• 420clownpeen [they/them,any]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Ultimately, the event was "poorly organized" and "plainly a shambles," however organizer William John McGee, head of a Smithsonian Institution division at the time, nevertheless concluded that the 1904 Savage Olympics "established in quantitative measure the inferiority of primitive peoples…in that coordination of mind and body which seems to mark the outcome of human development and measure the attainment of human excellence."[13]

    I disagree. In the full context, once again one can read it multiple ways. One can read it the way you have, where McGee's "credentials" are emphasized, or you can read it in a way that emphasizes his obvious self-serving bias as the organizer of the disgusting spectacle. And the citation that the portion of the article points to is plainly left-wing as well.

    Exhibition organizers hoped to demonstrate to the world that ethnic groups could be definitively ranked according to biological and cultural markers of civilization –– and that in this ranking, the United States came out on top. To accomplish this goal, they turned to a perhaps unusual tool: sports. Products and proponents of the masculine-coded, hyper-militaristic ideology of American imperialism, the Fair organizers believed that athletic competitions among the inhabitants of the “living exhibitions” could serve as a useful microcosm for testing the martial worth of a nation at the level of the individual (male) citizen.

    But really that's my point: it doesn't even matter if the person who wrote that portion is a Nazi or not, because writing in a way that belies any sort of opinion, even one as basically acceptable as "white supremacy is bad and unscientific" is verboten on Wikipedia. And without being allowed to establish a moral standard as basic as that, most writing on Wikipedia will allow readers to interpret racists as correct if they have any such inclination.