Kevin Kruse, “Diversity Is Our Strength”
When Musk and Hegseth argue that a racially diverse nation is inherently weak, they’re not returning us to some long-established American tradition from which we’ve recently strayed. They are, instead, parroting the exact same propaganda that Nazi Germany promoted against America during World War II.
For just one example, read this analysis the Nazis made of the American population in 1942, where they confidently concluded that America’s diversity would be its undoing: “During a war, only a people can fight for its future, not a mere population that is racially, religiously, linguistically, ideologically, and governmentally disunified. Given all that has been said, the USA has no unified people, only a population.”
Ibram X. Kendi, “On the Laughable Origins of the Far Right’s Beloved ‘Great Replacement Theory'”
To be racist is to see peoples of color as eternal immigrants. In 2019, President Trump told four congresswomen of color—three of whom were born in the United States—to “go back” to the “corrupt” and “crime-infested” countries they “originally came from.” Trump’s own paternal grandfather, Friedrich, originally came from Germany in 1885. He traveled back home in 1901 and met his wife, Elisabeth. They moved to the United States together in 1902 and returned to Germany in 1904. They came back to the U.S. for good in 1905—Elisabeth pregnant with Trump’s father, Fred. Trump’s mother, Mary Anne, immigrated from Scotland in 1930. Trump, a son of immigrants. To be racist is to see White people as eternal natives.
Jelani Cobb, “What ICE Should Have Learned From the Fugitive Slave Act”
The Fugitive Slave Act replaced the more complicated questions about the institution with a single, less complicated one: Were Northerners prepared to watch their neighbors, many of whom had lived in their communities for years, be violently removed from their homes or grabbed off the streets? For many, the answer was no. …
For most people it took an issue that they may have felt ambivalent about — or hadn’t much thought about at all — and gave them a direct, visceral reason to feel very strongly about it. Slavery might have been an abstract national concern, but the fate of a neighbor, whom people may have depended upon as a part of their community, was very much a personal one. Something akin to that reaction is occurring in communities across the U.S. now, as social-media feeds fill with images of children being harassed by ICE agents as they leave school and of a five-year-old boy being detained, and of adults being shoved to the ground and pepper-sprayed or pulled from their cars after agents smash the windows. The Fugitive Slave Act is remembered by historians for its ironic effect: designed as a means of cooling the simmering regional tensions over slavery, the law effectively made it the most contentious issue facing the nation.
Reo Eveleth, “The Olympics Has a New Sex Testing Policy. The Evidence Doesn’t Add Up”
Sex testing is as old as the modern Olympics. As soon as women were allowed to compete in the games, there were rumors and complaints that the women on the track were simply not womanly. In the 1930s, sports organizations forced women into what are now known as the “nude parades,” in which they asked every woman to get naked in front of a panel of doctors so that they could decide if they looked womanly enough.
Covering sex testing is a lot like documenting a twisted and deeply unethical game of whack-a-mole. The same bad ideas, incorrect assertions, and misguided policies pop up over and over and over again. Today, the mole that has popped up is genetic sex testing. We last saw this particular policy emerge in the 1960s, when every woman who competed in the Olympics was forced to go through an unreliable genetic test looking for Y chromosomal material — a test that about 1 in 500 women failed. (Surprise! Lots of women have Y chromosomal material in their cells.) The women who passed this test got a “femininity certificate” they had to carry with them to every single competition. Those who “failed” were told to fake an injury and leave.
Michael Waters, “The Ugly History Behind the Olympics’ New Gender Test”
In 1936 at the Berlin Olympics, there’s an American sprinter named Helen Stephens who wins a gold medal for the US. And almost immediately after she wins, there are newspaper stories that come out that essentially accuse her of being a man in disguise. And so Helen Stephens is stereotyped as being pretty butch—she has kind of a deep voice, big arms, big legs. And the fact of her being this butch woman who had won this track and field event was treated by certain sports commentators as proof that she was unfairly masculine. So there was a whole news cycle in August 1936 about whether or not Helen Stephens was actually a man. It’s really reminiscent of what happened in 2024 with the Algerian boxer Imane Khelif. There was a storyline circulating that this woman who had won gold was not feminine enough, and was therefore a threat to sports.
Diane de Vignemont, “France Was Changed by the Gisèle Pelicot Case, But Not Enough”
Earlier this month, I noticed that one of my male students at the Sorbonne was reading Gisèle’s memoir, “A Hymn to Life” (released on Feb. 17), over lunch. When I asked Yasser B., who requested his last name not be used, why he had picked it up, he told me that his mother had given it to him. “She asked me to read it,” the 22-year-old said, “because though she’d already discussed it with all her friends, she wanted a young man’s opinion on Gisèle’s ordeal.”
He said he’d noticed several of his female friends reading it when it came out in February, but that he had not originally planned to read it himself. Now, about halfway through the book, Yasser tells me that he’s already bought two more copies to give to his friends. “I used to think that Gisèle opened the doors to her trial to empower other women,” he told me. “Now,” he says, “I understand that she did for all of us.”
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In