Mixed Race Studies

Lewis Hamilton to change name to include mother Carmen’s surname

The Guardian
2022-03-14

Jamie Grierson, Reporter

Lewis Hamilton to change name to include mother Carmen’s surname

The British racing driver Lewis Hamilton is to change his name to incorporate his mother’s original surname – Larbalestier.

The seven-time world champion says he intends to incorporate his mother Carmen’s surname, Larbalestier, alongside Hamilton.

Hamilton’s father, Anthony, and his mother, Carmen, separated when Lewis was two; he lived with his mother until he was 12 before moving in with his father.

Speaking before the new Formula One season, which starts in Bahrain on Sunday, Hamilton, 37, said: “I am really proud of my family’s name. My mum’s name is Larbalestier and I am just about to put that in my name…

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Bubba Wallace Gets a Breakthrough NASCAR Victory at Talladega

The New York Times
2021-10-04

Andrew Keh

Going into Monday’s race at Talladega, Wallace said he believed he would win. Chris Graythen/Getty Images

Wallace’s NASCAR Cup win was the first by a Black driver since 1963 and also the inaugural victory in the sport’s top series for Michael Jordan, the co-owner of Wallace’s team.

A little more than a year after almost single-handedly forcing American auto racing to confront the sport’s longstanding issues with racism, Darrell Wallace Jr., known as Bubba, became just the second Black winner in NASCAR’s top series, finishing first at a rain-shortened event at Talladega Superspeedway on Monday afternoon.

Wallace, 27, rose from relative obscurity to national prominence last year when he added his voice to the widespread national protest movement for racial justice and equality after the murder of George Floyd. It was not unusual to hear an athlete speak on the subject — but it was unusual to hear a NASCAR driver do so.

It was stirring for many, then, to see Wallace, currently NASCAR’s only Black driver in the Cup Series, wear an “I Can’t Breathe” shirt — referring to the last words of Floyd and of Eric Garner, who died in 2014 after a New York City police officer placed him in a prohibited chokehold — and display the slogan “Black Lives Matter” on his car last year. He spoke out about the racism he experienced on a daily basis as a Black man in an overwhelmingly white sport. His burst of activism, most notably, persuaded NASCAR to ban the display of Confederate flags, long a fixture at American auto races…

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Lewis Hamilton attacks silence from F1 paddock over George Floyd killing

The Guardian
2020-05-31

Giles Richards

Lewis Hamilton has accused ‘some of the biggest stars’ in his sport of ‘staying silent in the midst of injustice’ after the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. Photograph: David Davies/PA

• Hamilton: ‘I see those of you who are staying silent’
• Driver condemns response from ‘white-dominated sport’

Lewis Hamilton has spoken out about the killing of George Floyd and offered a damning condemnation of the silence from others in Formula One, including his fellow drivers.

“I see those of you who are staying silent, some of you the biggest of stars yet you stay silent in the midst of injustice,” he wrote on Instagram. “Not a sign from anybody in my industry which of course is a white-dominated sport.

“I’m one of the only people of colour there yet I stand alone. I would have thought by now you would see why this happens and say something about it but you can’t stand alongside us. Just know I know who you are, and I see you.”

Hamilton is the only black driver in Formula One and has been outspoken on the sport’s need for greater diversity in the past. “There’s barely any diversity in F1,” Hamilton said in 2018. “Still nothing’s changed in 11 years I’ve been here.”…

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The Confederate Flag Didn’t Bother Bubba Wallace. Until It Did.

The New York Times
2020-06-19

Juliet Macur

Barry Cantrell

The only black driver in NASCAR’s top tier, he has emerged as an impassioned activist who got the flag banned at races in the largely white sport after years of putting up with it.

Darrell “Bubba” Wallace Jr., the only black driver in NASCAR’s top racing series, has drawn widespread attention and acclaim for his principled stand that got the Confederate flag banned from races in a largely white sport.

Yet, after years of often quiet acceptance of the sport’s “racist label,” as he put it, nobody was more surprised than his mother that he had become a central figure in the sports world’s upheaval regarding race.

“I was shocked,” his mother, Desiree Wallace, said in a telephone interview. “I said, ‘Wait a minute, is this my son? The one who doesn’t really care about anything but getting in the car and driving?’ I’m tripping that he’s gone from being a racecar driver to becoming a daggone activist. Who does that? Not Bubba.”

Yet a series of events, particularly the killing of a black man, Ahmaud Arbery, while he was jogging in a predominantly white neighborhood in Georgia, flipped a switch in Wallace, he and those who know him said…

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Who Is Bubba Wallace?

The New York Times
2020-06-12

Victor Mather

Jared C. Tilton/Getty Images

He is the only African-American driver in NASCAR’s top-flight racing series, and this week got the organization to bar the Confederate flag at its events.

Bubba Wallace, who instigated NASCAR’s banning of the Confederate flag, is the racing series’ only black driver. That has put him in the spotlight in a sport whose owners, drivers, crews and fans have historically been predominantly white.

What is the history of black drivers in NASCAR?

Wendell Scott was the pioneer, driving on the circuit from 1961 to 1973. Despite regularly facing discrimination, he won a race in 1963 in Jacksonville, Fla., that remains the only one at NASCAR’s top level to be won by an African-American driver. Scott died in 1990.

Although a handful of African-American drivers got into a race or two over the years since, no other black driver had a full-time ride in NASCAR’s top series until Wallace…

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Bubba Wallace emerges as NASCAR’s improbable yet ideally suited change agent

The Washington Post
2020-06-13

Liz Clarke, Sports Reporter

“I encourage people to have those tough conversations just to educate yourself,” Bubba Wallace says. (Matt Sullivan/Getty Images)

Born in Alabama and reared in North Carolina, Bubba Wallace doesn’t remember seeing a Confederate flag until he went to a racetrack. His memory isn’t tied to a particular track because the flag was a fixture in the grandstands nearly everywhere he competed as a young racer.

But that’s not what transformed Wallace into a change agent in America’s most tradition-bound sport. It was the video of an unarmed black jogger being gunned down in Georgia after he was cornered by a white father and son brandishing a pistol and shotgun.

“The Ahmaud Arbery video was the final straw for me in being silent. That shook me to the core like nothing has in the past,” Wallace, 26, said in a telephone interview Friday. “Something flipped inside of me to be more vocal and stand up for racial equality and make sure we get a hold on that and change the face of this world and get it to a better place. Creating unity and compassion and understanding of each of our brothers and sisters is so powerful. We have to preach that to the ones that don’t want to listen and understand.”…

…The only full-time African American racer in NASCAR’s Cup series, and the first since the late Wendell Scott of Danville, Va., retired in 1973, Wallace is uniquely suited to lead NASCAR into the future its executives say they want: one in which women and minorities feel welcome and fill the grandstands, pit crews and driver ranks in numbers that mirror the diversity of America.

Wallace’s father is white; his mother is black. Both are NASCAR loyalists and fans, in particular, of seven-time champion Dale Earnhardt. So Bubba, who started racing at age 9, grew up an Earnhardt fan, too…

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