01-08-2021

SuNdAy, AuGuST 1, 2021
5
Female sprinters take the
spotlight at Tokyo Olympic
SCoTT CACCioLA
For years, the 100-meter dash was
synonymous with one stupendously fast
human: Usain Bolt, who won three
straight Olympic titles before he retired
in 2017. He has since occupied his time
with dabbling in professional soccer,
selling cars, traveling the world as a bon
vivant and becoming a new father.
There was a time, not so long ago,
when his void at the Tokyo Games was
expected to be filled by a bunch of other
stupendously fast humans - in the
women's 100 meters.They seemed
primed for the spotlight, for a bit of
attention from the public that Shelly-Ann
Fraser-Pryce of Jamaica, one of the race's
top contenders, said was "long
overdue."But now, after another drugrelated
suspension, the final on Saturday
night is shaping up to be just as notable
for the athletes who are missing.
Blessing Okagbare of Nigeria, the
seventh-fastest woman in the world this
year, was provisionally suspended on
Saturday morning by the Athletics
Integrity Unit for testing positive for
human growth hormone, knocking her
out of the Games. Okagbare, the 2012
Olympic silver medalist in the long jump,
had won her opening round heat on
Friday.The news of Okagbare's exit -
between rounds and mid-competition -
was a stunning development. The field
was already absent Sha'Carri
Richardson, who is serving a monthlong
suspension for testing positive for
marijuana, a banned substance, after she
dominated the women's 100 meters at
the U.S. trials.
Richardson had been expected to be a
gold medal contender and cement
herself as one of the next great American
sprinters. She was replaced by Jenna
Prandini, the fourth-place finisher at the
trials.
On Friday, after successfully advancing
to the semifinals on Saturday, Prandini
said she was not feeling any additional
pressure."I'm just out here trying to do
my best," she said, "and that's all I can
do."
Prandini recalled being at practice
Sprinters competing in the women's 100-meter qualifying round on
Friday.
Photo: Alexandra Garcia
FRANK PASquALe
when she was informed that a spot had
opened up in the 100. She had already
secured a spot on the U.S. team in the
200 meters."To be honest, I had no idea
who I was replacing," she said. "I just got
a call, and they asked me if I'd run the
100, and I said yes, and that was it. I
didn't know the rest of the story. So, as
soon as you guys found out, that's when I
found out, as well."
After finishing with the third-fastest
qualifying time in Tokyo, Fraser-Pryce
did not discuss Richardson or her
suspension. She could be forgiven for
wanting the focus to remain on the
sprinters who are at the Olympics, even if
doing so was becoming a losing battle.
For much of Fraser-Pryce's career, she
- and most sprinters, male and female -
were overshadowed by Bolt.
Now, at 34, Fraser-Pryce is a two-time
Olympic champion, a six-time Olympic
medalist, a nine-time world champion
and the mother of a young son, Zyon. She
famously went into labor while watching
a broadcast of the women's 100-meter
final at the 2017 world championships.
She took about a year off after giving
birth, a sabbatical that "kind of
rejuvenated my motivation and what I
wanted to achieve," she said.
Fraser-Pryce returned to win another
world championship in 2019, then ran
the fastest time of her life in June: 10.63
at a meet in Jamaica. That performance
made her the second-fastest female
sprinter in history behind Florence
Griffith-Joyner, whose world record has
stood for 33 years.
On Friday, Fraser-Pryce did not
dismiss the idea that she could set
another personal best if the conditions
were right and the race lived up to its
potential.She was among the athletes
who described the Olympic Stadium
track as fast ("superfast" was her exact
word). In her heat on Friday alone, two
women - Ajla Del Ponte of Switzerland
and Gina Bass of Gambia - broke
national records.
"Honestly, I try not to put any pressure
on myself," Fraser-Pryce said. "I'm sure
coming into this championship, I may be
seen as a favorite. There are different
narratives that are out there. So I'm
trying not to focus on the expectations. I
just want to make sure I put myself in
position to do my best."
Easier said than done: Merely making
their way to the starting line proved too
much of a challenge for at least two of
Fraser-Pryce's rivals before the final on
Saturday. But it could still be one of the
premier showdowns of the Tokyo
Games.
Elaine Thompson-Herah, another
Jamaican, helped prevent Fraser-Pryce
from an Olympic three-peat by winning
gold in Rio de Janeiro. Marie-Josee Ta
Lou of the Ivory Coast had the fastest
time in qualifying. Dina Asher-Smith of
Britain edged Fraser-Pryce and Ta Lou at
a Diamond League meet in May.
The efficiency level of A.I.
Americans have good reason
to be skeptical of artificial
intelligence. Tesla crashes
have dented the dream of
self-driving cars. Mysterious
algorithms predict job
applicants' performance
based on little more than
video interviews. Similar
technologies may soon be
headed to the classroom, as
administrators use "learning
analytics platforms" to
scrutinize students' written
work and emotional states.
Financial technology
companies are using social
media and other sensitive
data to set interest rates and
repayment terms.
Even in areas where A.I.
seems to be an unqualified
good, like machine learning
to better spot melanoma,
researchers are worried that
current data sets do not
adequately represent all
patients' racial backgrounds.
U.S. authorities are
starting to respond.
Massachusetts passed a
nuanced law this spring
limiting the use of facial
recognition in criminal
investigations. Other
jurisdictions have taken a
stronger stance, prohibiting
the use of such technology
entirely or requiring consent
before biometric data is
collected. But the rise of A.I.
requires a more coordinated
nationwide response, guided
by first principles that clearly
identify the threats that
substandard or unproven
A.I. poses. The United States
can learn from the European
Union's proposed A.I.
regulation.
In April, the European
Union released a new
proposal for a systematic
regulation of artificial
intelligence. If enacted, it
will change the terms of the
debate by forbidding some
forms of A.I., regardless of
What if A.i. takes a wrong turn against
humanity?
Photo: Nicholas Konrad
their ostensible benefits.
Some forms of manipulative
advertising will be banned,
as will real-time
indiscriminate facial
recognition by public
authorities for law
enforcement purposes.
The list of prohibited A.I.
uses is not comprehensive
enough - for example, many
forms of nonconsensual
A.I.-driven emotion
recognition, mental health
diagnoses, ethnicity
attribution and lie detection
should also be banned. But
the broader principle - that
some uses of technology are
simply too harmful to be
permitted - should drive
global debates on A.I.
regulation.
The proposed regulation
also deems a wide variety of
A.I. high risk,
acknowledging that A.I.
presents two types of
problems. First, there is the
danger of malfunctioning
A.I. harming people or
things - a threat to physical
safety. Under the proposed
E.U.
regulation,
standardization bodies with
long experience in technical
fields are mandated to
synthesize best practices for
companies - which will then
need to comply with those
practices or justify why they
have chosen an alternative
approach.
Second, there is a risk of
discrimination or lack of fair
process in sensitive areas of
evaluation, including
education, employment,
social assistance and credit
scoring. This is a risk to
fundamental rights, amply
demonstrated in the United
States in works like Cathy
O'Neil's "Weapons of Math
Destruction" and Ruha
Benjamin's "Race After
Technology." Here, the E.U.
is insisting on formal
documentation from
companies to demonstrate
fair and nondiscriminatory
practices. National
supervisory authorities in
each member state can
impose hefty fines if
businesses fail to comply.
To be sure, Europe's
proposal is far from perfect,
and the E.U. is not alone in
considering the problems of
artificial intelligence. The
United States is starting to
grope toward basic
standards of A.I. regulation
as well. In April, the Federal
Trade Commission clarified
a 2020 guidance document
on A.I., stating that U.S. law
"prohibits the sale or use of
… racially biased
algorithms."
However, the problems
posed by unsafe or
discriminatory A.I. do not
appear to be a high-level
Biden administration
priority. As a remarkable
coalition of civil rights and
technology policy
organizations complained
this month: "Since assuming
office, this administration
has not pursued a public and
proactive agenda on the civil
rights implications of A.I. In
fact, the Trump
administration's executive
orders and regulatory
guidance on A.I. remain in
force, which constrains
agencies across the federal
government in setting policy
priorities."
Things are somewhat
better on the state level. A
more robust proposal is now
under discussion in
California to regulate public
contracts for the provision of
A.I.-based products and
services. Legislators in
Washington State are
discussing a similar
proposal. The proposed
California law has some
elements in common with
the European approach and
with the Canadian model of
"Algorithmic Impact
Assessment," designed to
mitigate bias and unfairness
in emerging A.I. for public
administration.
KARLA CoRNejo viLLAviCeNCio
This summer's controversy
over the underrepresentation
of dark-skinned Afro-Latinos
in "In the Heights," the
Hollywood adaptation of the
Broadway musical, laid bare
the cancer of colorism in
Latinx communities in the
United States. The reckoning
was long overdue, a pain
that goes back as long as our
community has existed. And
the mainstream media was
enraptured. It created what I
think of as the spectacle -
elespectáculo. I haven't seen
as high a demand for Latinx
voices since the Pulse
shooting.
"Latinidad" is the shared
language, childhood
references, music, food,
inside jokes and
idiosyncratic TV Spanglish
among the Latinx in this
country. It is the sameness
that unites us no matter
where we grow up, and no
matter where our parents
were from. But the idea of
sameness can devastate as
much as it can connect. An
open wound in this world of
Latinx has been the shame
around darkness, our own
and that of our family and
neighbors and compatriots.
According to media by us or
for us, dark-skinned Afro-
Latinos do not exist and if
they do, they aren't Latino.
Not really.
Some seem to derive
schadenfreude from our
colorism problem, while
others with a platform use it
to accrue social capital when
we call it out. It's the kind of
performative racial
conversation that allows
Americans to proclaim how
antiracist they are while they
continue to gentrify our
neighborhoods and hide the
fact that they get paid more
than their Black or Latina
co-worker.The main issue
we are asked to write about,
other than the border crisis,
is the issue of anti-Blackness
in our community. When
interviewers have asked me
what Latinidad means to
me, I fumble. For many
people, I am a representative
of undocumented, brown
Latinidad, but my Latinidad
is complicated, and it is
personal. That space of
always wondering - of
constantly creating a version
of myself that incorporates
my race, ethnicity,
nationality, migration to
America, education and all
the rest of my history - is my
Latinidad.
Latinidad isn't a race, and
you can be Latinx and be of
any ethnicity. And we are
still talking about and
around Mestizaje - a race
that doesn't exist in the
racial binary of white and
Black in the United States.
Lately I've caught myself
comparing the skin color of
Latinx artists in my movies
and on my dust jackets with
ugly feelings, looking at their
eyes and lips and
cheekbones and noses and
jaws, looking for tells of
ancestry, assuming
deception and theft.
There are the reckonings
we have among ourselves,
and they are messy, loud and
deeply specific; they are
conversations that are
nuanced, containing not
only facts, but embodied,
familial and community
knowledge. They are
probably not conversations
we are having for the first
time, and probably not the
first time they have brought
many of us to tears. Anti-
Blackness in the Latinx
world causes those of us with
skin in the game deep pain.
As a brown artist I am only
consumable by American
audiences when I write
about extreme suffering. I
suggest that we interrogate
within ourselves what our
personal and professional
stakes are in this
conversation.
I think of the casta
paintings, colonial-era
paintings depicting the
interethnic mixing among
Europeans, Indigenous
peoples, Africans and the
existing mixed-race
population in the New
World. The paintings
typically depict a man,
woman and child, arranged
according to a hierarchy of
race and status, and denote
the racial mixing that has
occurred. A taxonomic
atrocity where the child of a
Spaniard father and albino
mother is labeled tornaatrás,
or "return backward," while
an Indigenous couple and
their child are considered
Indiosmecosbárbaros, or
barbarian Indians. The race
of mestizos, a mix of white
and Indigenous, is
something that allows
people to talk about
citizenship without naming
it. Our ancestral caste
system is created by a
recognition of race that is so
obsessed with blood
quantum and phenotype
that it becomes eugenicist.
It's true that some people
hear Latino and think of
Ricky Martin, but others
think of job-stealing
Mexicans - a different binary
altogether, of citizen and
alien. Campesino means
peasant in Latin American
Spanish, but it is a word that
signals race as much as it
does class. You can call
someone a campesino as a
slur to mean they look
Indigenous, but not
Indigenous enough to be
romanticized as a noble
savage, just Indigenous
enough to be barred access
to cultural and economic
capital. These categories
unify even as they divide: A
Latino is a Mexican is a
campesino is an indio is an
illegal.
I cherish being a mixedrace
person. Some of my
mestizo family's most
ingrained traditions come
from the Black Caribbean,
like the salsa from Joe
Arroyo, whose songs kept
my head held high when I
felt shame as an
undocumented student at
Harvard. We sometimes
speak Quechua at home,
especially to describe good
or bad feelings in the body
that don't have words in
English or Spanish. But I am
not Black and I am not
native. I have had to decide
for myself what is a
respectful enactment of my
culture and what might be
romanticization of ancestors
I don't know. What is an
authentic expression of my
culture and what is
appropriation? It takes deep
personal reflection. It takes
education.
What was once Latin
culture in New York, what
was once Spanish culture in
New York, has meant
growing up mixed-race
alongside mixed races.
People on the ground - from
organizers of racial justice
movements and day laborer
centers to gangs in New York
and Los Angeles .
The beauty of being bilingual
NATALiA SyLveSTeR
My parents refused to let my sister and
me forget how to speak Spanish by
pretending they didn't understand
when we spoke English. Spanish was
the only language we were allowed to
speak in our one-bedroom apartment
in Miami in the late 1980s. We both
graduated from English as a second
language lessons in record time as
kindergartners and first graders, and
we longed to play and talk and live in
English as if it were a shiny new toy.
"No teentiendo," my mother would
say, shaking her head and shrugging in
feigned confusion anytime we slipped
into English. My sister and I would let
out exasperated sighs at having to
repeat ourselves in Spanish, only to be
interrupted by a correction of our
grammar and vocabulary after every
other word. One day you'll thank me,
my mother retorted.
That day has come to pass 30 years
later in ordinary places like Goodwill, a
Walmart parking lot, a Costco Tire
Center.I'm most thankful that I can
speak Spanish because it has allowed
me to help others. There was the young
mother who wanted to know whether
she could leave a cumbersome diaper
bin aside at the register at Goodwill
while she shopped. The cashier shook
her head dismissively and said she
didn't understand. It wasn't difficult to
read the woman's gestures - she was
struggling to push her baby's carriage
while lugging the large box around the
store. Even after I told the cashier what
the woman was saying, her irritation
was palpable.
The air of judgment is one I've come
to recognize: How dare this woman not
speak English, how dare this other
woman speak both English and
Spanish. It was a small moment, but it
speaks to how easy it would have been
for the cashier to ignore a young Latina
mother struggling to care for her child
had there not been someone around to
interpret. "I don't understand," she
kept saying, though the mother's
gestures transcended language. I
choose not to understand is what she
really meant.
Those of us who grew up bilingual
The celebration incolor diversity
The issue of anti-Blackness in North American
community is pervasive. Photo: Collected
understand the complexities of holding
onto and embracing either language.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-
Cortez recently said on Twitter,
"Growing up, Spanish was my first
language - but like many 1st generation
Latinx Americans, I have to
continuously work at it & improve. It's
not perfect."
In the Spanish spoken by the
children of immigrants, you'll hear the
echoes of cousins laughing at our
accents when we visited them in Latin
America. If you go back one
generation, you'll hear stories of people
like my in-laws, whose teachers in
Florida beat them for speaking in
school the language they spoke at
home. Go back yet another generation
and you'll hear of the state-sanctioned
racial terror inflicted on residents of
Mexican descent in Texas in the late
1800s and early 1900s.
On videos circulating on social media
you'll hear Americans harassing
Spanish-speakers at supermarkets and
restaurants. This language of
xenophobia and white supremacy is
spoken fluently by our own president,
and is at the root of why generations of
Latinx Americans' relationship with
Spanish is laced with pain.
Those whose parents tried to shield
them from discrimination by not
passing it on are often expected to be
fluent in a language they never had the
chance to forget. Those of us who
managed to hold on to it, despite the
pressures to assimilate, know that our
imperfect Spanish is a privilege we are
often shamed for both inside and
outside of our communities. And those
of us who speak only Spanish are too
often dismissed and worse, targeted -
by women pushing shopping carts, by
ICE raids, by gunmen with antiimmigrant
manifestoes. Their terror
makes victims of us all.A few weeks
before the election in 2016, a woman at
a Walmart parking lot in Manor, Tex.,
ran to the tent where I was helping to
register voters; she was in tears
because her car had been stolen. In a
town that's nearly 50 percent Latinx,
none of the police officers on site could
understand her. As she filed her police
report, with me as an interpreter, I
noticed how they made almost no eye
contact with her. I was the one they
could understand, so they saw only me.
She confided that her immigration
papers were in the car.
The bittersweet discovery that language, and the stories it carries,
is not a straight path. Photo:
Rachel Levit Ruiz