With Michael Johnson
I know a thing or two about what it’s like for people to be afraid of you. I made a career out of it. When I was a fast bowler, the batsman at the other end, a lot of the time, would have been scared. That was because he feared that he would be hit. I bowled at more than 90mph. Sometimes that fear would be greater than that of him being embarrassed or losing his wicket. He might suffer physical pain. He might not. The thought would have been at the front, or back, of his mind. It was all part of the challenge of elite cricket.
But I also now know, as a much older and wiser man, that when the West Indies team that I was part of were beating every team out of sight, we made others afraid. And not just those batting at the other end. Not just the opposition. We personified the white man’s greatest fear. There I was, and there we were, showing superiority, showing dominance and a ruthless attitude to get what we wanted. It was why, among some sections of the media, we were so unpopular. They called us ‘muggers’ or used derogatory terms associated with violence. That fear is sometimes at the front, or back, of the mind with a lot of folks when it comes to Black people.
Fear underpins this entire story. Black people are afraid of being abused, discriminated against. In extreme cases there is a fear of physical violence from those who are supposed to protect them. They are afraid of speaking out or being labelled a troublemaker. We know that. Ibtihaj Muhammad spoke eloquently about fear. It is the central, crucial, constant force that ensures the survival of the system that we have described. One that keeps Black people at the bottom.
But the system works another way, too. It tells white people that Black people are uneducated, that we’re poor, that we’re aggressive, that we’re low-skilled, that we don’t look like them, we don’t behave like them. We are other. Be afraid. For Lord forbid what would happen if we were ever to rise up, take over and exact our revenge. In the cricketing context – and I absolutely note the small measure here – the West Indies cricket team did that.
And it is something of a taboo. People don’t like to talk about it, admit it or recognise its importance. So let’s bottom-line it. Let’s put it down in black and white, if you will. White people are generally afraid of Black people.
Well, that’s my opinion anyway. Am I wrong?
‘Not to me,’ Michael Johnson says in his distinctive deep voice. He’s sitting in front of a sideboard showing off a few trophies and the iconic gold shoes that carried him to the double Olympic gold for the US in the 200 and 400 metres in Atlanta in 1996, and the 400m world record in Seville three years later.
‘You know something?’ Michael says. ‘My wife often says, “Why are white people so afraid all the time? They’re always afraid, what are they afraid of?” ’
Johnson is not a man who does anything for the sake of it. On the track he won four Olympic golds and eight World Championship golds. He is still the only man to have won both 200m and 400m events at an Olympics. He is a true sporting great and there probably aren’t the words to do him justice. When he stopped competing, his opinions and voice were in high demand. And it would have been easy for him to say, ‘No thanks’, or even just to offer up a few platitudes now and then. But now he’s a true great in his commentary role for the media, too. That is down to his presence and authority. And at the start of our call, I admit to being slightly star-struck meeting him in the past. I was in the same lift with him once at an awards dinner and I really wanted to speak with him and tell him that I was a fan. But I didn’t. ‘Then you robbed us both of a moment,’ he laughs.
The guy has an aura. And it is even noticeable on a video call. When Michael Johnson speaks, you listen because you know there’s a story to be recounted. So, we’re going to have a go at trying to answer his wife’s question. But there’s a story worth recounting at this point, which I share with Michael.
It’s 1990 and Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam, a civil rights group which combined elements of Islam and Black nationalism, is taking questions from white Middle Americans on The Phil Donahue Show. Farrakhan, another guy who could grab your attention, has calmly and brilliantly described the subjugation of the Black race for hundreds of years. How everything that gave them an identity was stripped from them – names, culture, language, religion. You name it. Then a white woman stands up and, presumably in an effort to try to explain or defend systemic racism, says this: ‘What scares us, I think, is we hear violence.’ Farrakhan has made controversial statements in the past and I don’t endorse everything he has ever said. But his reply was perfect then. And it is perfect now.
Isn’t it sad that we who have been the victims of so much violence… now whites fear violence from us. We do not have a history of killing white people. White people have a history of killing us. And what you fear, it is a deep guilt that white folks suffer. You are afraid that if we ever come to power, we will do to you and your fathers what you and your people have done to us, and I think you are judging us by the state of your own mind and that is not necessarily the mind of Black people.
A year later Rodney King was beaten at least fifty-three times with batons by four Los Angeles policemen. We know that because it was secretly recorded. All four were acquitted in court, sparking the six-day LA riots. I’m talking to Michael only a few days after white supremacists have stormed the Washington Capitol, cajoled by President Donald Trump. We’ve not yet even mentioned George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Jacob Blake, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin.
‘What we saw at our Capitol building and all of that, people are starting to see now this is really jacked up. I think that there’s just a tremendous amount of fear,’ Michael says. ‘There was an amazing video that I reposted on my social media last summer when all of the riots and protests were going on. People were crashing, smashing windows and things. And there was this one Black woman, very passionate, talking to a reporter. And she said, “Look, you guys broke the contract. You said that we were equal, you said that we have all of these rights. We have all of this justice. We haven’t seen any of that – you’re killing Black people. We don’t have opportunities. You broke the contract. We didn’t.” And then she said, “So that’s all we’re out here doing is trying to get your attention to let you know that we’re not gonna stand for it any more. And all we want is equality.” And she looked directly at the camera and she goes: “And y’all are lucky that we don’t want revenge.”
‘And we don’t. You know, even families who have lost loved ones because white police officers killed them because they were “afraid” don’t talk about revenge. That’s what they will say. So it’s not our fear. What does a white police officer say after he shot an unarmed Black man? “I was afraid.” Or, “I felt threatened.” ’
Going back to what Louis Farrakhan said, it is perhaps not surprising that white people have that fear. Those who do know of the punishment and abuse that Black people have been subjected to, and those who have been brainwashed to still believe that we deserve that punishment and abuse, will no doubt reckon they are justified for thinking that way. It’s not surprising at all. As I said, for some it will be at the back of their mind. For others at the front. But there is a scale of fear. The fear of orchestrated, violent revenge at one end. At the other there’s physical intimidation. I’m thinking back to that incident in the lift when I was in Australia. And how the media love to portray Black people as dangerous and violent. And, let’s be honest, a lot of white people might see a young Black guy on the street, strong, tall, and be fearful. They will fear being robbed or attacked. They’ve been conditioned to think that way.
But for Michael, the fear is something different. Sure, he recognises that physical ‘threat’, but he sees it in a more subtle, dangerous way that ultimately led to those rioters trying to overturn the 2020 US election. And it’s more dangerous because of the way Donald Trump was prepared to say what Michael terms ‘things other conservative politicians thought, and would work away in the background trying to achieve, but would never actually say’.
‘I think the bigger fear from white people is that they will have to compete now,’ he says. ‘I think that they know that they have privilege and they don’t want to lose that. People don’t like change. They do not like change. So they don’t want to lose that privilege. Look, what is privilege? Privilege means you get priority status over other people. That’s what it means. Come on, Mike, you were an athlete, I’m an athlete, we get some privilege, right? It feels good. But at the same time, if that privilege is at the expense of someone else, then, to me, it doesn’t feel so good. And in this case, it is at the expense of someone else.
‘It’s hard now, it used to be easy. Growing up as a young white man, as long as you stay out of trouble and do the right things, you’re gonna succeed in life. That’s not the case for young Black men. Right? That was always the case for young white men. While it’s not where we want it to be, there has been a tremendous amount of progress. And that progress has made it more equal for a lot of people. And that means that a lot of young white people or young white men now have to compete and they don’t like that. It doesn’t feel good. So they are afraid. “Yeah, I’m gonna have to compete, too. I am no longer gonna have this privilege.” I think that’s part of it.
‘The conservative movement is all about stopping change. The progressive movement is all about continuing to move forward and evolve as a society and as humans and they don’t want it. What does “Make America Great Again” mean? It means, “Take us back to when it was great for white people because we were on top. Take us back to when we owned the land and when we owned the Black people.” ’
Michael then surprises me. He tells me that the suicide rate in the US among white males is ‘out of control’. And after our call I go and find the data. He is right, of course. According to the American Foundation for the Prevention of Suicide, white middle-aged males account for 70 per cent of cases.
‘Is that because of progress made? When you have Black CEOs of companies, you have a Black president, you have Black people starting to actually be in positions of power, you now have a young white man going to interview for a job, and where always before it was another white man sitting across from him it may now be an Hispanic woman, or a Black woman, or Black man, or an Asian woman. So you have to compete. Previously you were up and the only way that’s going to equal out is, you know, in order for Black people to start getting those equal opportunities, is for you to come down. That’s what equal is. That’s what equality means. Everybody’s on the same page. But if one is up and one is down, in order to equal out, yeah, you’re gonna have to give us something. I know that people don’t want to hear that, but you gotta give it up. You got to give up the privilege.’
Michael’s perspective is interesting. And it’s very specific. It really does get down to the nub of the issue, if you like. The guy handing out the jobs is not necessarily white any more. But it also gives a different slant on equality. The idea that for everybody to be level, someone has to lose out? I don’t believe in real terms that when you bring one up, the other has to come down. The key word, I think, is that mentally people believe they are being brought down. That’s because they are so accustomed to having that white privilege that when they no longer have it, they think they have lost something. They are not losing anything in real, physical terms.
‘Yes, because they’re so used to it, some of them don’t even know. So yeah, you’re gonna have to give that up. Because you’re up here, because you’ve been put up here, this country has been built in a way to actually put you up there on top. We have to acknowledge as well that America has been built and established in such a way where it is unequal, it is completely unequal. And it’s tilted in favour of white people and white men. And even to a point where some don’t even know it.
‘When the conversation sort of rose to prominence, there were many who said, “I didn’t realise I had this privilege, I don’t want it, I don’t feel good about this.” So it’s very interesting, but I think we have to be very careful about that idea of bringing someone down for someone else to come up. But at the same time, I think we do have to do it. If that’s an uncomfortable situation or a conversation, you know, I think we have to have the uncomfortable situation. It is needed. The only time I want to bring someone down is when they’re somewhere they should not be. And when you have this privilege, and you have deliberately been put in a group of human beings who are seen as on top of another group of human beings, that shouldn’t be the case. And so, yes, you need to come down.’
The ‘conversation’ that Michael is referring to, of course, is the waves of Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death. It would be wrong to say that he had an ‘awakening’ about what racism was or its toxicity, but he felt that it was the time to speak and to react as if there had been a sort of ‘our time is now’ moment.
‘I have always been outspoken in regard to my thoughts, my position. I rarely hold anything back,’ he says. ‘But I have been much more outspoken as of late. Because I think that I just finally have had enough.’
Growing up in Dallas, Texas, Michael did not really experience racism. It was a close, multicultural community bonded by the fact that ‘we were all struggling’. Only when he moved out of his community did he start to notice something was up. At high school in 1986 a white friend of his called Martin Luther King Day ‘that Black people’s day’. Michael was taken aback. ‘I just thought, Huh, there’s something not right about what she just said.’ When he went to the predominantly white Baylor University in Waco, Texas, he was left in no doubt.
‘I was targeted, for sure. I fought back. It might be the n-word, or something like that, so you push back. This is what happens, people say these things, and I gotta stand up and defend myself. But is there anything that can be done to stop it? I can stop it in a moment with a fist on your lip, but that’s it. But it’s taken years, decades even, for me as an individual to recognise that I need to do something about this. And I need to be a part of the community. After my athletics career I started to feel like I needed to be part of the solution with regard to making change, actively making change. I can tell you that I always felt, as a Black athlete, that I had a responsibility to my Black community to represent them well, and to sort of defy the stereotypes and that sort of thing.’
But there was one incident that enraged Michael. It was the death of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery in Brunswick, Georgia, in February 2020. Naomi Osaka wore his name on a face mask in the US Open. Ahmaud was out for his usual daily jog on a Sunday afternoon. The sun was out. The birds were singing. It was the same jog he’d been doing for years. Neighbours would see him and say, ‘There goes Ahmaud.’ Unfortunately, a white father and son had taken exception to Ahmaud’s run that day. They followed him in their white pick-up truck. And when he ran past them, they shot him to death with a shotgun. We know this because, again, it was all caught on camera. And yet the police were dragging their feet on the investigation until that video came to light.
It would still take countrywide protests for anyone to be arrested and charged. Michael was involved in those protests. He took part in a 2-mile run to apply pressure, raise awareness. In May, Gregory McMichael, a former police officer, and Travis McMichael were charged with murder and aggravated assault.
‘I don’t know why but, for some reason, that one just really hit me, touched me in a different way,’ Michael says. ‘And I think part of it was, I just thought there’s a very good chance the men who did this are going to get away with it, and that burned me up. That just really pissed me off, like nothing else. And then, of course, we just had more and more incidents, like George Floyd. But I’ll be honest and say, it’s hard when it’s just you. And I think that it’s become much easier for me when we have other people speaking up about this so that you feel like they are in it with you.
‘When I’ve looked at the Black Lives Matter movement and seen all of these young people out there, Black and white, of all different ethnicities, marching for equality, marching for social justice, nobody knows who these people are. If I’ve got a platform, then I owe it to myself to be supportive of them, or to them rather, and to do what I can. And I’ve always wanted to do that. I’ve always been a big advocate for sport for social change, you know, and been involved in starting organisations and working with organisations to use sport for social change around the world. But to be honest, prior to this year, I’ve done more of that work outside of this country than I have in my own country. Because, again, I think we just sort of get numb to it at some point.
‘I think there’s a conservative effort to make us numb to it in this country. We had a Black president, what more can you ask for? Right? You know, you start to get lulled into that false sense of security. And I think it was a big wake-up call for a lot of us. The Covid pandemic meant everyone’s kind of at home, you have a little bit more time to focus on things, everything slows down, and to see this white police officer with his knee on George Floyd’s neck, killing him, or see this privilege that Amy Cooper exercises over a Black man… it’s just horrible.’
Ah, yes. Amy Cooper. She was the young woman who, when out walking her dog in New York City’s Central Park, took exception to a Black man asking her to put a leash on her dog, as per the rules. She called the police. ‘I’m taking a picture and calling the cops,’ she said. ‘I’m going to tell them there’s an African-American man threatening my life.’ The man’s name was Christian Cooper (no relation). Of course, he was not being threatening in the least. And, by the way, we only know this because Christian filmed the encounter.
Fortunately, Christian was not harmed (Cooper underwent racial-bias training). But it is an important moment because, for a start, it reinforces the idea that white people are terrified of Black people. And, second, that they have the privilege of phoning the police and using the term ‘African-American’ knowing that the majority of the time the police will turn up – and darn quickly, too – and believe her. And not the Black person. And that’s when tragedies happen. When murder becomes part of arresting.
‘There was an example just the other day, a perfect example of it,’ Michael says. ‘A Black man’s family called 911 because they needed assistance from health and human services, because he needed psychological help. So 911 sent the police. They killed him.’ Right. And they are able to get away with it because the police can play the fear card. ‘Oh, we thought he had a gun.’
‘Not only is there fear, fear has become weaponised. It has become a defence mechanism and also become a weapon for white people. I realise now that this stuff has just become normalised. And it shouldn’t be normal!
‘I think back to the discussions I’ve had with my son about how to behave if the police turn up. He’s twenty now but the first time we spoke about it was in his early teens. He’s tall, he’s athletic, he was starting to be independent, go out on his own. And I think back and it’s crazy! At what point did this become normal? My dad had that conversation with me, my brothers, my sisters. That’s ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous.’
Of course it is. And that’s Michael Johnson saying it. An American idol, legend. Someone who the majority of Americans were more than happy to revere when he was king of track and field, to bask in his reflected glory and claim him as one of their own. But here he is talking about being made to feel worth less than those people. Having to sit his kid down and tell him his life is in danger because of the colour of his skin. And it’s been happening for hundreds of years. He is not alone. The author Candice Brathwaite, in her bestselling book about Black motherhood, I Am Not Your Baby Mother, writes about leaving London with her small son because she didn’t think it was safe to raise him in that city. So even when Black people do great things, nothing changes. And often they do those great things because they think it will help to make it stop. That they will be seen as equal. Or be accepted.