Of Our Spiritual Strokes

https://drive.google.com/file/d/10fOBAyexi_yBxtkCmiYzttLod43p7WXR/view?usp=sharing

 

Of Our Spiritual Strokes: Written Statement

My remix project aims to remind people that the struggle of being Black in America is more than just the experience of outright racism and bigotry but also facing barriers that have yet to be dismantled taking the form of inaccessibility in many different sects of life. My video specifically covers the sport of rowing which is an overwhelmingly white sport and has been since the beginning (almost 200 years of rowing being a competitive sport). According to the NCAA, the percentage of white women who participated in collegiate rowing was 77% while the percentage of Black women was a mere 2 %.  My remix video is meant to be a mock “hype video”, often made by collegiate rowing teams and uploaded to YouTube to get their fans excited and to show off their program. The comical part of this is that often hype videos for programs attempt to show the people of color that they have the most, to come off as diverse, but you don’t see this attempt in the clips I used because there was little to no diversity to show off. I used clips from collegiate teams including The University of Washington (a clip of the team in the movie The Boys in The Boat as well as a clip of the actual team today), Princeton, Yale, and The University of Texas. In the background, I also included audio clips of W.E.B Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folks chapter one. Lastly, I used clips from A Most Beautiful Thing, a documentary about the first all-black high school rowing team that was birthed in Chicago. 

I chose to start the video using a clip of The Boys in The Boat to show the early

beginnings of America stepping its foot into the success of competitive rowing. Because the film is about the University of Washington going to the Berlin Olympics of 1936 I then wanted to flip it to the team at UofW today to show the little differences made during such a time difference in the racial makeup of the team. I then flip through these different teams, hoping that what stands out the most is the whiteness of the teams, it should be pretty hard to miss. In the background of these beginning clips is the poem The Crying of Water by Arthur Symons, which is what W.E.B Du Bois starts the chapter with. Du Bois uses this poem to start this chapter to portray the trapping, lifelong struggles of Black People in America, indicated by the end of the poem reading “All life long crying without avail” The beginning of my video is meant to feel pessimistic, like there is no hope to crack the pattern of inaccessibility in rowing or the whiteness of it. This pessimism is meant to evoke anger, anger about the fact that rowing was meant to be exclusive and discriminatory from the start and does not fail to do so even today. 

In the second half of the video, I used an audio clip from the middle of Du Bois’ chapter where he discusses the hardships of being Black in America. This is also where I start to include clips of A Most Beautiful Thing. In chapter one of The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B Du Bois discusses this idea of the double consciousness that African American people grapple with. ​​The constant struggle of wanting to belong, being despised for not belonging but also being perpetually kept from belonging. I found it crucial to use this text in the background because rowing is the very proof of the systems we let lay in place that enable the color line to exist and create the issue of the double consciousness for Black people in America. W.E.B Du Bois also has a particular ideology about the richness of Black culture. He believes that if the color line generally were to be dismantled, Black people would have so much to offer to different parts of America, like the workforce, academia, or music. So to veer away from the pessimistic view I so boldly started the video with, I combined these words of W.E.B Du Bois with clips of A Most Beautiful Thing and other strong images of Black people to show what a world of rowing would look like, could look like, if the sport was made accessible and if we don’t continue to fall into the same patterns of exclusion. I think that this is where the critique lies. I am questioning the limits of rowing, not simply why it is so white or why it has been such a white sport but rather why we continue to allow it to be such a white-dominated sport. I think that my favorite definition of critique is that it is the practice of liberation, I’d say that through this video I am attempting to do just that. The first step was liberating myself from being the bystander or being a sponge amongst many other sponges by simply accepting that rowing is such a white-dominated sport. The second step that I took was creating this video in hopes of liberating my audience from being bystanders to such exclusion. 

I’d say the relationship between remixing, originality, and identity is that they can all be described as revolutionary. By bringing your identity into a space that it wasn’t meant to be or wasn’t built for, a forced change comes about. Or by bringing your own identity, whatever intersections it lays in, into a concept or idea, it is immediately making it original. As a Black woman who is also a D3 rower, I was able to take this intersection of my identity and make it into something that called for change in the sphere of rowing, something original. I was able to portray my own experience of constantly being in a very white environment and at the same time call for a change to this environment. So a remix can be a manifestation of intersectionality and question the limiting aspects of the differing identities or environments that lie at the intersection, and my project mirrors that exactly. 

Works Cited

“Black Girls Who Row.” YouTube, 19 June 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIBEGJY5oEA. Accessed 19 December 2023.

“THE BOYS IN THE BOAT | Official Trailer.” YouTube, 18 October 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfEA-udzjjQ. Accessed 19 December 2023.

Gavin, Scott. “Diversity in the Sport of Rowing.” The Shipley School |, https://blogs.shipleyschool.org/diversity-in-the-sport-of-rowing. Accessed 19 December 2023.

Lacy, Steve. “The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B Du Bois – The Forethought & Chapter 1: Of Our Spiritual Strivings.” . – YouTube, 2 October 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLefT-YBOnY&t=1s. Accessed 19 December 2023.

“A Morning with Princeton Men’s Rowing.” YouTube, 1 June 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzF80xsUFgI. Accessed 19 December 2023.

“A Most Beautiful Thing│Official Trailer│Peacock.” YouTube, 21 August 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxWhdwpFCgQ. Accessed 19 December 2023.

“Yale Crew Tank.” YouTube, 15 June 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxLFZusk7_g. Accessed 19 December 2023.