The Patriot Post® · Leftmedia Frets Over Whiteness at Winter Olympics

With the Winter Olympic Games in Milan Cortina, Italy, beginning this week, the Associated Press has identified a “problem.” It turns out that these Winter Olympic Games are too white, and the AP is not concerned about too much snow. No, the Leftmedia outlet has noticed that the European nations’ teams, from countries like those in historically white Scandinavia, are packed with a bunch of white-skinned athletes.

Apparently, the AP finds it troubling that Sweden’s national Olympic team is filled with Swedes.

In an article titled, “Europe’s rising diversity is not reflected at the Winter Olympics. Culture plays a big role,” the AP bemoans the fact that, despite a massive influx of immigrants primarily from northern Africa and the Middle East, Europe’s national teams’ athletes remain predominantly ethnically representative of these countries’ native majority populations. Among Sweden’s 10 million people, two million are foreign-born, yet there are few brown faces among the nation’s Olympic athletes.

The AP then highlights Maryan Hashi, a member of Sweden’s ski team and a 30-year-old immigrant from Somalia, who emigrated with her parents to the northern European country when she was 14. The article notes that Hashi struggled with culture shock upon arriving in her new home, but she was eventually introduced to skiing at the local ski resort near her town and fell in love with the sport.

It’s a similar tale of the challenges of cultural integration that is replete throughout American history. But America was and is a unique place where one’s ethnicity does not identify or define one as an American.

However, the same has not been the case for Europe’s nations. Being Swedish, French, or English was much more about one’s ethnic identity, history, and culture than about one’s regional or geopolitical location. Only in the last couple of decades, with mass migration from Northern Africa and the Middle East, have European nations been challenged to answer the question of what makes someone European.

But thanks to the myth of multiculturalism, the question of national versus ethnic identity is increasingly coming to a head.

For the AP, the concern of pushing forward the inherently racist ideology of diversity, equity, and inclusion presupposes any notion that a Swedish Olympic team being filled with Swedes is a problem.

That Sweden has allowed migrants to immigrate is not the primary issue. That migrants want to immigrate to Sweden is not the problem, either, as long as it is their aim and goal to assimilate into the culture of their new home, as Hashi has apparently done.

Where the AP goes wrong is that it places the onus on the native population to accommodate immigrants’ cultural sensibilities rather than on immigrants to adapt to and assimilate into their new home. The article laments that while Sweden’s youth-targeted ski program, “which since 2008 has reached an estimated 30,000 children every year and offers students free equipment and access to slopes,” is open to any youth, it doesn’t specifically target the children of immigrants.

Opportunity is a good thing, but apparently, that’s not enough for DEI-obsessed leftists. Rather than foster the unity that the Olympics are meant to create, they’d rather fret that Sweden’s Olympic Team is too white.