Cornell ‘Center for Racial Justice’ Suggests Legacy of Fitness is Racist
“was a core concern of the eugenics movement”
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
From their website:
The Heavy Legacy of “Fitness” and its Racial Origins
Summertime 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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Comments
and ambition and being on time and good manners >>>all the things that,, apparently,, according to these “experts” maintains whts as leaders aka supremacists
did they also note that a real core concept of the eugenics movement was/is planned parenthoods margeret sanger and the continued push to exterminate babies especially blk babies!!!!!!
ACTUALLY, Margaret Sanger was against abortions and for birth control. The first Planned Parenthood president who was not against eugenic abortions was Alan Guttmacher.
https://stonetoss.com/comic/lunk-alarm/
As many times as I hear those who seem to hate and denigrate the benefits we as Americans have worked for and enjoyed, I still cannot wrap my head around the lies they tell.
I read the whole speech and see exactly where they took the “race suicide” out of context. However, there is absolutely NO connection I can make with the claims of “fitness” being lauded or only some race to be held as an example.
It was a excellent word to mothers: to appreciate the hard work and the rewards granted from it.
The admonition is to avoid “race suicide” by not acting selfishly so as to think having no children, or less than at least the replacement two needed would maintain any society that we could appreciate.
It is well-known that we are currently at a replacement rate of about 1.8 and have already lost the society we grew up knowing – to be replaced by whatever society immigrants bring with them.
President Roosevelts speech was a clarion call to appreciate motherhood as the highest calling and honor and recognize that its loss would irrevocably alter our country.
I always thought it unfair that black dudes seem to have much better muscle definition than white dudes, those with low body fat that is. You can see this in the NBA players. Black players are cut. White players look like they are made out of playdough. Not fair! Is this racism or just envy?
Good so all the “anti-racist” bigoted Palestinian violence loving freaks can be fat and out of shape ; works for me.
Well, most of ’em are women, so…
–Jake From State Farm
Oh I don’t know there’s plenty of trans men in those groups too ; oh yeah that’s women again
This is a very finite slice of the American eugenic story and does SEEM to conflate two distinct points. Fitness was, in fact, a eugenic mission, and Teddy Roosevelt was our “fittest” president, a ruffian athlete. But his message to the Mother’s Congress had less to do about quality than quantity because the audience was already his ideal type.