That doesn’t make the issues at hand any less important, but it clearly alters the dynamic of these kinds of disagreements. One can argue with the decision of an RD to operate this way without assuming he’s unsympathetic, especially when he says he’s 1000% in agreement with you in principle.Īlso, at some point, the fact that this was a virtual event has to enter the picture, because it means that the locus of the conflict was not the site of a gathering of human beings preparing or or engaging in a running contest, but the Internet and the cystic acne known as social media that began disfiguring its face a dozen or so years ago. At last notice, the 9/11 Heroes run was one of them.
This is probably obvious, but Lake is not the only event organizer who prefers to avoid overt political displays at his events. Why not quiz every race director on this, not just the ones from Appalachia with big-ass beards who might have, you know, funny ideas about BLM? And that assumes that it’s important for the world to know. Even apart from whether a given RD wants to play host to the volatility that arises when permitting any kind of political talk, it seems more sensible to ask someone like Lake what his organic position on human rights are, rather than asking him what he thinks of a slogan. If you watch one screen, it’s Black people rioting on another, it’s white cops attacking unarmed Black protesters. Huber goes on to make a great point that he seems to ignore in organizing his ideas: “BLM” means different things to different people. Nevertheless, Chan was employing the same tactics Chris Chavez: Summoning the mob to pile on someone for refusing to actively be on the train, in this case after the RD had gone to some lengths to establish that he had no specific animus against BLM.(There are many substantive differences between the genesis of the two eruptions, which I’ll get into in a subscriber post later this week, but for now suffice it to say that I empathize far more with Chan’s actions, whom I don’t see as any sort of villain here, than with Chavez’s.) In his defense, some Blue Lives Matter pictures had evidently survived the deletion process Lake, despite his itchy and vigilant trigger-finger, says he didn’t see those.
But Chan took to Instagram, declaring the issue to be one rooted in white privilege. I can certainly understand Chan’s eagerness to post his result along with the accompanying picture and commentary, but when Lake told Chan “I am 1000% in agreement, but this is not a political site,” that really should have ended it. But the subtitle, “The infamous race director Lazarus Lake and runner Ben Chan disagree on whether the running community is a place for serious debate,” requires some radical leaps that the content fails to support. The piece, written by Mirhashem’s de facto male mouthpiece for these kinds of “bad man” stories, Martin Fritz Huber, carries the headline “Why Did a Virtual Ultra Ban ‘Black Lives Matter’?” it’s a fair question, although “Why Did a Virtual Ultra Ban Political Messages?” seems more accurate. Actually, the story and its framing were only part of the smear job the way its editor, Molly Mirhashem, promoted it on social media was the clincher. It was a textbook example of beginning with a conclusion and fighting off every logical exit-ramp to ensure getting to the holy grail of highlighting a far-flung and consequential injustice permeating all of running.
On September 11, Outside Online ran a hit piece under the guise of asking its object, someone the article called the “noted” race director of a virtual ultramarathon, why he had banned entrants from using the term Black Lives Matter as a team name in the event, an act that inspired swift social-media reprisals against the RD, Gary Cantrell, whose nom de plume is Lazarus Lake. (Come to think of it, that would be a poor way to run even an openly discriminatory business mean people still like to get paid.) In the end, someone ostensibly on your side will notice and report on the mismatch between your mission statement and your behaviors, and suggest that you don’t prod others in the direction of more humanistic value systems while exposing the active corrosion in your own.
Lazarus lake free#
The short version of this story is that any person or entity wanting to to be at the forefront of equality in sport or anywhere else would do well to avoid deception, bully tactics, and the exploitation of free labor to get there.
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