When I was six years old, my grandmother put me in a winter get-up, snowpants and all, took me to an ice rink and placed me in skating classes. At that age, I was too young to realize everyone around me in those classes was white. As I learned more skills, I decided to join the skating rink’s synchronized skating team, which consisted of roughly 15 skaters. I stayed on this team for about six years until COVID-19 hit, when I switched to a different skating team for a year. When I swapped back to my original team, I had adapted a completely new mindset on how different it is to be a Black figure skater, especially on a team.
Figure skating was originally a sport that only white people played. The exception was one person in the 1930s, Debi Thomas. She started to figure skate, even with the segregation laws in place. Once the laws were lifted, she was able to compete in competitions, making it all the way to the Olympics. Even after this success, the sport has remained a primarily white-dominated sport. In my experiences, being the only Black person on an all-white team proved to be challenging. The way I had to wear my hair, the shade of lipstick I had to use and the color of tights I had to wear. These differences did not look as good on me as they did on the other girls on my team; however, there were also many positives to this as well.
At the rink I skated my whole life, we would perform ice shows twice a year, which the public was invited to. There were many times when I had a Black girl and her mother come up to me to say I did a good job. They would then ask if the rink taught figure skating. Since my coaches knew me so well, they allowed me to help teach the kids learning basic moves. When I went in after a show, it always made me happy to see that same little girl in a class trying to learn.
Black History Month always reminds me that I was fortunate enough to have opportunities like this and that it’s vital to bring more diversity to figure skating. People of color can see that they belong not just on the ice, but everywhere. It reminds me that it’s important to remember this history of Black figure skaters, who paved the way for the start of bringing more diversity into the sport, such as Thomas and Mabel Fairbanks, the first Black woman inducted into the US Figure Skating Hall of Fame and Starr Andrews, the first woman to win a medal after 35 years.