Time Magazine Says Exercise Is Influenced by ‘White Supremacy’

Time Magazine’s website published an article recently explaining how exercise is rooted in “White Supremacy.”

QUICK FACTS:
  • Time.com recently published an article titled “The White Supremacist Origins of Exercise, and 6 Other Surprising Facts About the History of U.S. Physical Fitness,” arguing exercise rooted in racism.
  • The author, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, also wrote “Fit Nation,” a book that claims “fitness is a social justice issue.”
  • “What would be considered today fat or bigger, was actually desirable and actually signified affluence—which is like the polar opposite of today,” Petrzela wrote.
  • According to Petrzela, running was never fair, but unsafe and discriminatory. “Access was never totally equal, if you lived in a neighborhood that didn’t have safe streets or streets that were not well lit,” the author said.
  • Petrzela argued in the article that COVID-19 lockdowns “accelerated fitness inequality,” claiming that “not everyone” can “go home and be on [their] Peloton,” but approved of fitness mogul Richard Simmons.
  • “We should not presume that because you are fat, that you are not fit or that you want to lose weight. And I think that we probably couldn’t have had that without Richard Simmons,” Petrzela said.
AUTHOR OF TIME MAGAZINE ARTICLE NATALIA MEHLMAN PETRZELA ON HOW RUNNING IS ROOTED IN “WHITE SUPREMACY”:

“Women were catcalled. People of color were thought to be committing a crime,” Petrzela wrote.

BACKGROUND:
  • According to Scientific American (SciAm), racism is also the root cause of why Black women face health concerns.
  • “This heightened concern about their weight is not new; it reflects the racist stigmatization of their bodies,” the website says.
  • In June 2020, SciAm published an article declaring that “Black women in particular, face considerable health challenges” and also have been “identified as the subgroup with the highest body mass index (BMI) in the US.”
  • “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,” the article continued.

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