AP Whines That Winter Sports Are Too White

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Fresh off the news that the UK government has deemed that the pastoral English countryside is too “white” and must be forcibly diversified by Third World hordes littering and defecating in public, comes a new judgment from the diversity racists: the Winter Olympics are also unforgivably white.

In a recent article, the Associated Press (AP), a mainstream media organization which, like all mainstream media organizations, is utterly lacking in political diversity (despite promoting itself as “news without an agenda”), accused several European nations competing in the Winter Olympics of the capital sin of being “overwhelmingly white.”

The article by “Europe-based sports writer” Steve Douglas, who is white, noted approvingly that the United States was “sending one of its most diverse teams” to the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics, but those bigoted European nations weren’t giving the issue enough attention. “Immigration from Africa and the Middle East has transformed the demographics of Europe in recent decades,” the AP article continued, but the team rosters for countries such as France, Germany, and Switzerland “look a lot like Sweden’s: overwhelmingly white and lacking the immigrant representation.”

“Sweden is sending a team made up almost exclusively of ethnically Swedish athletes, with NHL player Mika Zibanejad, whose father is from Iran, a rare exception,” the AP lamented. “That hardly reflects the diversity of the Nordic country: About 2 million of its 10 million residents were born abroad, about half of them in Asia or Africa, according to national statistics agency SCB.”

The diversity racists always point to demographic “representation” as a marker of a society’s bigotry; if any demographic is not as fully represented on, say, an Olympic team as it is in the general population, the explanation must be systemic racism. Never mind that recent immigrants to white-majority European nations from Africa or the Middle East almost certainly have no experience with, much less Olympic-level skill at, sports like downhill skiing or bobsledding. Maybe they don’t even have any interest in them. That’s all irrelevant to the diversity racists.

In the article, Maryan Hashi — a Somali migrant who came to Sweden with her family in 2009 – said it wasn’t until 2018 that she discovered “there was a ski slope five minutes from her home, after a co-worker suggested she try snowboarding as part of a pilot integration project.”

“When you don’t have information or access or anybody around you does it — snowboarding is basically a white sport — and when you’re not correctly integrated into the community, you don’t know much about it,” Hashi told the AP, apparently blaming “the community” for not “correctly” integrating her.

This also raises the point that many – arguably even most – immigrants to Europe from Africa and the Middle East are less interested in integration than they are in domination, but that is a whole other topic of discussion.

Josef Fahlen, a professor of sport pedagogy at Umea University in Sweden, offered to the AP the commonsense explanation that “the children of non-European immigrants are unlikely to be introduced to sports that their parents are not familiar with.” He pointed to the example of Alexander Isak, a black soccer player on the Swedish team whose parents are from Eritrea. “It makes total sense” that Isak found his way into football “because football exists in Eritrea. Skiing doesn’t,” Fahlen said.

All perfectly sensible, but the diversity racists aren’t swayed by sense or logic. Winter sports feature too many white people, and that is bad. The AP fretted on X, “In Europe, immigration from Africa and the Middle East has rapidly changed the demographics of the top winter sports countries. That won’t be reflected in their rosters for the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics.”

As usual, social media backlash to the Left’s obsession with politicizing the meritocracy of sports was brutal. “Wait, you’re telling me people from the Middle East and Africa aren’t dominating the Alpine Skiing events?” one person posted.

“I, for one, am shocked that recent refugees from the eastern deserts of Syria aren’t dominating the Finnish Ski Jumping team,” quipped columnist Jon Gabriel.

Political analyst Aleksandar Djokic stated matter-of-factly, “Sorry, professional sport is for professional athletes. They get chosen based on skill, not their ethnic background.”

An X poster going by the moniker Hambrose Bierce wrote, “I didn’t catch your article about the Olympics grappling with Kenyan supremacy in marathon running for some reason.”

Let’s pursue this line of thought for a moment: why have the diversity racists not judged non-white societies to be guilty of a lack of diversity? Have they raised the complaint that China’s Winter Olympic team includes no black Africans? That there is a glaring absence of Asians on Saudi Arabia’s team? That South Africa’s Winter Olympics team is utterly devoid of Hispanics? That the Olympic teams for Nigeria, Ethiopia, Uganda, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Cameroon, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad, Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia, DR Congo, Republic of Congo, Angola, Mozambique, Zambia, Malawi, Botswana, Lesotho, Eswatini, and Namibia have never included a single white athlete?

Diversity is not the issue; whiteness is the issue. What the diversity racists deeply resent is that winter sports remain predominantly white globally. The diversity racists don’t care about diversity writ large; they won’t even be satisfied with fair demographic representation. The goal is to eliminate white predominance in any field, from winter sports to the English countryside. That is the ugly truth behind the neo-Marxist obsession with diversity and inclusion: white people collectively belong to the oppressor class while all non-whites are the oppressed, and social justice can only be achieved by upending and reversing that dynamic.

This evil obsession in the media with demonizing people of European descent and dismantling the chimera of “whiteness” will only end when all these racists are purged from news organizations (the recent firing of 1/3 of the Washington Post’s newsroom was a good start). We must demand zero tolerance in the news media – and in every other arena, for that matter, from education to entertainment to government office – for the scourge of ideological racism.

Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior.