They Didn’t Do Anything Wrong but They Did Everything White: Examination of the 1968 Harvard Crew’s Support of the Olympic Project for Human Rights
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The iconic image of Tommie Smith and John Carlos standing on the podium, with bowed heads, black-gloved fists in the air during the playing of the American national anthem at the 1968 Summer Olympic Games in Mexico City, is a symbol of resistance and the civil rights movement. This symbolic activism was part of a larger movement, the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR) that was led by Dr. Harry Edwards. The movement was designed to be a nonviolent protest against the inhumane treatment of Black men in the United States. While Edwards and several of the track-and-field athletes worked to create awareness of their fight, a small group of rowers out of Harvard University also took notice. The Harvard men’s eight was the crew selected to represent the United States at the 1968 Games in Mexico, and shortly after their selection, a number of the men decided that they too wanted to support the initiative that Edwards had started. In their attempt to prove that they were indeed allies to the Black athletes on the American team, the men met with Edwards and decided to send letters to each person selected to represent the United States at the 1968 Games in Mexico that outlined the plight of the Black American athletes. However, while their intentions may have been honorable, many within the OPHR movement did not agree with the involvement of the Harvard rowers. Several members argued that these privileged White men had no right to be involved and their initiative was unwanted. This raises important discussions surrounding allyship; more specifically what constitutes an ally compared to the “great white hope?” This paper uses Edward’s concept of allyship and the oblivious possessive investment of whiteness and critically examines the Harvard men’s support of the OPHR movement in 1968.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.039 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".