When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
From their website:
The Heavy Legacy of “Fitness” and its Racial OriginsSummertime is upon us, and for many that entails family barbecues, beach getaways, and plenty of outdoor festivals. For others, the thought of this time of year brings body anxiety and a perceived urgent desire to get in shape, bikini-ready, or become summertime fine. And no matter where you turn, there are fitness narratives and discourses influencing you to eat less and exercise more. But where did those idealized “beach bodies” come from, and which bodies get labeled “summertime fine”? Would it surprise you to know that those images we have in our minds stem from a racist history?We have spent our careers studying the history of fitness in the United States. What we have found in our research is that our nation’s obsession with fitness did not come out of thin air; rather, we can trace it back to late 19th century physical education teachings.By the turn of the 20th century, the term “fitness” was doing some heavy cultural work. During this time, as historian Shannon Walsh demonstrates, the “fitness” of American society was of utmost concern to many politicians, Progressive Era reformers, educators, and physicians, and was a core concern of the eugenics movement. Eugenic ideology positioned white Anglo-Saxon, Protestant Americans of Northern European descent as the nation’s ideal “genetic stock,” whose reproduction should be encouraged and whose traits should define human excellence. Conversely, Black Americans, immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, Indigenous peoples, poor whites, and disabled individuals were constructed as threats to this racial purity, their bodies marked as degenerate and their reproduction as a danger to civilization.The concept of fitness took on particular cultural relevance amidst fears about the purity of the white Anglo-Saxon population in relation to major demographic shifts happening across the country at that time. The influx of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe and Asia, the emancipation of newly freed Black people, and the migration of rural Americans to cities all fed a growing concern that “old-stock” Americans would lose their majority status. This concern had a name: race suicide. The idea was that the more “civilized” race of native-born, Anglo-Saxon white Americans was allowing itself to be wiped out simply by not reproducing enough “old-stock” children. President Theodore Roosevelt popularized the notion of race suicide and gave speeches that promoted ways to avoid it. For instance, in 1905, Roosevelt gave a speech before the National Congress of Mothers, in which he encouraged mothers, with emphasis on college educated women, to avoid birth control and give birth to children to evade the perils of race suicide. However, it wasn’t simply the act of having babies that was being encouraged—the push was to have better white babies and fitter white families. Fitness practices were thus promoted for varying groups of Americans, with the activities advocated often mapping onto ranked beliefs about appropriate societal roles (by gender, social class, age, race) with the goal of cultivating a strong and “pure” American populace, one that was Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, and white.
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