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Lewis Hamilton: Not the First and Unfortunately Not the LastLewis Hamilton: Not the First and Unfor


What Happened with Lewis Hamilton?


After winning his eighth Grand Prix, Lewis Hamilton, a British racer who has been racing for Formula One for 5 years, was the target of online racist abuse. The win was intense and was decided by fighting off a 10-second trail that landed his opponent, Max Verstappen, in a hospital. The racist comments have caused an understandable uproar on social media, with Facebook and Instagram removing those hateful comments from their platforms.

Like many other companies, Facebook has been an unabashed supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement and has called this kind of abuse “unacceptable.” To combat further instances of racial hatred, Facebook has re-advertised its Comment and Message Filtering systems, as stated by a senior Facebook official. Twitter has done the same by reiterating that this abuse will not be tolerated as well. Hamilton’s team, Mercedes, and the league’s governing body, the FIA, have also condemned this hatred to the highest degree, spreading this anti-racist message in their sphere. This incident was only one week after three England players, Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho, and Bukayo Saka were racially targeted amid the Euro 2020 tournament.

These incidents speak to a more significant problem in the sports community: systemic racism. Such incidents spark the much-needed conversation tackling systemic racism in the sports world, which is more prominent than previously thought.


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Systemic Racism In and Out of Sports:


The Aspen Institute defines systemic racism or structural racism as “a system in which public policies, institutional practices, cultural representations, and other norms work in various, often reinforcing ways to perpetuate racial group inequity. It identifies dimensions of our history and culture that have allowed privileges associated with “whiteness” and disadvantages associated with “color” to endure and adapt over time. Structural racism is not something that a few people or institutions choose to practice. Instead, it has been a feature of the social, economic, and political systems in which we all exist.” While the phrase structural racism is used for historical racism in society, systemic racism is used for the modern age. Systemic racism has been ingrained into every part of society, from politics to film and television. Sports is no exception.

Although Hamilton, Rashford, Sancho, and Saka are British, systemic racism in American sports is arguably a more dire conversation. In 2016, Colin Kaepernick kneeled quietly during the national anthem in protest of police brutality during the third preseason 49ers game of the year. This action sparked immense controversy, so much so that the then-president Donald Trump called Kaepernick unpatriotic, a great insult in sports, one of the few aspects of society that people can agree on nowadays. Throughout the years, sports has remained neutral to politics until the turn of the 2010s. With the turn of the decade, the political climate became more divided, and so did the reactions of sports teams and athletes. However, Kaepernick introduced a new relationship between politics and sports and a new kind of patriotism, one of rightful criticism.

With the prominence of the Black Lives Matter movement reaching its peak in the pandemic summer of 2020, many athletes took a stand in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, much to the general dismay of the then administration, joining a new kind of patriotism. In 2021, incidents such as the attacks on Hamilton still occur everywhere. It is an unfortunate reality that plagues modern society.


What You Can Do to Help:


There is a lot one can do to spread awareness about systemic racism in sports. For one, zero-tolerance policies against racism should be a guarantee in all spaces. Supporting athletes like Kaepernick who take a stand is equally essential, as they are the voices that politicians need to hear. Lastly, make racial equity and inclusion a priority in your local communities. Most of us have recreational leagues for different sports in our area. When you see something, speak up. When you hear something, speak up. Critical patriotism is the only way our communities, countries, and world can change.


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