Racism is built into KY horse racing’s history. Is industry ready to address injustice?
If you want to see just how quickly U.S. society appears to be changing, check out the speed with which the horse racing industry condemned the atrocious racist remarks of horseman Tom VanMeter on social media.
Fasig-Tipton, Keeneland, the Daily Racing News, the National Thoroughbred Racing Association, all quickly jumped to social media to distance themselves. On Wednesday, Keeneland announced plans to ban VanMeter from the track and sales pavilion. The haste surprised insiders like Evan Hammonds, the executive editor of the Blood Horse Magazine.
“The industry is not known for being groundbreaking in the situation going on these days, but it was pretty amazing how fast this came together,” Hammonds noted.
Nowadays, of course, we protect the brand above all else, and society in general has agreed that brand components — even if they foaled American Pharoah — should not be seen spouting racist epithets. But is it such a surprise that racism would show up on the social media pages of an industry that in Kentucky was created on the backs of the enslaved? An industry that hitched its wagon to a series of talented Black jockeys, only to get rid of them in post-Civil War backlash? An industry that today still survives on a cheap labor force that has merely gone from Black to Latino workers?
In Maryjean Wall’s excellent book, “How Kentucky Became Southern,” she details the historical construct of attracting new players to a devastated industry after the Civil War, one based on moonlight and magnolias.
“The neo-Southern image was a cleverly crafted picture, situating the Bluegrass within an Eden of smoothly operating plantations where the horses ran fast, the living seemed ideal, and all African-Americans occupied servile positions of offering juleps to the colonels as the white folk relaxed in the shade of columned mansions,” Wall wrote. “This picture grew in direct contrast to the highly visible sphere that blacks had occupied as star athletes of the sport.”
When Wall arrived in Kentucky in the 1960s to go to UK and cover racing for the Herald-Leader, the plantation image was still prominent. “That’s changed,” she said. “The plantation is out but the industry is still based on cheap labor.”
Of course, if the top levels of a sport are limited to the top .01 richest Americans, it’s hard to see how much diversity can be attained, even in the fan base. A few months ago, the sport horse world reacted with both support and disdain to an article in the Chronicle of the Horse by a very wealthy 17-year-old, who bemoaned the lack of support for Black Lives Matter protests. Bless her heart, as we say, but the Venn diagram of people who spend millions of dollars to jump over fences and those marching for weeks straight to protest police brutality is a pretty slender sliver.
So what will be interesting to see is if the racing industry does indeed try to make substantive changes. As Joe Nevills, bloodstock editor for the Paulick Report noted, the industry has a short memory. “If a VanMeter horse comes up and it’s a star, do you think no one will buy it? It’s hard to put on buyers: Do you deny business to someone who did this reprehensible thing or do you try to win?”
And if you’re trying to win, how much do you care about changes that lead to a more just society? Starting tomorrow, the trainers that employ track backside workers could pay them better wages and provide healthcare to them all, then pass those costs onto the billionaires they work for. But that would take a lot of money and hard work.
Horseracing has become more sensitive to society’s whims and foibles, such as a dislike of watching horses die on the track. The industry definitely passed the test of its first post-George Floyd-Breonna Taylor crisis, but like all of U.S. society, it’s a long way from getting an A.
This story was originally published July 8, 2020 at 1:43 PM.
