Dr. Shanice Jones Cameron
Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her research focuses on Black women’s health, well-being, and sport discourses that are distributed through social and digital media.
Email: Scamero5@charlotte.edu
Website: https://shanicejonescameron.com
Dr. Daniel A. Grano
Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. His research focuses on intersections between sport and politics, with particular emphases on race, health, religion, and public memory.
Email: dgrano@charlotte.edu
In her 1988 book, A Burst of Light, Black feminist writer and activist Audre Lorde famously wrote, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation and that is an act of political warfare.” These words remain especially relevant for Black women and offer a lens for parsing public discourses surrounding Olympic gold medalist Simone Biles’s withdrawal from the 2020 Olympics due to mental health concerns and her subsequent “redemption” in 2024. Sport communication research indicates that axes of oppression, including race and gender, shape public mental health disclosures and stigma. Thus, it follows that Biles’s disclosure would be criticized and politicized.
Sport and news media, and members of the U.S. women’s gymnastics team, claimed victory in a “redemption tour” after they won gold in the team final at the Paris Olympics. The women took silver at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics after Simone Biles withdrew from the team final for mental health reasons. Her withdrawal was mostly celebrated as a powerful moment for destigmatizing mental illness. Yet commentators emphasized that without one of the greatest gymnasts of all time, the U.S. team had lost its chance to win gold.
If redemption was related to competitive glory alone, then it would be easy to resolve the contradiction behind claiming Biles’s mental health struggles as both heroic and costly: the act of supposed sin or error that required redemption would be less about Biles individually, and more about the team’s limitations. But athletic redemption is rarely a team sport, and coverage centered around Biles’s immense talent as both cause and source of hope for Team USA’s redemptive mission.
Fans, media commentators, and sport culture scholars have treated famous athletes’ mental health disclosures as heroic acts that destigmatize mental illness and encourage help-seeking behaviors. Yet athletes’ disclosures are conditioned by race and gender privilege. Black male players’ mental health advocacy has received less positive coverage than the advocacy of their white peers, and it has been conditioned by norms for “quiet” and “reserved” decorum.
Black women athletes’ disclosures are additionally and uniquely complicated by the “interplay” between their “racial and gendered identities.” This is especially due to assumptions about Black women’s anger and volatility, stigmatizations of weakness, and the “strong Black woman” ideal.
These problems of racialized and gendered diagnosis are reflected in media coverage of Black women athletes’ mental health. Throughout her career, journalists have emphasized Biles’s emotional volatility, “lack of mental fortitude,” and anger – focusing on her struggles to control these presumably “natural” challenges of Black, feminine athleticism during competition. While coverage of her mental health disclosure at the Tokyo Games was largely positive, questions about her mental toughness lingered.
The story of Biles’s redemptive return to Olympic competition centered around her struggles to overcome the mental health challenges that led to her withdrawal, and those struggles were understood as inherent to her Blackness and femininity. It is therefore impossible to disentangle the possibilities of Biles’s (and by extension the American team’s) redemption from the drama and uncertainty of Black, feminine emotional control.
Biles’s Olympic return followed the familiar script of a Black athlete who needed to be publicly forgiven for a previous offense. Her 2024 interview with Alex Cooper, host of the Call Her Daddy podcast, can be read as a necessary stop on Biles’s “redemption tour.” Biles seemingly internalized the notion that she did something “wrong” when she withdrew for her mental health and safety. In the interview, Biles explained that during the Toyko Olympics she struggled with the “twisties” – a condition where she dangerously lost control over her body. Her withdrawal and attempt to regain some control over her circumstances resulted in criticism aimed at undermining her autonomy, mental fortitude, and self-preservation.
Framing Biles’s withdrawal within a redemption arc pivots on the assumption that women, especially Black women, should reject self-preservation to perform for the dominant society. The underlying sentiment is that white America is entitled to Black women’s labor—even at their expense. If Biles fails to perform, she is doubly burdened with the responsibility to atone for being a person who requires care and rest. For Black women, self-preservation is an act of political warfare against the institutions that dehumanize and dominate them.
Sports journalists and sport culture scholars have rightfully criticized redemption stories as facile responses to crisis in sport that disproportionately privilege white, male athletes and that reduce complex problems (e.g. sexual violence, racial injustice) down to questions of sin and forgiveness. Instead of redemption stories, it would be appropriate for sport media to highlight resilience narratives. Resilience shifts the focus from a past “sin” that needs to be corrected to an athlete’s agency and self-efficacy. Resilience holds space for the reality that everyone encounters hardships without blaming athletes for their response to personal challenges that are outside of their control.
