On Tuesday, apparently in response to the case of Ahmaud Arbery, the young black man who was reportedly jogging when he was shot by a white man in Georgia, The New York Times ran an opinion piece titled, “Jogging Has Always Excluded Black People.”
The author, historian Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, began her polemic by suggesting that the idea promulgated in the late 1960’s that jogging was accessible to everyone has been proven false by history, and the “sport of running has maintained this fiction.” Petrzela posited that black runners reacted to the video of Arbery’s death by asserting that they routinely steered “clear of certain neighborhoods,” ran “only in daylight,” wore an “Ivy League sweatshirt to broadcast respectability.” She continued, “Many white runners, by contrast, were aghast that the sense of peace they feel when hitting the open road reflected their racial privilege.”
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