As the nation watches the U.S. Olympic team compete in Beijing, it’s hard to ignore that the team is unrepresentative of the United States as a whole — even as Black athletes won medals, with speedskater Erin Jackson capturing gold and bobsledder Elana Meyers Taylor winning silver. In 2018, the U.S. Olympic team was roughly 92 percent White. Of the 20 athletes of color who competed, 12 represented either figure skating or bobsledding. In snow sports, though, talented White athletes make up a vast majority of the American team. This composition is no accident — rather, it reflects deep historical roots.
While many have pointed to a lack of interest or fewer economic or social opportunities for athletes of color to become involved in winter sports, one overlooked factor is that these sports are often played in states in the country’s West that have long histories of excluding people of color, through both segregation and violence.
When winter sports grew in popularity in the United States after World War II, the boom centered in the West, thanks to the advantages provided by altitude and topography. And due to the history of exclusion, these places were overwhelmingly White.
Today, snow-sports athletes largely train at elite facilities in the West, such as Park City, Utah; Mount Hood, Ore.; Copper Mountain, Colo.; or Mammoth Lakes, Calif. Due to the history of exclusion, this geographic concentration fueled a culture around these sports that is distinctly White.
For the United States to maintain and grow its success in winter sports, the sports federations need to grapple with this history and its legacies.
In the wake of the Civil War, White Americans disproportionately benefited from the 1862 Homestead Act, which redistributed over 270 million acres of land taken from Native Americans by military force. A head of household could receive the title for up to 160 acres of land after living on and improving it for five years.
Officially, this offer of free land was open to any U.S. citizen (or “intended citizen”) head of household, including women. However, with a few notable exceptions, Black citizens, many of whom had recently been freed from enslavement, found it nearly impossible to take advantage of the land bonanza.
Among the formerly enslaved, most restarted their lives with little more than the shirts on their backs. They lacked the capital needed to transport their families to the West and start homesteads. Odious labor contracts began forcing many of them back into agricultural labor for others in the South, almost immediately after Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Courthouse. These predatory labor arrangements ensured that many formerly enslaved people would never gain the resources necessary to take advantage of the Homestead Act.