No, Don Jr., No One Said Exercise Is Racist

Donald Trump Jr., much like the man whose morally compromised seed produced him, is a liar, a con man — utterly and irredeemably full of shit.

Although this much is obvious and hardly worth noting, there is something about saying it which never fails to satisfy.

But my reasons for expressing this banal truism are unrelated to either personal catharsis or amusement. Instead, I do so because exposing his latest turn at dishonesty serves two valuable functions.

First, it reveals how the right seeks to stoke the fires of white racial resentment for political gain. And second, it demonstrates a more profound truth about racism in American history — one which the right actively seeks to cover up in our nation’s schools.

In a recent rant on his Rumble channel — a right-wing YouTube alternative for people who can’t manage to find all the easily-accessible right-wing content on YouTube — he accused the left of finding a new target in our never-ending woke crusades.

And what is that target?

According to Junior, it’s exercise.

Because apparently, we think exercise and promoting physical fitness are racist.

And where did he come up with such a bombshell revelation?

Apparently, from an interview in TIME magazine, which he likely didn’t read but about which someone told him. Someone who also didn’t read it but heard about it from someone else.

Probably on Reddit or 4Chan.

Because much like the telephone game you might have played in your youth, by the time the story reached Saint Donnie of the Hair Gel, it bore no resemblance to the truth.

The interview was with author and scholar Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, whose new book Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession, is being released this month.

Therein, Petrzela constructs a history of the physical fitness movement from its origins in the early 20th century. She discusses how people have thought about exercise over time — the motivations for it, the benefits, and the social functions of being a nation of physically fit people.

Although one might assume fitness was always a desired norm, Petrzela shows this is far from true. Indeed, as she points out in the interview (and the book):

However, she continues:

Elsewhere she discusses the mid-century link between the nation’s obsession with exercise and the goal of potential war preparedness. She even discusses the role of Richard Simmons — far from the masculine norm often associated with people who “work out” — in revolutionizing the fitness industry in the 1980s and encouraging exercise for all.

So, where is the racism part?

What has Junior so worked up is the part where Petrzela explains how (and, importantly, why) those pushing exercise and fitness began encouraging women to build up their strength alongside men, for whom it was already being pushed.

As she notes, the voices calling for a new commitment to physical fitness weren’t principally concerned about women’s health but something else — something ideological.

In other words, part of the history of the fitness revolution — and especially for women — involved an almost eugenic-like desire to shore up white racial dominance in a rapidly changing nation.

To Junior, of course, merely noting this history is tantamount to “the left” seeking to discourage people from taking care of themselves. So the Little MAGA Prince was apoplectic, accusing TIME and Petrzela not only of anti-white wokism but also a war on masculinity:

Keep in mind: this embrace of physical fitness comes from a dude whose idea of exercise is shooting wild animals and whose father notoriously swears off exercise because he thinks the body is like a battery that wears down when you work out, never to be re-charged.

So, yeah.

. . .

In any event, what Junior is doing is what the Trumps have learned works — stoking right-wing white resentment; in this case, by telling the MAGA faithful that Antifa or BLM or Marxists or liberals or feminists or whatever are coming for their gym memberships.

See, he’s saying: they’re irrational, crazed, and out to destroy even something as good and wholesome and healthy as exercise, all in the name of anti-racism.

Which serves the function of discrediting the left and smearing anti-racism as an inherently illegitimate school of thought or movement.

If they think exercise is racist, they’ll believe anything is racist, so when they call something racist, we should feel free to ignore them.

That’s the message here.

What’s most interesting about the real story, though — the one Petrzela uncovered and which Don Jr. mangles for political gain — is what it says about racism: not in the world of physical fitness per se, but in America writ large.

What does it say that something as truly innocuous as exercise was initially being pushed, at least partly, because of white racial paranoia and a desire to maintain white societal supremacy?

What does it say that something which shouldn’t have been ideological was?

And not because the left made it so, but because reactionaries and conservatives, afraid of demographic change, did?

It was the MAGA types of the 1920s, fresh off the anti-immigrant fervor of the infamous Dillingham Commission, who were injecting politics — the politics of racism — into the issue of physical fitness.

It wasn’t the period’s leftists doing this: it wasn’t Trotskyites or trade unionists. It wasn’t the early NAACP or the ACLU.

It was the kind of people who, in the modern era, would have all voted for Donald Trump and who would today be tuned in to his vacuous son’s Rumble channel.

By exposing this hidden history of the physical fitness movement, Petrzela has done a great service — one which the right cannot abide. And that service is not discrediting exercise, as Junior dishonestly suggests, but proving the point made by anti-racist scholars and critical race theorists.

Namely, that racism and white supremacist thinking are so deeply embedded in the nation’s culture that there is hardly any aspect of that culture left untouched by their poison.

The fact that even exercise was linked to a desire for white dominance is proof of that.

And when you spend your time trying to deny the reality of racism’s hold on the country, both historically and today, revealing truths such as this is dangerous.

Which is the real reason Junior is so upset.

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This post was previously published on Tim Wise’s blog.

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