Student submission – Current Event VCU FA24

The event I want to talk about this week did happen last month. Still, I only recently saw a tweet talking about the situation, and upon looking at tweets further, I realized a large portion of them were still very hostile and dismissive of Jordan Chiles despite it being nearly a month after the issuance of her bronze medal. One of the recurring themes I saw in the tweets this month was that Chiles made it about skin color and that she should “stfu” about her skin color. This stuck out to me because I’ve seen black people get accused of “making things about race” a lot online. The problem with this accusation is that there is a type of racism that isn’t overt in your face, things like calling someone the n-word or something similar in your face. It’s dismissive, and at times malicious, to not listen when black fems or nonbinary (and masks) claim misogynoir. Even if the person harming does not realize it, there can be times when misogynoiristic actions are being done without being obvious. Because of that, when these people are called out, the blame for “making things about race” falls on the minorities’ shoulders. I also briefly wanted to discuss Chiles’s comment about “the person she is” being taken for her with this controversy. I think Chiles is right. The (negative) tweets about this situation all make assumptions about Chiles that they do not know her enough to make. They accuse her of being entitled because she brought up racial discrimination. They compare her to Simone Biles when the only commonality between them is that they are people of color in Olympic-level gymnastics. Chiles, in the eyes of these people, has been boiled to this controversy.