Racial stereotyping is a big problem in sport (ever heard the myths that white men can’t jump? Or black people don’t swim?).
Black athletes are often assumed to have greater natural speed and strength than their white counterparts, and while this may seem like a positive, this myth of ‘natural talent’ can be weaponised against black athletes and used to undermine and devalue their hard work and training ethic.
For Vietnamese bodybuilder, Amazin LeThi, racism and stereotyping had a huge impact on her life.
Amazin was bullied mercilessly for being the only Asian person involved in sport growing up.
She says discrimination and racial stereotypes are preventing Asian women like her from taking part in physical activity – and it is having a damaging effect on their health.
The bodybuilder and author was born in Vietnam. She was adopted from an orphanage as a baby and brought to Australia to live with her new family for the first few years of her life, before later moving to the UK.
She says growing up in Australia was an incredibly hostile environment as an ethnic minority, and she experienced bullying from kids at school, people in the community and even teachers.
‘I must have been seven years old,’ Amazin tells Metro.co.uk. ‘One teacher made me stand up in front of the whole class – I was the only Asian child in the class – and they used me to illustrate an example of what failure looks like. All the kids just laughed.
‘The teacher then threw the blackboard eraser and I remember it hitting me on the forehead. As a child, you pick up things very quickly about how your difference is perceived.
‘I remember thinking in that moment – I will never be humiliated like that ever again, and I never want anyone else to experience that humiliation.’
This is when Amazin found sport. Throwing herself into physical activity provided an outlet from the pain she felt at being singled-out and persecuted. But the team environment wasn’t exactly welcoming.
‘I needed to find something with a sense of community. I found that in team sports initially,’ Amazin explains. ‘I loved playing all kinds of team sports. But I quickly noticed that I was one of the only Asian kids on any of these teams.
‘A lot of people, when they do sports, they feel safe in a team. A team provides unity and support. But I felt very unsafe in a team sport environment. I was the only Asian kid on my teams, and that racism and hostility that I had felt all through my life, very much spilled over into the world of sport.’
Amazin fell victim to the damaging stereotypes about Asian people in sports. It was assumed that she wouldn’t fit in in athletic environments, that she wouldn’t be any good at sports, that she would never achieve anything.
‘We are seen as very nerdy, very geeky, very studious,’ says Amazin. ‘So, we can’t be good at sports. Our physique is different, we’re smaller – so we’re only good for the more traditionally “feminine” sports – we can’t be fast, we can’t be strong.
‘I loved athletics, but I was bullied by my teammates. I loved sprinting, but I was pulled aside by my coach and told that I was slowing the team down, that Asian people aren’t very good at fast sports, and he told me to try out for long-distance running instead because that will suit my physique.’
For Amazin, the use of archaic racial stereotypes about east Asians pushed her out of an environment that she loved and made her feel completely unwelcome.
With team sports off the table, Amazin returned to her first love: weight training. She first began training with weights when she was just six years old and attended gyms from the age of eight.
It wasn’t the ideal environment for a little girl – it was almost entirely dominated by adult men – but Amazin loved lifting weights and felt at home there, despite the unpleasant comments and hostility she had to deal with.
‘Learning to navigate these white, male-dominated spaces at such a young age really gave me an edge, and I still carry so much of that with me today,’ explains Amazin.
‘I wanted to compete at a high level so I could continue to break down stereotypes about Asian women and what we can achieve. There were no Asian women bodybuilding at the time, and I wanted to show that it can be done, that we can do more than what your stereotypes expect of us.’
Amazin became the first internationally published Vietnamese health and fitness author, and she is so happy to be able to show that east Asian women do belong in these spaces, and convey just how important fitness and sport is for everybody or every ethnicity.
‘People of colour – we hold a lot of trauma inside of us,’ says Amazin. ‘Particularly Asian people, because it is not part of our culture to be overly vocal about how we’re feeling.
‘For the most part, people from my community like to act as though mental health doesn’t exist, like mental illness is something shameful, something that signifies a failure. So it’s no surprise to me that Asian youth have one of the highest levels of contemplation of suicide, and the lowest rates of seeking help. I know, because I’ve been there.’
As a young adult, Amazin ended up homeless for a number of years and she says the racial discrimination and bullying she had experienced lead to a deep depression and suicidal thoughts.
‘I literally slept for two days straight,’ she remembers. ‘I woke up the third day and cried for another 24 hours. I just remember being curled up in the foetal position and thinking, where has my life taken me?
‘I knew at that moment that I could either sink further, or I could pull myself out of it. It was the hardest thing I have ever done, but I managed it.’
Amazin says sport got her through it. Immersing herself in bodybuilding gave her something to focus on, something to work towards. She says it made her realise just how useful sport can be in helping people get through hardship, which is why she thinks it’s a vital tool for people of colour.
‘Sport can help people of colour to survive the things that they go through on a daily basis,’ she tells us.
‘Sport is not just about being competitive, it’s about learning those unique skills that help us to thrive in difficult situations. Goal-setting, learning to push past pain, resilience in the face of defeat and learning to pick yourself up when you fall back down.
‘These are all things you learn from sport, and they are all things you need to use as people of colour in the face of racial hostility.’
It wasn’t easy for Amazin to pull herself back. She had a total nervous breakdown and it took her many years to get over it, but now she’s at a point where she is able to share her story – and she knows how important that is.
‘Sometimes it feels as though we have only moved inches. The face of UK sport is still predominantly white,’ she adds. ‘The face of the UK is changing, but sport isn’t reflecting that. Where are the British Asian athletes in Team GB?’
The Asian community in the UK has the lowest participation rate in sport and the highest dropout rate when they do participate. Amazin thinks this comes down to a failure in the culture of sport and a perpetuation of racist and discouraging stereotypes.
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