Entrepreneurial Appetite

Fit Citizens: A History of Black Women's Exercise with Dr. Ava Purkiss

• Ava Purkiss • Season 6 • Episode 7

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What if the history of Black women's fitness could be a lens through which we understand broader societal dynamics? On this special episode of the African Americans in Sport podcast, we have the privilege of hosting Dr. Ava Purkiss, associate professor of history and author of "Fit Citizens: A History of Black Women's Exercise." Dr. Purkiss shares her personal journey, driven by the early loss of her mother, which led her into researching the critical intersections of race, health, and fitness. Together, we explore how race, gender, and class have shaped the landscape for Black women in sports and fitness, and how these elements have been key to community health and empowerment over the years.

Our conversation takes a thought-provoking turn as we unravel the complexities surrounding body image and the weight loss industry, particularly from the unique vantage point of South Florida's vibrant culture. With insights from Dr. Purkiss's experiences at Curves gym and a diet clinic, we examine the societal pressures and cultural influences that frame perceptions of body image, especially within communities of color. The narrative weaves through personal and geographical influences, highlighting how these pressures manifest in places like Miami's beach-centric environment, and how they impact individuals on a personal level.

Lastly, our discussion delves into the evolution of fitness narratives and the powerful roles historical figures have played in redefining the health standards for Black communities. We shine a light on the contributions of icons like Mary Rose Reeves Allen and E.B. Henderson, while also critiquing contemporary health metrics such as BMI. The episode closes with an exploration of the layered identities of Black historical figures and their ongoing influence on today's health discourse, leaving our listeners with a richer understanding of how fitness and cultural standards continue to intersect and evolve.

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Langston Clark:

What's good everyone. Welcome to the African Americans in Sport podcast, a unique podcasting format where each episode is a lesson and each season is a semester where we detail the diverse experiences of African Americans in sport. Today's class features another 50 for 50 episode, part of a special series of bonus lessons meant to commemorate 50th anniversary of Title IX by highlighting Black women in sports. Our conversation today is with Dr Ava Purkiss, an associate professor of history at the University of Michigan and author of Fit Citizen History of Black Women's Exercise. What's up, everybody, welcome to another episode, another lesson of the African Americans in Sport pod class. It's me, dr Langston Clark, one of our two hosts and professors for the show, and I have a very special guest today, dr Ava Purkiss, who is a fellow Longhorn.

Langston Clark:

For those of you who aren't one of our college students or a college student who listens to this podcast but also listens to my other show, entrepreneurial Appetite, you will notice that there is an episode on that podcast where I have a conversation with Dr Dinah Berry and Dr Nicole Gross, and so they wrote this book called A Black Woman's History of the United States, and in that book there was a spot about Black women in athletics.

Langston Clark:

It was a really small part and I asked Dr Barrett in an interview. I was like, are there any other people who are writing books about sports or related to sports? And then she had mentioned Dr Purkiss, who was at Michigan and who recently published the book Fit Citizens, and it is not necessarily about sport, but I think, even though that this podcast, this pod class, deals with the intersections of race, sport and, at times, gender as well, we recognize that fitness and the body, black bodies way. Black bodies maintain their health, are used for our benefits, of our communities and maybe at times not for the benefit of our communities an important part of the overall conversation. And so I actually think it's good that we're having a conversation about the Black body and its ability to move and do things outside of the context and sport, because that's a very important thing for us to consider in our community. Dr Purkiss, before we begin, I just want to start with a question about how did you get interested in this content?

Ava Purkiss:

Well, thank you first of all, dr Clark, for inviting me to your pod class. I'm really excited to be in conversation with you. I love this question because I think folks assume that everyone does research on the thing that they do in their regular life. So I think the assumption is that I love exercise, or I was an athlete as a younger person, or I'm an athlete now, and that couldn't be further from the truth. I have some kind of coincidental happenstance, things that happened in my life that I think came together to spur my interest in this, and some of them are not rosy, but I think it's important to dig into some of our autobiography, our biography, to kind of see the pieces that lead us to write spend over a decade writing these books, right?

Ava Purkiss:

So the first thing that got me interested generally in the area of race and health and fitness was my mom. So unfortunately, my mom passed away at the age of 42 of cancer, and I was 15 at the time and my mother she worked at the hospital. She was a cardiovascular technician and when I was a little kid I thought that was like some big, fancy job. It's not like she was just like a very low paid hospital worker. And so after my mom died, I was just like, how could she die? She worked at the hospital, she was in the quote unquote medical field. I was like, how did she die?

Ava Purkiss:

And I started asking questions to myself, started asking questions to myself, to my older relatives, about the intersection of race, gender and class, right, like. I remember asking my sister, my older sister, if our mother was Hillary Clinton, would she still be alive? I remember asking her that question because what I was really trying to get at was was this an issue of access? Was it because we grew up working class and poor? And so from then, from 15, I really started to think about how health is not just this kind of natural thing but it's really determined by social determinants, right? So that's kind of where I started thinking about fitness health access.

Ava Purkiss:

Secondly, when I was in college and during the summer, I needed a summer job and a gym opened up very close to where I was living and I don't know what generation you're of, dr Clark, but there used to be a chain of gyms called Curves. They were gyms, yes, you remember gyms for, oh, it was gender exclusive, it was women only, yes. So this is like two thousands early two thousands, and I again not having I had. I never played sports, I never played outside, I never was into fitness or anything like that. I just needed a job and so.

Ava Purkiss:

I applied and they hired me. So that was my summer job for two summers and I became a quote unquote fitness instructor and I learned a lot about the fitness industry. So that was one not motivator, but one of the biographical elements that got me interested in asking questions about fitness and the body and gender. And last, when I graduated college, I didn't have a job. I was a psychology major and I remember I applied to a bunch of different jobs, you know, mostly in doing child counseling or working at counseling centers or things like that, and I wasn't coming up with anything.

Ava Purkiss:

And I saw this job for a weight loss specialist at a diet clinic in South Florida. I won't mention that, there's a reason why I won't mention the name of it, but I started working there and I saw the really ugly side of the weight loss industrial complex and I was actually fired from that job, which makes perfect sense. And so there I also started to think critically, observe critically what it meant to want to modify your body, but what it meant for particularly people of color, because I worked in a location that was situated in a kind of working class neighborhood, you know, black women, latinas, coming in desperate to lose weight for all kinds of reasons, and so I really started to think about it critically then. So those are some of my biographical elements that got me interested. And just again my biographical elements that got me interested, and just again thinking critically about these intersections that really cohere around the body.

Ava Purkiss:

So where are you from? I am originally from Kingston, jamaica. That's where I was born, and I moved to Miami when I was four, so hence the no accent, but that's my hometown. That's where I grew up until I went to college was south.

Langston Clark:

I'm really interested because you know miami is miami and you know how you know bodies can be in miami. Yes, I imagine the pressures for women in particular in the 2000s. That's when like big butts became a thing. I remember oh my goodness, was it Q-Tip? The Vibrant Thing video came out and it was the first since, like Uncle Luke, there was a gap. It was Uncle Luke, two live crew. It was very sexualized, very body butt shaking, all of that. And then it was a lull. It was gangster rap, it was I'm going to kill you type rap. And then Vibrant Thing came out and the game changed. I'm interested to see a little bit more about what was. What was the culture like for you growing up in that? And how did fitness get wrapped into to body image? Because fitness isn't necessarily just because you look like you have a fit body. That's not mean you have a fit body, aesthetically fit, but not healthily fit.

Ava Purkiss:

Those are very interesting cultural, musical touchstones that you mentioned. But I also I also feel like the emphasis on an hourglass figure having very voluptuous derriere right, particularly in our communities, never went away. It never went away. And you know, growing up in South Florida, where beach culture is very prevalent, it's hot all the time. You are in clothes that show off your body because you kind of have to be right. There's no winter, there's no coats, there's no scarves, there's no boots, there's nothing to cover up your body. There is a lot of surveillance about your body because your body has to be on display. There's a lot of surveillance about your body because your body has to be on display. There's a part of me that feels like that's the case everywhere.

Ava Purkiss:

I think people in North Dakota care about how their bodies looks. In the 90s and in the 2000s, right, there were curves and I'm sure in North Dakota, but I grew up in a, you know, body conscious area because you went to the beach all the time. Football is really big in South Florida, so sports is one of the ways that people are kind. In black communities we're not as weight conscious. That's true in not just African-American but African diasporic communities Haitian American, jamaican, american, bahamian, american, african, latinx people. There was a point where, you know, having too much body was not accepted.

Langston Clark:

My mom isn't gonna like this, but it's the truth. Truth. My grandmother was so mean to my mom growing up and my grandmother was so mean I will never forget. Listen, this was like a one-time instance. My entire life until my grandmother died was that had been about. That was like 30, like probably 35, 34 years my grandmother has been getting on my mom about her weight. Wow, not, I'm not talking about microaggressions, I'm talking about jabs Like Connie put on all of that weight. Connie is big old. But Connie, you know, the doctor told you when you were 16, you weren't supposed to put on any weight because you got one leg bigger than the other, all types of stuff.

Langston Clark:

And we talk about this in my family all the time. I don't know how your family is, but in my family we talk about each other in a very loving type of way, but we talk about each other. Yes, when I say we talk about, like we gossip about each other and we reflect on each other, both the good and the bad, and we laugh about it. So we talk about. You know your grandmother was like this. So if you do something that was kind of out of out of pocket or wrong, it's like oh, you sound like your grandmother, but you don't want to sound like your grandmother in that way. You know what I'm saying. So, right, so like my grandmother's, get on my mom all the time, and it was constant always, but my grandmother wasn't always a small woman. My grandmother didn't start shrinking until you, like, she started getting that old lady shrink until I I was about 15, like before my grandmother started getting old oh, she was big.

Ava Purkiss:

She stayed getting with my mom about being big.

Langston Clark:

So when you say that prevalent in my experience growing up, even in how like my mom was treated by her mom, you know.

Ava Purkiss:

Oh, so that's in here. That's in here, right, this is unknown or less known history of black fat shaming. Right, it is historical.

Langston Clark:

And I don't.

Ava Purkiss:

I don't know when your grandmother was born, but this is happening in the late 1890s, the turn of the century, 1910s, 19, oh, 1920s. Oh, my goodness, it blows up and it's funny. I remember seeing it might've been on Twitter this was a black person saying I wish that you gain weight. Wasn't a greeting in black American homes? Right, Like it's a greeting. It's like when you haven't seen someone from a long time.

Langston Clark:

The first thing I say you gain weight. It's a greeting. It's like when you haven't seen someone from a long time.

Ava Purkiss:

The first thing I say you came way, honey, right. So that is how I grew up, and again, not in any kind of unusual fat hating environment. This is just regular Girl. You get big.

Langston Clark:

Look at you, you get big right.

Ava Purkiss:

Just regular black families, regular black communities, regular black adolescent life. I feel like I've done that?

Langston Clark:

I'm sure I've done that before.

Ava Purkiss:

What you oh, you got big.

Langston Clark:

I'm sure I like. I've told them they like even my guy. Friends, dude, you don't put on some weight. Yeah, I'm not talking about muscle. You know what I'm saying.

Ava Purkiss:

Yeah and again. So. So to answer your question, the Miami piece is part of it because it's like one of the classic surgery capitals of the country, of the world. You know a lot of emphasis on having a beach body, things like that. So there's a lot more opportunity for exhibition and surveillance surveillance but in a way that's not necessarily unique, I think, in this country, in this history or to white folks, black folks.

Langston Clark:

We're all doing it.

Ava Purkiss:

We're all doing it for different reasons and with different histories and with a different tenor, but we're all doing it, yeah.

Langston Clark:

So tell me a little bit about you said you've been doing this work for over 10 years. So talk about the story behind the book.

Ava Purkiss:

Yes, okay, so I'll give a little bit more information or background around me. So I was a psychology major in college. I really loved the science of human behavior. But while I was in college I got really interested in black everything black history, black life, black literature. You know, there wasn't an AFAB major at my college so I kind of just assembled it, put it together as much as I could, but I was like I just wanted more. I just wanted more, more black education, whatever I could get my hands on. And so I ended up getting a master's in African and African diaspora studies at Florida International University in Miami and there that's where I really discovered my deep, deep love for African American history, black women's history in particular, and I really loved labor history. I loved labor history and I wrote this thesis on Black domestic workers in the late 19th, early 20th century and I was like I'm a labor historian, I love labor, this is what I wanted to do.

Ava Purkiss:

So when I applied for my PhD in history at University of Texas, I did it with the intention of continuing on this path. I wanted to do Black women's labor history and then my advisor gently advised me to kind of take a different path to trying to understand black women. I was really interested in the body. I was really interested in how the body was weakened or damaged or deteriorated from domestic work this thing that we don't think of as arduous and what black women did to try to recuperate from that. So I still had an interest in the body, but I was really interested in, like labor conditions and resistance Right, conditions and resistance Right. So we you know, my advisor and I went back and forth and I ended up landing on exercise is the thing that I wanted to look into and I was like, well, I'm not going to find anything, but let me try. So, like I start looking, I start trying to put old timey words for exercise, exertion or whatever.

Ava Purkiss:

But actually when once I started looking for exercise, some athletic terms, that I looked up, some archives that I looked in, I found so many, so many sources, so many. All of them are not in this book and so that's kind of my circuitous way of getting here. And it's funny because, like I said, I have that background's kind of my circuitous way of getting here. And it's funny because, like I said, I had all that background stuff kind of working its way already. Right, I had the history with my mom, I had working at Curbs, I had the diet industry work that I did. So that stuff is always all those experiences are always working right, whether we think they are or not. And I just dug into it and I became enamored with it. I love the project. I was so surprised by what I found and I decided to write a dissertation on it.

Langston Clark:

So that's that background of how I got there and I have friends who are, who are historians, and it that man, it seems like you know that history degree takes a long time. It does like it just seems like man. It seems like y'all spend 10 years in grad school and then you spend six years on 10 years. Yeah, it just seems like the the history is is is rough to me. I don't, I don't know what your journey was like, but when you say you spent 10 years writing the book, I believe that and I'm wondering, like just just for context, right, so you're I'm assuming that the book was also your dissertation. Yes, and so talk about, for, like, the students who are thinking about graduate school. Yeah, and I'm not trying to scare people away from history, I'm not.

Ava Purkiss:

Oh, my gosh, yeah it doesn't.

Langston Clark:

You don't have to take 10 years in grad school to be a historian. I'm exaggerating in some cases. I'm exaggerating. I didn't I have to take 10 years in grad school to be a historian. I'm exaggerating In some cases. I'm exaggerating.

Ava Purkiss:

I didn't take 10. I took six. I took six years.

Langston Clark:

Which is which is which that's within a range of typical? I think yes, and so you write your, your dissertation. Your dissertation becomes the book. Talk about the process of going from dissertation to book. Right, and how does? How was that different?

Ava Purkiss:

Yeah, sure. So the dissertation is really you assembling, as I'm speaking from the perspective of history, right? So one of the reasons it's it is hard and you can't do it in four years is that you have to assemble, you have to go to many archives and kind of assemble your own archive with which to work, and you have to write a dissertation to show that this is a viable project, that this is something that can become a book.

Ava Purkiss:

It is not a book. At the dissertation stage it's usually a really poorly written, you know, 300, 200 to 300 page document. But you're really just trying to experiment with an argument, support it with sources, do your due diligence with the scholarship, steeping it in the scholarship, showing that it's a new idea. It's kind of like proof of concept, completely different from when you have to actually turn it into a book. A book needs to be in a particular kind of package. A book needs to sell. A book needs to reach multiple audiences. Your dissertation is really for you and your four or five member committee.

Ava Purkiss:

A book is for the world. You have to write a document for the world. It can't have a bunch of jargon. It can't be, you know, weighed down by a bunch of historiographical, scholarly language and arguments. You have to put a lot of the stuff in the in the end notes. And you know, someone once told me actually my advisor told me that a dissertation, you show that you can tell a story. In a book, you tell the story. So books are about telling stories. Yes, you have an argument, yes, it's super scholarly, yes, you have a ton of sources to back it up, but you are telling a particular story. You are advancing an argument through a compelling narrative, which is rarely what you do in a dissertation.

Ava Purkiss:

Does that make sense.

Langston Clark:

Yeah, it makes sense, it takes a long time.

Ava Purkiss:

It takes a long time to transform it from this assemblage to a narrative that's right.

Langston Clark:

My dissertation was in ethnography and I'm going through that now. It's very, it's a very different oh my goodness Very different process. Yeah, for sure, yeah.

Ava Purkiss:

Yeah.

Langston Clark:

I did get to read some of the book, and so the title is very meaningful. Can you talk about the title of the book and what it means to be a fit citizens, what fit means, what citizens means and how those two concepts go together? Sure, and what might have been some alternative titles that you had in mind?

Ava Purkiss:

Fit citizens. The reason that I chose this title and I'll say too, sometimes you don't get the title that you want Again, the difference between a dissertation and a book, a strong, pithy title. That was an assertion. So the women in the book are asserting themselves as fit citizens and I'm asserting them as fit citizens. I'm not questioning it, I'm not unsure of it. I'm making an argument saying they're fit citizens, right. These people, these black women, who are constantly referred to and framed as unfit in every way physically unfit, morally unfit are fit. And this demographic, who are often denied full-fledged citizens, are citizens right. So put them together they are fit citizens. So I liked the title. It was short and snappy and assertive and strong and bold, and I wanted that in a title. But it took me a while to get there.

Ava Purkiss:

Some other titles I was thinking of was like exercising the black body or exercising citizenship or exercising citizenship. The reason that I decided to not go with those is one I just have a. I'm very cautious about how I use the term Black body. I think sometimes we use it too much and we use it when we really mean Black people. So I was like no, I don't like that, I don't want. I don't want Black body in my title. I don't even want it in my subtitle. I use that term very carefully and specifically in the book, but I didn't want it in my title. And exercising citizenship it's too, I don't know, it's a little bit too scholarly. I think there's too much unpacking with that term, I think, for a book title. So I went with Fit Citizens.

Langston Clark:

I agree with your statement about the overuse of Black body. As someone who's a physical education scholar, when I hear people say, especially education scholars, who dismiss us by the way, they do Really yeah, we're at the bottom.

Ava Purkiss:

You belong in like kinesiology or something.

Langston Clark:

No, no, no, we don't have. We're like dual marginalized. But I let's not go into that. We're a weird, a weird awkward place. Okay, we, I think we're at the bottom of the academy, to be honest with you. Yeah, we are.

Ava Purkiss:

Oh, I wish we could talk.

Langston Clark:

Okay, we'll do that another time yeah I'm so curious about that, okay yeah, we're definitely at the bottom of the academy. In some ways I'm a body scholar, so if I'm writing a term, I'm a scholar of the body not, not, not in the same way as an exercise physiologist.

Langston Clark:

You're literally looking at the body. I wrote a paper about comprehensive physical activity as as a means of, as a means of improving the health of Black folks in their school age here, so K through 12. Sure, but it was the contradiction of the Black body. So, on the one hand, like you're viewed as a body, as an athlete, not viewed as just a body, right, but on the other hand, it's like, well, our health outcomes suggest that we maybe don't always have the ideal body, right. It was like a juxtaposition of those two things, yeah, and so there is a clear difference between when we're talking about body, it depersonalizes it, yeah, or dehumanizes it in a way.

Langston Clark:

Yeah, I agree with your statement about being very careful about saying black bodies and, just to the point about being at the bottom of the academy, physical education birthed all sports studies, okay. So kinesiology, exercise science, I would even say sports history all of that stuff comes from us. So eb henderson, who was at um, at howard university he actually went to uh delhi sergeants classes yes, yes at Harvard and, interestingly, his mentor was a black woman.

Langston Clark:

I forgot her name she was Mary Rose Reeves Allen. Yeah, that's her. She's in here too, yes, so so even when I read that I was like, okay, so Mary Rose Reeves Allen went to Dudley Sargent's school before EB Henderson.

Ava Purkiss:

Yeah, yeah, but also before he segregated it, because he ended up doing that and I didn't know that.

Langston Clark:

I didn't know that he, that he segregated it afterwards was going to be an interesting conversation we have in our circles, because Dudley Sargent is, like I know, iconic for us.

Ava Purkiss:

Not in this book, he's not.

Langston Clark:

So she she was. She was an interesting person to highlight in another paper I did, and EB Henderson gets a lot of credit for being the founder of black basketball, for being the founder of black sports history, and what was interesting in some of the research I did was that his mentor was actually Mary Rose Reeves Allen, who she put him on in a lot of ways. He followed her as department chair at Howard for the program in physical education and there are some interesting connections between the work that you talk about here and things that I looked at before. I'm really interested in this concept of fitness right, because you can give us a history of the concept of fit, and so could you talk a little bit more about how fit, the word fit, the term fit, the concept fit has evolved because it always mean what we think it means right now.

Ava Purkiss:

Yeah, so in the 19th century fitness just really meant character. You know it had a lot of moral meaning. It meant adequate or sufficient or good character. It wasn't until after World War I that the term started to take on physical characteristics, like to mean physically fit, right. So you had this pre-World War I context where fit or fitness was really about less tangible qualities, internal qualities. And then, after this major world event where people's bodies depended on, or the success of this war depended on, people's physical characteristics, it started to take on this physical meaning and I think what ended up happening in our kind of recent history contemporary moment is that we think fitness is only physical now, like it's only about the body, and people forget.

Ava Purkiss:

After this World War I period, the moral meaning of fitness and the physical meaning of fitness started to coalesce and so fitness is also moral and physical. So, you know, black women are really important in my perspective to that story because they're presumed to have neither. They don't have moral fitness, right, they're debased people. They are, you know, over overly sexed. Right, they are of low character. And they're also they are plagued by tuberculosis, syphilis, all of these diseases. They're also physically unfit, all of these diseases. They're also physically unfit, and so I was like well, I wonder how the history of purposeful exercise works within that idea and that context. So I hope that answers your question. But this idea of fitness, it really starts to change, like in the 1920s.

Langston Clark:

I thought it was interesting because we conflate fitness with character. When we look at somebody and we and we see that they're, they're out of shape or they look out of shape, it's like, oh, you're lazy, you know what I mean? Oh, you don't take responsibility for your body. That's where the moralizing of people being out of shape or perceived as out of shape or unfit comes from, and there's a whole, there's a whole history behind that, and it was what I thought was interesting. It was something that really played out in the parts of the book that I read were was black classism and how that was displayed, and so I forget the guy's name. We're going to get into some of the major figures, but it was a black doctor. Yeah, doctor was, on the one hand, he was doing good work in black communities, but man he was, was, he was killing us in a new way. And so I feel bad because I'm saying booker t, washington's wife, but she has her own identity olivia davidson yes so I don't want to just make her booker t washington's wife like.

Langston Clark:

She had a whole appreciation for fitness and health and things like that. That really was in a lot of ways, a precursor to things that happen later. So let's talk about man, the black elite play an interesting role, or the who we perceive to be black elite play an interesting role in how fitness comes about in our communities, in our culture yeah.

Ava Purkiss:

So that is a great question. The first thing I want to say is class generally is very complicated. Black class is extremely complicated, right? Because economically marginalized groups find different ways to assert their class status outside of, like money or profession. When we say Black middle class in a historical way, we're not talking about people who are super financially stable and have amazing jobs. I'll give you an example.

Ava Purkiss:

So Alice Dunbar Nelson is someone who's in the book. She's a poet, she's an activist, she's a writer, she teaches physical education. By the way, at one point she was married at one point to Paul Lawrence Dunbar, who was, like the most famous African-American at the time. He was a poet, you know, light skinned, educated, has some, you know, a little bit of snobbery to her.

Ava Purkiss:

We would call her middle class, yeah, but sometimes she couldn't afford to pay her rent. Sometimes she couldn't afford, you know, she struggled to have the basic things that she needed in life. Sometimes she did not have income coming in. Sometimes she was really looking for work, right. So I use her as an example to say, although we would consider her middle-class historically, you know, and today she still experiences precarity. So when I say middle class, I'm kind of talking about both people who are have some semblance of financial stability in education, but also people who imagine themselves as being a part of the middle class, who aspire to be right part of that class. So that's who I'm talking about in the book when I say Black middle class, it's not just doctors and lawyers, it's.

Ava Purkiss:

It also might be someone who works in an office, but sometimes it's unemployed, A stenographer who can't find work, sometimes that those who are solidly middle-class black elite and or aspiring are fostering much more or displaying much more of this kind of fat hostility and judgment of the body. I do. I have feelings about that. We can talk about that later or now if you want. I have feelings about that. You brought up. I feel like I know who you're talking about. It might've been chapter one or two.

Langston Clark:

It was early, dr Elliot Rawlings, was it him?

Ava Purkiss:

I think it was Rawlings. It was Rawlings, so I'm so glad you picked up on that. So what I was trying to do there in that analysis of him where I'm saying on one hand, he is just really dogging Black people right, he's a Black doctor. He's saying you all are no good, all you want to do is have fun, all you care about is hilarity. You don't care about your health, you don't care about education, you don't care about racial uplift, and at the same time, this man is very invested in saving black lives, yeah, very, very invested in stemming black premature death.

Ava Purkiss:

Simpson same person. That is really illustrative of how I write the book and how I see this history. I'm very ambivalent about it. So sometimes, dr Clark, the same people who are lambasting black working class folks stop loafing, get off of your stoops, invest in your health who are engaging in a project of body hierarchization right, judging people's physicality, right, judging people's physicality Same people sometimes are building playgrounds, opening up community centers, building clinics, democratizing exercise, trying to make it more accessible, overly celebratory of the, the kind of judgment and the shaming piece and also dismissive of that really critical community work, because these people were actually really interested in black life black lives, I think that's frustration with lack of results.

Langston Clark:

I think that's the manifestation of, let's say, you, you got a cause. You working for the cause really hard, you go hard and I'm going hard for this. I believe in this. How come y'all don't believe in it? Or the way that you believe in it isn't how other people believe in it, and so their actions don't match the way that you believe they should believe in it. And so that's where, oh, you're doing all this stuff. Like I built the playground, how come y'all don't take y'all kids there? Y'all don't care about this. You keep building playgrounds, they don't they not showing up? And so I don't have a concise or pithy term for that. That's. That's something that we do Not all of us, of course, but part of the exhaustion of the work and taking the frustration of the work not working the way you want it to out on somebody. You know what I mean.

Ava Purkiss:

And I think it also allows, at least in a historical sense, Black people to be complex. Yeah, and I think it's okay to write about and think about Black historical figures and actors as being really complicated, as you know, not necessarily two-faced, but really complex, layered individuals who can, in the same body, do seemingly contradictory things. Everybody wasn't a freedom fighter every day of their lives and everybody also wasn't E.

Langston Clark:

Franklin Frazier all the time.

Ava Purkiss:

Yeah, I think in writing this book I gave myself grace to feel ambivalent about a lot of the advice given, the sentiment behind the health advice given and some of the work these health reformers did. I think it's okay to be ambivalent about it. It's okay to not be overly celebratory and to not be overly critical. I think, it's okay to kind of live in between, and that's where I am.

Langston Clark:

That's good Talk about some of the prominent women that you highlight in the book and things that they know.

Ava Purkiss:

I'm going to answer that in a roundabout way, but it's really I'm going to answer the question. Your question is also kind of about writing style, so the way that I write I don't meditate for a long time, you'll see this.

Ava Purkiss:

Dr Clark, I don't meditate for a long time on singular figures, so I don not advocating that. I actually think I probably should meditate more on singular figures and I am also really interested in, like regular people whose names we don't know. So some recognizable names that show up in the book are like Ida B Wells is in there for a page or two, mary McLeod Bethune is in there for a couple pages, wb Du Bois appears a few times. Booker T Washington is in there. Michelle Obama makes an appearance at the end, right, those are kind of the recognizable names and you know they kind of. You know punctuate the book. But there are women in there whose names we just don't know that I think are important. So you mentioned Olivia Davidson. I love her, I love her. So I a lot of work to get that place established.

Ava Purkiss:

I know that we all attributed to Booker T Washington, but that woman worked her butt off to get Tuskegee established. She helped with the curriculum, she helped with the fundraising. She was also Booker T Washington's second wife Not her most illustrious achievement, but I just want to put her in context and she wrote this beautiful and brilliant treatise on Black women and girls' bodies and health in the 1880s, and this is before the physical culture movement. This is before the you know, mass exercise movement, all of this and she's really thinking critically about black female bodies as already glorious already, precious already, you know, wonderful, beautiful temples that are ruined by overwork, exhaustion. Patent medicines that we don't really need. She might be my favorite person in the book patent medicines that we don't really need.

Langston Clark:

She might be my favorite person in the book you're reminding, you're triggering my memory I was. I remember reading her and she was saying because when you're talking about all these medicines and like she was like anti-pills almost, yes, he was talking about, look, just eat healthy. Yes, yeah, yeah, you know what I mean. Yeah, and that like that's like keeping us out of the whole. There's a whole medical industry and supplement industry around, like all of these things you can take. That was just the end. You'll eat good food, you know she's like you don't need it.

Ava Purkiss:

I mean, she's also anti drug. She's like don't do drugs either. But yeah, and I think what she was trying to say is our bodies are already blessed and beautiful and wonderful. We just have to keep them that way. We're already coming into this world, there's already a God given beauty and value to our bodies, regardless, regardless of what anyone says. We just have to keep them that way. And I, you know, and I just I think, I think 1887, she makes that speech in front of a group of Black teachers, 1887. So she's someone that sticks out for me as a kind of free thinker, progenitor of what I'm calling Black physical culture.

Ava Purkiss:

Physical culture there's a woman named Mary P Evans. There's a woman named Mary P Evans. She's the editor of a Black woman's newspaper and she writes several articles just explicitly about exercise for Black women in the 1890s. 1890s. Dr Clark, 1890s. Brilliant Frida the Knight is also someone who's really interesting. She's all the way in Chapter 5. She's the first food editor for Ebony. She writes this cookbook, this black cookbook, and in it she's giving weight loss advice. In the black cookbook. This makes absolutely no sense on its face, right? But there are all these different figures that are invested in exercise, health, weight loss, fitness, dieting from the 1880s all the way through the 1950s and 60s.

Ava Purkiss:

Those are some of the figures that stick out for me, but again there's just a lot of different figures kind of swirling around in the book.

Langston Clark:

So about the I don't want to say this the tension between, let's say, lizzo right, lizzo, lizzo was a controversial figure. I don't want to misquote her or anything like that, but there's, I think there's an underlying culture that saying that, regardless of what your body looks like, your body is an ideal body or a healthy body. But the data, even if so, one I just want to I have to make this statement. I want to be clear that when we talk about BMI and comparisons between, like a white standard of of what bodies should look like and be in terms of body mass and all that stuff, it's problematic.

Ava Purkiss:

BMI as a metric is very complex.

Langston Clark:

Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.

Langston Clark:

It's a terrible unscientific if you ask me, it's lazy science, right, yeah, it's, trying to find an easy way to do something is very complicated. So my mentor, my mentor, while I was on tenure track, it was like I walked in his office one day. It's like, oh, we're just talking about this study we're doing, and he asked if I want to help out. I forgot about, didn't have time. He was telling me he was breaking down BMI. He was he's, he's Chinese. So he was like, listen, we did this study on BM. He was like there's a study on BMI and it was the white kid had a BMI. That was whatever number it was. The Asian kid had the same BMI. The white kid was slim as a rail, the Asian kid was chubby, and so he was saying that the reason why it was when he first started doing a BMI studies on adolescent males, it was all on white, white kids.

Langston Clark:

You know what I'm saying? Standards, all messed up. Nevertheless, we know there's food that's bad for us. There is a point where you're going to have weight issues and your, your body type is not meant to carry a certain amount of weight. So how, how then do we negotiate the appreciation for your body already being beautiful, but then not go down a slippery slope of whatever my body is is good. When that, or whatever I put into my body, whatever I do to my body and that could be overexertion with exercise because you can't exercise too much how do you balance that out or even talk about it in a way where people will receive it?

Ava Purkiss:

That's a great question. It's a great question, I think I oh my gosh, I have so many responses. So there is a branch of thinking in feminist circles right that we should just kind of do away with the total concept of health, we should adopt body neutrality and we should just jettison this whole idea of health. Because the idea of health is so patriarchal, white, anti-black Right, Just built on colonialism, slavery, things like this, that it can't be rescued, it can't be done in a way that serves the most marginalized right, that we should just get rid of it. Let's just get rid of the idea of health and let's just practice body neutrality. And I do find those arguments provocative and appealing. But one of the reasons why it's hard for me to fully adopt is that I want, you know, just thinking about this book, thinking about my mother who really did aspire to health.

Ava Purkiss:

I mean, she tried to exercise, she tried to diet, she did all of that throughout her life and she's up dying at 42. I think I want to keep health as an aspiration for people who want it. I don't want it to, I want. I want the memory of my mother working to, even though it wasn't available to her to aspire toward, is something I want her to have Right. And so I think the way I would respond to that question is why can't we just allow people to aspire toward their health goals and body goals as they deem fit?

Ava Purkiss:

Why can't we adopt a kind of deeply radical politics of personhood my body, my choice, right which is very reminiscent of another debate happening in this country? Why can't we do that? And why can't we focus on providing all of the resources someone needs to achieve, you know kind of traditional notions of health and let them decide if they want to take advantage of it? Right, gym memberships why can't they be free? Why can't we have lights on street, lights on every street? Why is Whole Foods only for rich people?

Ava Purkiss:

Once we take all those barriers away, then maybe we can participate in this kind of. Should Lizzo do this or should she? Once we allow people to have those resources and then make decisions about what they want for their bodies, what they want to put in them, how they want to modify their own bodies, I think that's we should think about that bodily autonomy first, before, before we start having discussions about what's healthy, what isn't. What should you do, what shouldn't you do, what should your body look like? What's healthy or not? Bodily autonomy and what advice do you have for college students?

Langston Clark:

Black college students, Black student-athletes who are on their journey through figuring out what they want to do with their next steps, navigating, you know, all of that stuff that college students have to think about.

Ava Purkiss:

If I were to write another chapter it would be about exercise and the civil rights movement. So my book stops around like 1955, 1960. I mean, I have a little little tiny piece about the civil rights movement in the epilogue and I would want to write about how all those marches and even sit-ins, which you think are not very physical but actually are all those demonstrations, required a certain kind of fitness and physicality and exercise, and that they're not just exercising, they're not just exercises in citizenship, they're exercising for citizenship. I kind of play around with that.

Ava Purkiss:

I know, yeah, I know, I know so you better say that for your next podcast.

Langston Clark:

I know that's going to be the highlight on the NPR. You know how they do they mix parts of the interview. Yeah, yeah, that was it. That was yeah.

Ava Purkiss:

Yeah, that's what I would, would have written and in terms of advice. So the advice I have is going to sound really corny, but I promise you it's good advice. Sound really corny, but I promise you.

Ava Purkiss:

It's good advice. The advice I have is to do the reading. Okay, let me tell you what I mean by that. It's not just do the reading, because as educators we like when you do the reading, reading, the act of reading, it compounds. So when you read on a Monday and then you read again on a Wednesday, you just compound. You're not just like interest compounds, knowledge compounds. So every time you miss an opportunity to do the reading, you miss an opportunity to compound your own knowledge and skill set.

Ava Purkiss:

And the thing about doing reading I mean like traditional reading is that reading is not just about literacy in a traditional sense. Literacy in the traditional sense, like reading also teaches you how to read life, images, film, people. You know the documents that you're going to have to examine to see if you know what your tax situation is going to be. Reading certain social circumstances that have to do with romance, your future, if someone's trying to take advantage of you. Reading a kind of civic. You know certain civic scenes that you know we need to kind of figure out who we're going to vote for, who is going to right. Reading is about survival, and so doing the reading every time is just compounding interest in the knowledge that you have accumulated and invested in. Yeah, that's my advice.

Langston Clark:

Dr Ava Purkiss, I appreciate you coming and sharing your knowledge with us, being a guest speaker on this episode of the African-Americans in Sport pod class. Are you on Twitter? I am?

Ava Purkiss:

on Twitter.

Langston Clark:

What's your Twitter? It's P-U-R-K-I-S-S-s-s-a all right, dr fergus, thank you. Thank you for joining today's class. If you learned from and like what you heard, please leave a review, give the class five stars or donate to our patreon. A link can be found in the show notes.