charleston, he could slip away and blend in with the free Black population there.

Or if you took him a bit farther north, he might be able to escape and use the Underground Railroad to get to a free state. Even if he didn't run, if he put on a lot of weight or just didn't seem really interested in winning, you were losing a lot. So certainly people saw them in very instrumental ways.

They knew these jockeys much better than they did the average slave. And obviously we have to think about, you know, the media of the time, but Charles Stewart, who did gain his freedom, claimed to have, you know, great respect and liking for the man who had owned him and trained him, who had plucked him from out of, you know, many young enslaved boys and said, you're the one who's going to be a jockey.

So already his life was going to be a lot more pleasant than the other boys who had just a lifetime of endless boring and brutal toil ahead of them. And he claimed that Colonel Johnston not only was careful about his physical well-being, but respected him, talked to him about horses,

you know, that they got on quite well. But I would say, you know, if you were a jockey, you had a much more equal relationship with a man who owned you than any other enslaved male or female was likely to. And even if you, let's say, sass the overseer, your owner is not going to let the overseer beat you. You are too valuable.

valuable in terms of being a winning jockey and also you are seen as not just one of a hundred male slaves but you know you are charles you are a person that the owner knows and they may never see as an equal but they do see as a person who's an individual with unique skills are there any accounts that tell us how the enslaved black jockeys felt about horse racing

We don't have that many accounts. Probably the best one was made actually after the Civil War by Charles Stewart. He had been raised by the man who owned him, who was a leading racehorse owner and trainer from a very young age to be a jockey. Generally, they seem to feel very positively about this. You know, if you were a jockey, you might win your freedom. And even if you didn't, you would get to travel. You wouldn't be on the plantation all the time. You might get at least a bit of money.

If you won, people would be interested in you. In some ways, you would get a better diet than other enslaved people. But of course, if you were a jockey, you had to stay very thin. But still, the quality, I mean, you'd probably get a lot of lean meat, for example. So you would eat better and live better than most enslaved people. And, you know, you would not be out in the fields picking cotton.

You would be riding a horse. And as long as you like horses, this would be something enjoyable. Even if you were never going to be a jockey, you were going to be a groom or a stable hand. Most people would much rather work in a stable where they weren't carefully supervised than, you know, to be out under the overseer's eye in a cotton field or, you know, being constantly monitored within the house.

What happened to Black involvement in horse racing? It's so much rarer to see Black jockeys now. The first Kentucky Derby, which was run in 1876, I believe all the jockeys participating are Black.

And some of them are former slaves. But by 1900, there are few black jockeys. And by the 1920s, there are basically none. I mean, I'm sure there have been a small number, but I cannot think of a single famous black jockey in America in the last hundred years. Part of it is that the sport moved north after the Civil War.

I mean, obviously, there were Black men and boys in the North, but the relationship, there wasn't a planter-slave relationship template. And it may have been that Black men did not necessarily want to work for white men as jockeys. And the idea that, you know, it was unthreatening to have Black jockeys because, after all, they were probably slaves.

that no longer applied. So the idea of free Black men who are, at least in theory, full US citizens and who might by this point hope to make quite a lot of money as jockeys and become celebrities in the era of photography and mass media, that was not so attractive to many people who were either racing fans or racing administrators. There's a lot of sporting disciplines where Black stars are missing at an elite level.

tennis, for example. Arthur Ashe was a great star in the 60s and 70s, but he was really the only one. And then on the women's side, it took until the 1990s with Venus and Serena Williams. Golf, there's Tiger Woods. I believe he has African-American father and an Asian-American mother. And he certainly, when he emerged in the 90s, was very unusual as a man who was not white, who was a golf star.

Swimming, a lot of that has to do with lack of opportunity. I mean, obviously, some of that is economic. I mean, if you're going to become a great swimmer, you have to have a pool, whether it's your personal pool or more likely you belong to some kind of a swim club, which is somewhat expensive. You don't have to be wealthy to be a swimmer. Michael Phelps is not from a rich family. But historically, even when Americans were comfortable with

Black baseball players, Black singers, Black dancers, even Black intellectuals. But mixing in swimming pools was a source of tremendous anxiety. So even in places that did not have segregation laws about public transportation or movie theaters or schools or hospitals,

people who operated swimming pools found ways around the rules to make it very difficult for Black people to swim there or just create an atmosphere in which Black people were so uncomfortable. I think a theme that seems to be emerging, which is one of slavery's legacies, it seems that Black individuals in countries impacted by slavery

can participate and excel in sports that don't require lots of access to certain specialist facilities, like a pool, from a young age. I can't help but think of cricket and running, two sports that see a lot of incredible Caribbean athletes competing at the top level. When does a sport like cricket begin to take root in the Caribbean?

It was brought by white people, whether they were slaveholders or in later eras. And I think the thing about cricket is you don't really need a lot of items to play cricket.

You don't have to buy a lot of equipment. I mean, you need something that can serve as a bat and you need a ball and you need something, but it could just be somebody's shirt to mark out the field. But, you know, people play it on the beach very casually. Most of the great cricketers such as Viv Richards from Antigua and Michael Holding from Barbados, you know, I mean, they said they were little kids and they were just playing a very improvised form of cricket and

wherever there was a field that they could play in and eventually someone noticed that they actually seemed to be pretty talented at this. That's still such a live issue. Access to sporting facilities is drawn across racial and class lines. I was reading research from 2020 by Sport England, which found that people from Black and Asian backgrounds are less likely overall to take part in physical activity than people considered white British.

But what was really interesting is that within that research, Sport England also found that people who identify as black are more likely to go to the gym than other ethnic groups and are twice as likely to play in team sports compared to the white British population. Meanwhile, people of mixed heritage, like me, are the most likely to take part in sport or fitness activities across the board.

I would have loved to read a corresponding breakdown of the economic circumstances of these groups as well. I think it would be very illuminating.

We know that in the UK, black and other ethnic minority groups are twice as likely to experience deep poverty than white British demographics. This doesn't mean that there aren't millions more white British households in poverty. There are millions more white British households full stop. But it does mean that if you are from an ethnic minority group, you are disproportionately more likely to experience that level of poverty.

Many low-income people in the UK, whatever race they may be, or whether they're immigrants or born British, do not have a lot of access to sporting facilities. You know, a claim with the 2012 London Olympics was that in addition to showcasing Britain, this was going to have a sport and fitness legacy for the population as a whole. And that really has not happened in an era of austerity.

So even, you know, many people who are white, Christian, native-born British, but poor, can they go to a swimming pool? Can they go to a tennis court? Can they join a cricket club? Not necessarily. We've also seen, you know, in many communities, even more affluent ones, school playing fields being sold off to developers, right?

So, you know, the kids don't really have anywhere to go. I think we also see more parental anxiety, again, with all class and racial levels, fear of their children being out, a sense that children when they're not at school should be at home, a lot of anxiety that unless you're so gifted at sports, that a whole new career opens up to you.

that you really should be at home studying. I have a close friend who has two teenage children and they're both in swimming. And one of the children in particular, I mean, she's really, really good. She's on the county swimming team.

But it's a huge investment of her time, which means that she has less time just to hang out, be with her friends. And it's a huge amount of investment of her parents' time. They're literally getting up at five in the morning on a Saturday. They both have full-time jobs, but they're getting in the car at five to drive her to practice or to a meet. Some of it is a financial investment, but it's also, do the parents have the time or the money or even the desire to

Just another short plug, but it is relevant here. The current second season of Physical Capital, available to everyone, is hosted by Rebecca Aching and Julu Bushell, who was Team GB's first black swimmer. Natalie's point about the personal investment required to engage in sports at an elite level made me think also about investment by countries.

Certain countries excel at certain sports because they have the cash to cultivate a specialism in that area, such as Britain and cycling. In previous decades, you know, during the Cold War, people in the West and the US were often bitter that the Soviet bloc seemed to win so many medals in pretty much every sport. But the fact was, those countries were putting immense amounts of money and they were training kids, you know,

from a very, very early age, whether it was in gymnastics or ice hockey or whatever sport it was, we could just do all we can to remove barriers, whether they're financial barriers, race barriers, class barriers, gender barriers, you know, things that say that, you know, girls don't want to be sweaty and unladylike or get big muscles so that anyone who, even if they haven't yet shown a great talent, but anyone who has a desire to

to do something in sport is not immediately put off by either the cost or social factors. Human Resources was written by me, Moya Lothian-McLean. Our editor and producer is Renee Richardson. Our researchers are Dr. Alison Bennett and Arisa Lumba. Production assistant is Rory Boyle. Sound design by Ben Yolovitz.

This is a Broccoli Production, part of the Sony Podcast Network.