The founder of the Enhanceds is someone called Aron Ping D’Souza, American tech entrepreneur, personality-capitalist and one of those business people whose rhetorical style involves boasting about their own extreme, brutal, gamechanging honesty, even while spouting the most unbelievable horsesh*t.
‘Doping’ is a colonialist slur that reeks of symbolic and historic violence against both the Black and enhanced populations and needs to be removed from our vocabulary”.
Yes. This is real. What they’re saying is that being on drugs is pretty much the same as being black. They’re going with doped lives matter. They’re comparing the burdens of “the enhanced community” ie drugged athletes, with the struggle for civil rights, the legacy of slavery, with centuries of blood-soaked racial apartheid and its associated scars.
This is of course deeply cynical and cheap. But it is at least non-exclusive. Being on drugs is not just like being black. Being on drugs is also like being gay. “Think back 50 years ago, being a gay man was like being enhanced today. It’s stigmatised, it’s marginalised,” D’Souza has said, and true to this vision the Enhanced website carries a detailed section on the trials of “coming out” as enhanced to your family, friends and colleagues (who frankly don’t care, please put your singlet back on), with much talk of allies, support networks and being kind.
www.bbc.co.uk
www.espn.co.uk
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