Understanding parkour through the lens of decolonisation deepens its significance and the importance of the values its practitioners live out in the world. It allows it to be situated not only as a sport, discipline, or art form, but as a force that can continue to bring people together, fostering connection and networks of support for people at times and in places where it is sorely needed.
For many, the most engaging aspects of contemporary parkour culture exist due to its focus on collaborative and open co-creation. While standards and norms are unavoidably found, these are arrived at democratically, with innovation and difference always winning out over dogma or any enforcement of uniformity. The sport has always celebrated—and benefitted from—the diversity of its practice and practitioners. Experimentation and exploration are core components alongside defiance of restriction. It is clear that how a person approaches parkour, right down to specific movement selection or the challenges they are drawn to, is a combined result of the environment they are most often practicing in, along with the very identity of the person themselves.
Despite its often very progressive values, parkour is not an island. It exists within the broader dominant culture and material conditions that any local community might find themselves within. Those practicing it must contend with the negative pressures that exist outside of the sport. Despite this, communities have the potential to offer some respite from the societal issues around them. But ultimately, like all cultural spaces, they will be shaped by the histories and hierarchies that inform the world beyond them.
Now globally recognised, the sport has sometimes found itself whitewashed, either in media or in its perception by those who encounter it without knowledge of it’s history. Most are unaware that parkour’s origins are intimately tied to indigenous history and the embodied resistance of the colonised (see our article titled, “A Brief History of Parkour”). Parkour is not, and has never been a “white sport”, but for some Black athletes in the U.S., their relationship to it begins with contradiction. While it is an activity that offers liberation and the defiance of physical and social boundaries, some have told stories of being criticised by their peers, who see parkour as a white-coded activity—creating a feeling of being othered in both directions. First by the desire to engage with a community of practitioners who may not share their background or lived experience, and then again by judgement from their peers for doing so.
“We as Black people within the community share an experience where many of our contemporaries would say that we have ‘white interests’ because we looked one way but had interests that often fell in a community that ‘belonged to someone else.’” — Marquis Johnson (Obsidian Gathering – A Celebration of Blackness in Parkour)
These tensions reveal why an awareness of parkour’s history in relation to colonialism and decolonisation is key in ensuring that it continues to have a positive impact on individuals, empowering them and giving them a sense of belonging, valued participation, and collective ownership. This awareness can also help influence the broader dominant culture through representation and the affirmation of its values.
Decolonisation is the process by which the structures, ideologies, and legacies of empire are identified, challenged, and dismantled. This can refer to the political independence of former colonies, but it also applies to the deeper cultural, psychological, and social frameworks left behind by colonial rule. In this sense, decolonisation is ongoing work, and for individuals can mean reclaiming identity, heritage, and freedom for self-expression. Frantz Fanon, a revolutionary thinker and psychiatrist from Martinique, wrote extensively about the psychological impacts of colonisation. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon explains the often-harsh experience of reclaiming agency:
“Decolonisation is always a violent phenomenon... It transforms spectators crushed with their inessentiality into privileged actors, with the grandiose glare of history’s floodlights upon them.” — Frantz Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth)
Fanon insisted that decolonisation is not just an event, but a process of transformation—where those silenced and subjugated rediscover themselves as creators of culture and meaning. Within the context of parkour this can mean reclaiming physical space, moving freely and defiantly within it, and creating meaning through that experience. Interestingly, Fanon’s birthplace of Martinique was the same Caribbean island where, in 1902, Georges Hébert was stationed and witnessed the catastrophic eruption of Mount Pelée. That event, and the heroic rescue efforts of the indigenous people there, heavily influenced his creation of méthode naturelle.
This historical irony brings us full-circle. While méthode naturelle was developed by a French officer attempting to replicate the movement abilities of colonised peoples he observed live and work across the French colonies in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. His work was then taught to an orphan of the First Indochina War, who’s abilities and storied heroism inspired his son. Who in turn, along with other family members and friends, built upon this. Parkour then emerged from a group of young men who although lived in France, were almost all the children of families from former French colonies in those very places. Perhaps unknowingly, it remains that David Belle, Sebastien Foucan, and the Yamakasi were reclaiming a heritage that actually already belonged to them. They had freed the essence of what had been taken and systemised, and then gave it back to the world. In this way, parkour now is for everyone and belongs to all those who engage with it in earnest.
Understanding parkour through the lens of decolonisation deepens its significance and the importance of the values its practitioners live out in the world. It allows it to be situated not only as a sport, discipline, or art form, but as a force that can continue to bring people together, fostering connection and networks of support for people at times and in places where it is sorely needed.
Written by Tom Taylor @movementpower
