Chamblee54

“The White Supremacist Origins of Exercise, and 6 Other Surprising Facts About the history of fitness in America.” turned up on twitter this morning. The article was promotion for a book, Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession. The book is coming out February 2, 2023. There are no one star comments available.
Time magazine had an interview with author Natalis Mehlman Petrzela. “It was super interesting reading the reflections of fitness enthusiasts in the early 20th century. They said we should get rid of corsets, corsets are an assault on women’s form, and that women should be lifting weights and gaining strength. At first, you feel like this is so progressive.”
“Then you keep reading, and they’re saying white women should start building up their strength because we need more white babies. They’re writing during an incredible amount of immigration, soon after enslaved people have been emancipated. This is totally part of a white supremacy project. So that was a real “holy crap” moment as a historian, where deep archival research really reveals the contradictions of this moment.”
Hopefully, the finished book will have more information about who “they” is. Until then, we are stuck with those few sentences. Is exercise a white supremacist activity? It looks like WS has become another clickbait gimmick. Take a fluff article about an upcoming book, put WS in the headline, and get oodles of eyeballs. @TIME apparently is not concerned that the next headline to trumpet WS will have less impact. The wolf is back, bigger and meaner than ever.
Comments to the Time tweet included a link to Racist Roots of Fighting Obesity. This article was originally published in Scientific American. Authors include Lindo Bacon (formerly Linda), and Sabrina Strings, author of Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia.
“This heightened concern about their weight is not new; it reflects the racist stigmatization of Black women’s bodies. … In the eyes of many medical practitioners in the late 19th century, Black women were destined to die off along with the men of their race because of their presumed inability to control their “animal appetites”—eating, drinking and fornicating. … Today the idea that weight is the main problem dogging Black women builds on these historically racist ideas and ignores how interrelated social factors impact Black women’s health. It also perpetuates a misinformed and damaging message about weight and health. Indeed, social determinants have been shown to be more consequential to health than BMI or health behaviors. …” (Does BMI outweigh BLM?)
“Doctors often tell fat people that dietary control leading to weight loss is the solution to their health problems. But many studies show that the stigma associated with body weight, rather than the body weight itself, is responsible for some adverse health consequences blamed on obesity, including increased mortality risk. Regardless of income, Black women consistently experience weightism in addition to sexism and racism. From workplace discrimination and poor service at restaurants to rude or objectifying commentary online, the stress of these life experiences contributes to higher rates of chronic mental and physical illnesses …”
“A 2018 opinion piece in the journal BMC Medicine argued that bias against fat people is actually a larger driver of the so-called obesity epidemic than adiposity itself. A 2015 study … found that people who reported experiencing weight discrimination had a 60 percent increased risk of dying, independent of BMI (and therefore regardless of body size). … Simply blaming Black women’s health conditions on “obesity” ignores these critically important sociohistorical factors. It also leads to a prescription long since proved to be ineffective: weight loss. … This weight-focused paradigm fails to produce thinner or healthier bodies but succeeds in fostering weight stigma.”
When I tried to retweet the @sciam link, twitter shook a finger in my face. “Want to read the article first? You’re about to share an article you haven’t opened on Twitter.” As it turned out, I opened the article in another browser, away from Elon’s watchful eye. It will be interesting to see if this happens again, with a less provocative article. Pictures are from The Library of Congress.