Posted on September 16, 2013

Who’s Really Left Out of the CrossFit Circle

Gene Demby, NPR, September 15, 2013

Last week, the headquarters for CrossFit, the popular — and polarizing — workout genre, shared an item on its Facebook page from a blog called Stuff Black People Don’t Like.

And according to an entry from February on the Stuff Black People Don’t Like blog, CrossFit is anti-black:

“Crossfit ‘boxes’ usually charge expensive membership fees and boast a mostly white clientele. A list of Crossfit Games champions and competitors reveals a veritable whitopia. In the past two years, the male and female champions have repeated. The male champion, the ‘world’s fittest man,’ is a white Southerner that Django hasn’t gotten around to killing yet, who indulges his white privilege every day by reading that racist and homophobic book, the Bible.

“The women’s champion is even worse, an Icelandic native whose surname refers to a Northern European pagan deity (ipso facto proof of Nazism).”

But while the Stuff Black People Don’t Like blog post appeared to be satire — the blog’s name was a riff on the popular, defunct blog called Stuff White People Like, which was written by a white dude and poked fun of the fascinations of young, creative class of white folks like himself — SBDL is maintained by advocates of a school of thought called “race realism.” (Racial realists believe that race is a biological reality and that black folks are natively intellectually inferior and inclined to violence. David Duke, the former Klan member and presidential hopeful,is a “racial realist.” You see where we’re going with this.)

It didn’t take long before hundreds of CrossFit Headquarters’ Facebook followers hammered the company for sharing the SBDL post. Before long, CrossFit headquarters issued a textbook non-apology apology on the social networking site.

“We have decided to remove the racial satire about CrossFit from our feed. Thanks to the users who informed us that the blog’s author is an actual racist — a view so pathetic that it is sometimes hard to distinguish from comedy written to mock racists. We apologize if you found this offensive.”

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But the racist blog post and the decision by CrossFit to share it bumped up against a popular perception: CrossFit culture is, if not hostile, then at least unwelcoming to people of color.

The CrossFit ethos eschews stuff like workout machines and the amenities that many big fitness chains provide, instead emphasizing stuff like Olympic lifts and gymnastics. It’s kind of showily no-frills, and gyms — or “boxes,” in CrossFit parlance — are often just huge garages with chin-up bars, mats and free weights. People who CrossFit together often form tight-knit cliques, leading to a reputation that CrossFit is a little culty and militaristic.

Syncere Martinez, who runs a Harlem CrossFit affiliate gym said he knew it was coming. “When that [blog post went up] I can guarantee you, in the first four minutes, I was one of the first people contacted,” Martinez says. He and several other prominent black CrossFitters often joke that they’re the only black CrossFitters.

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Greene, the CrossFit spokesperson, and Web Smith, a prodigious Tweeter and and “one of CrossFit’s 22 black people” wondered if the idea of their universe being dominated by white folks was fueled by the CrossFit Games. The Games, in which really fit people move heavy things very quickly, which are televised every year by ESPN and have gone a long way to putting CrossFit on the mainstream radar.

“For better or worse, a lot of people are used to people of color doing well in sports,” Greene said. “There are some, but most of the people who are the top athletes at the Games are not.”

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So just how white is Crossfit, anyway? It’s tough to say, in part because of the company’s peculiar corporate structure. People who own CrossFit gyms aren’t franchisees but “affiliates” — they’re licensed by CrossFit HQ but set their own rules, hours and workouts and buy their own equipment. That aversion to top-down orders is a reflection of the libertarian ideology of its founder, Greg Glassman. While Greene said that it would be interesting to crunch the numbers on CrossFit memberships, “there’s no way to get the affiliate owners to record [those stats] without mandating it.” As you might guess, that’s a nonstarter among free enterprise types.

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But even if a given CrossFit location were ethnically diverse, it just can’t be economically so: a CrossFit membership can easily cost north of $200 a month — less than a personal trainer might cost but easily five to 10 times what someone might pay to go to a big fitness chain like 24 Hour Fitness of Planet Fitness. {snip}

That cost would be way out of reach for most people, but more so for people of color, who are more likely to face economic barriers to exercise. {snip}

But Smith said that there are plenty of professional black folks who could afford the membership but still don’t see themselves as the kind of people who might join a CrossFit box. For that reason, he said that the controversy over the blog post might have a silver lining. “I wasn’t so upset, because there’s not been another time when we’ve been willing to discuss the fact there are no black people at CrossFit,” he said.

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