#Ad of Olympian Maame Biney pushes idea of black victimhood

How hard is it to be a black person in America? Apparently it’s like having a leg amputated or getting cancer. That’s at least the implication of a new commercial from Visa playing during the Olympics. 

The commercial, which features three Olympic athletes, begins with a voiceover: “Everyone celebrates the finish line. But what about the starting line?” We see a skier preparing for a race explaining how he had to go through 12 rounds of chemotherapy treatments. And a man in a locker room who explains, “I didn’t become a snowboarder until after I became an amputee.” 

Between those two shots, is a clip of short track speed skater Maame Biney at the starting line. She looks at the camera and says: “I’m African American and I’m surrounded by people who aren’t.” What does it say about our culture that we think simply being black around people who are not is such a hardship that it deserves to be compared to having cancer or losing a limb? 

It’s become a cliché these days to say that we live in a culture that seems to value victimhood above all else. But this commercial seems to be a veritable competition of who has things the hardest. And simply being African-American in a sport with mostly white people is right up there. What kind of message does this send to all the children out there — especially the black children — who are watching the Olympics? Not: Here is a person who looks like you and has succeeded in arenas it would have been hard to imagine when your grandparents were young. Rather: Even when I have achieved this amazing thing I am still plagued by the feeling that I am an outsider who will experience bigotry. 

What’s particularly fascinating about this episode is that Biney actually has overcome hardships. She moved here from Ghana with her father when she was five years old. Her mother decided to stay in Ghana, though. Though her father is an engineer and clearly didn’t seem to lack for resources in Northern Virginia, being an immigrant is rarely easy. And neither is growing up separated from your mother by an ocean. But it takes longer to say that than what Visa was willing to pay for in airtime. 

So instead it used what has become a shorthand for adversity — being black. It’s a kind of stand-in. Instead of saying someone is poor or grew up in a dangerous neighborhood or went to a bad school, you can just say he or she is black. But, of course, that only reinforces a dangerous and inaccurate stereotype. 

In the past few years, a number of people have written in to advice columns at Slate and elsewhere worried about raising a black child. One woman in a lesbian relationship wrote to say that she only wanted a white sperm donor because “it is factually safer to not be black.” In another, a black man writes that his white wife can’t bring a black baby into this world because “she is too afraid.” A number of them expressed concern about how they wouldn’t want to raise a black child in America because of how hard it would be — how they would be stopped by police all the time and would encounter casual racism everywhere they went.

When our culture advertises that being black is itself such a form of adversity, there will be real consequences. And for those of us raising black children, it has become particularly difficult to push back against this message. 

In a report a few years ago called “Black Men Making It in America,” my American Enterprise Institute colleague Brad Wilcox and two other researchers noted that despite what many Americans believe, most black men are not poor or unemployed. “More than one-in-two black men (57%) have made it into the middle class or higher as adults today, up from 38% in 1960… And the share of black men who are poor has fallen from 41% in 1960 to 18% in 2016.” And less than a quarter will ever be incarcerated.

Maybe you figured that only some kind of white supremacist would engage in this kind of blanket assumption — that being black also means you will grow up with all of these other attendant adversities. But now it turns out that the folks getting paid millions to write commercials for Fortune 500 companies think this way, too.

Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.