I spent my youth feeling weak, stocky, and ungainly. I struggled with committing to fitness regimes — none seemed to work with my physique and strength goals. In my twenties, I discovered powerlifting-style training. By combing through training websites, I found a method that added pounds to my lifts in every workout. I became strong. By the time I was 35, people finally said I had muscle and a physique worthy of emulation.
I've always enjoyed watching powerlifters push the limits of human strength, but I've also noticed its unbearable Whiteness. When I researched Black powerlifters and strength athletes, I found Mark Henry's career before powerlifting and a scattered few others.
When Henry entered the WWE in the 1990s, he used two monikers. The first was Sexual Chocolate. The wrestler's name appeared across a Hershey bar in his intro video while a Barry White imitation of smooth R&B played in the background. He would hulk down into the ring — all 6 feet, 4 inches of him — convinced of his own sensual desirability and proficiency.
Our bodies, according to White supremacy, are more resilient to pain. Supremacists use our athletic dominance — from the rumble tumble of football to the graceful power of tennis — to justify their beliefs.
Once he started to perform, he quickly made his second moniker apparent: World's Strongest Man. What his wrestling style lacked in the technical proficiency of, say, Kurt Angle or The Undertaker or the devil-may-care recklessness of the Hardy Boyz, he made up for in sheer strength. Henry often maltreated opponents with slams when he won in the ring. When he was slated to lose a match, announcers Jim Ross and Jerry Lawler would make a show of the winner defeating the proverbial immovable man.
The World's Strongest Man was not a product of Vince McMahon's fictional world where fans could feel transported into a different universe with WWE Raw and SmackDown. Before joining the WWE, he represented America as an Olympian. He still holds world records in powerlifting, the sport dedicated to awarding strength athletes who lift the highest combined total weight for a squat, deadlift, and bench press.
I know the racist stories my country tells of Black physicality: We are bestial. We are overly sexual. But most of all, we have physical advantages over White people that have historically required whips, guns, chain gangs, and prisons. Our bodies, according to White supremacy, are more resilient to pain. Supremacists use our athletic dominance — from the rumble tumble of football to the graceful power of tennis — to justify their beliefs.
Children of all races learn the myth of John Henry in elementary school. In 1870, some White people proposed a contest between the steel-driving Negro and a machine they felt could do the job better. The optimism of the age demanded that the machine win to relieve the price of menial labor.
John Henry knew better. There would always be a need for sweat and calluses to fix up the American economy. It is the intellectual inheritance of the children of slavery, whose parents' uncompensated physical labor helped birth history's latest superpower.
In America's history of union-busting and devaluing Black labor, did John Henry have a choice other than to duel a machine? He would deny his spirit to the White men who set the contest. But in the American tradition, he gave up his body. John Henry laid down more steel than the machine could at the cost of his heart. An ancestor passed into legend, claimed both by White supremacy as a testament of the human spirit and by Black people as to what White men will do to our bodies to make a point.
If I were to buy into that racist myth, I'd expect Black people to dominate powerlifting records. I'd expect to see John Henry's descendants dominating strength sports. But there are few Black men of strength fame. John and Mark Henry C.T. Fletcher bench pressed 650 pounds in an open powerlifting competition at Muscle Bench, and Ronnie Coleman, the eight-time Mr. Olympia bodybuilding champion, also gained a reputation for Symphisian strength by squatting 800 pounds for two clean reps.
It is hard to find data on many Black powerlifters. I have done my best to provide raw data on the absence of Blackness in sports where physical strength is prized above all.
The United States of America Powerlifting (USAPL) is our country's representative organization in the International Powerlifting Federation (IPF). The USAPL provides historical data on powerlifting performance throughout the years in their sanctioned contests in America. I had to go deeper to find racial data on the participants.
From 2012 to 2019, only 38% of the USAPL's men's champions have been Black. All of them are below the 120-kilogram (264.5-pound) weight class. These numbers include Black men who have won multiple championships in their weight classes.
Damario Halloway reigned in the 66-kilogram (145-pound) class for three years, with his highest recorded total a monstrous 775 kilograms (1,708 pounds). Ian Bell, son of powerlifter Gene Bell, ruled the 93-kilogram (205-pound) division from 2014 to 2016, with him ending his reign with a total of 972.5 kilograms (2,142 pounds). Garrett Bailey, starting in 2017, was a two-time champion. At 74 kilograms (163 pounds), Nathan Walton was a three-time champion in his division.
I followed the same research methodology when looking into the racial composition of America's Olympic weightlifting teams. Mark Henry served his country in 1992 and 1996, when Black folks made up 25% and 33% of the fielded teams, respectively. In 2012, Black folks made up 33% of the team. It rose to 50% for the 2016 games only to fall to 12% for the 2020 games in Tokyo.
The Arnold Strongman Classic is probably the closest approximation to John Henry's rage against the machine. The world's strongest men gather to compete in events such as cleaning Apollon's wheels above their heads, hoisting Atlas stones with speed, and deadlifting Mack truck tires for reps. Before Game of Thrones made him famous as Gregor "The Mountain" Clegane, Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson trained for this contest. The last Black man to rank in the top three of this contest was in 2002 when Mark Henry won first place.
Mark Rippetoe, a famed strength coach, wrote that "strength is the most general adaptation." White people train themselves to see cultivated strength as the welding of human muscle and spirit. For Black people, it is seen as a confirmation of our subhumanity.
Simone Biles can perform flips and launches no other human being in history could. Rather than gymnastic authorities lauding her performance, they set rules in place to judge her differently. Sha'Carri Richardson, who may be the fastest woman in the world, did not have the opportunity to prove her fitness during the Olympics due to her use of a substance for which Black people have been disproportionately incarcerated. South Africa's Caster Semenya and Namibians Christian Mboma and Beatrice Masilingi were barred from running in Tokyo because of their naturally high testosterone levels. Our physical evidence cannot be rooted in our training and striving but a biological advantage that is opposed to the stories White supremacy creates about transcendent physicality.
Consider some of the culture that surrounds strength sports. Weight vests, for example, derive from a military ethos I am terrified to partake in publicly: Many fitness companies offer vests that look exactly like combat armor. They use military-based technology designed to help our service members survive a shot from an AK-47 in some foreign land. Steel plates replace the bulletproof armor soldiers slip in the vest's pockets.
Weighted walks are a popular conditioning tool for powerlifters. Yet I was terrified of walking around my subdivision in one. What if some cop saw me wearing military-adjacent gear and decided to shoot first and ask questions later? The vest I chose was as far away from military chic as possible.
Military chic also makes me think of how powerlifters draw their strength from whiteness. Apollon's wheels, for example, is a Strongman event derived from the training tool of a French strength athlete from the late 18th century. Louis Uni, whose stage name was Apollon the Mighty, had two railroad car wheels welded to a thick barbell as a training tool. Cleaning and jerking the nearly 350-pound tool is a featured event of the Arnold Strongman Classic. The Dinnie rings, named after a famed Scottish strength athlete, are still marketed as the pinnacle of grip strength. Björnsson broke a record that stood for a millennium by carrying a nearly 1,500-pound log five steps. The Viking that tried to do that a thousand years ago broke his back in the attempt.
In this sense, strength sports is how White people try to connect with their ancestry. Powerlifting and Strongman seemingly do this by channeling the legends from European weightlifters of yore. Does this preference explain, then, why the legend of John Henry gets so little acknowledgment? Where is the event at the Arnold Strongman Classic that simulates his feat?
After a hiatus, Mark Henry returned to the WWE in 2003 and wrestled under a stable called Thuggin' and Buggin' Enterprises. Hip-hop replaced his original Sexual Chocolate theme. He was now a massive, balding competitor who wanted nothing but a challenging fight.
In May 2020, Vlad TV interviewed Henry about that particular wrestling stint. Henry said he dealt with behind-the-scenes racism that goes into scripting the storylines as the world's strongest men toss each other around in a ring. "There will always be bias, always be prejudice, always be racism," he explained. "On a TV show, you can fight people and beat people up for it."
Black people could tune in and experience catharsis from every slam Henry delivered. Despite that, he still had to assert his humanity to WWE writers. In one storyline, they referred to him as a "silverback gorilla." Henry objected.
"Anytime there was something that dealt remotely with racism, whether it be in the strength world, pro wrestling, entertainment, in my private life, I make it noted I'm not gonna have it," he said. "There is only room enough for right, and if I'm right, then your ass gotta go."
"I am not a primate," Henry added.
The World's Strongest Man still had to defend his humanity and superhuman accomplishments in the face of dehumanization. Mark Henry and other Black strength athletes are not seen as the descendants of John Henry's spirit. To acknowledge this ancestry would force America to confront hard truths about perceived sources of strength and whether it holds different views of this for Black and White athletes. In a nation that cannot even squarely tell its history of slavery, doing so is currently too difficult a task.