Given that racists and slavers used the “natural physical strength” of black people to justify putting them on hard labor and some medics still think that blacks has higher resistance to pain, I wonder if when black athletes started to join mixed race sport teams, some racist would have used the same “biological advantage” argument that now transphobes use against trans athletes to claim it was “unfair” for black to compete against whites to justify segregation.
For a while there was a persistent myth that black people had an extra muscle in their leg that allowed them to perform better at sports.
It’s kind of similar to phrenology in trying to justify racism.
While there is no extra muscle, it is factually true that people of West African descent tend to have more fast twitch muscle fibers which is a pretty big advantage in many sports.
This is likely why the myth of the extra muscle originated.
This may have been the time when dissecting cadavers was very, very looked down on. It was seen as desecrating the body. So knowledge of the body just wasn’t there.
No, this shit was pretty prevalent in the 90s and I guarantee some people are still parroting it today.
Ergh I’m guilty of repeating this bullshit when I was younger. It had been sold to me as a fact, not in what I perceived was a racist context per se - more a ‘oh cool, lucky them, that makes sense gestures at basketball’ way. Believe me, I get it now. Also, my mum’s black… Where did I get this bullshit from? White men can’t jump?
This was taught to me in grade school. I feel pretty betrayed.
Suffice it to say, I found it dubious even as a child and as an adult, learned better, but WTF.
There was an NFL commentator named Jimmy the Greek who said something like “they are bred to be a better athlete” on air. He was fired shortly thereafter. Can’t remember when it happened though, maybe the mid 1980’s. Not sure if he himself was racist or if he was just saying what popped into his head.
The black is a better athlete to begin with, because he’s been bred to be that way. Because of his high thighs and big thighs that goes up into his back. And they can jump higher and run faster because of their bigger thighs. And he’s bred to be the better athlete because this goes back all the way to the Civil War, when, during the slave trading, the big, the owner, the slave owner would breed his big black to his big woman so that he could have uh big black kid, see. That’s where it all started!
Racist. Definitely racist.
Honestly I think the part of this that surprises me is that he got fired for this… in the 1980s.
I wonder if there’s an ask historians thread on exactly when racism became “denormalized”, if that’s a word.
I’m not trying to be pedantic, but I want to draw your attention to what you said about being unsure about the person’s motives. If a person says something like “they (a group of people) are bred different” then that’s racist. It doesn’t matter if the person is a bigot or openly hates people for their skin color or not; that kind of belief is eugenics and is a racist belief.
Good people, well-intentioned people, can be and are racists, because they are raised with certain ideas and beliefs that are rooted in racism. The things that pop into heir head are racist because they haven’t taken time to look into their own beliefs and understand where they come from, to de-racialize their thinking.
Or, you know, they’re bigots and like having racist thoughts because it serves the bigotry, but that’s a different problem.
“I’m not trying to be pedantic”
You’re just being wrong.
“That’s just racist”
No. Claiming that there is a historical reason behind why black people are better athletes isn’t racism. It’s an attempted description, it’s no different than describing environmental pressures for sickle-cell. (I personally don’t know if the description is correct, but I hear it predominately from very pro-black activists, primarily trying to prove that all black reproduction was actually rape).
“Eugenics and racism”
That’s not an endorsement of eugenics, and eugenics is not the same as racism.
“They’re bigots and like having racist thoughts because it serves the bigotry”
What do you think racism and bigotry are? Isn’t racism a subset of bigotry? How does this statement make sense? Or any of yours for that matter?
Eugenics is not, by itself, racist. It is frequently used inappropriately by people with racist motives, but isn’t necessarily so. For instance, the Ashkenazi Jews used a eugenics program to largely eliminate Tay-Sachs syndrome in their communities, by enforced genetic testing and forbidding marriage (or at least having children) for people that were both carriers of the genetic defect. There was also a strong tradition of arranged marriages, which made it much simpler.
The issue is that racists assume that a particular skin color (or ethnic group) is correlated with, for instance, being a “social parasite”, or some such nonsense. The truth is that behavior is a very complex interplay between environment and genetics, and we simply can’t make any reasonable conclusions about what specific genes will 100% definitely result in some kind of socially unacceptable behaviour, or even if that behaviour isn’t positively adaptive in some other way. We can’t even say which genes will probably result in traits that we currently consider to be negative, because genetics simply isn’t destiny (outside of cases of genetic diseases).
Thinking like this just works against those of us trying to fight racism. Racism is, at its core founded in a belief that some people are inherently more valuable than others, based on ethnicity/how they look.
A factual statement about a group of people can be true or false, but in order to be racist it must also (explicitly or implicitly) say something about those peoples worth.
Saying “group A has lower IQ than group B” can be factually correct, and part in an analysis into why, and how the differences can be evened out. Saying “group X is dumber than group Y” can also be factually correct, but can be said in a context and with an implication that this makes them less valuable as people. Purely based on the statements themselves you can’t tell if either is racist. You need to look at the implications, context, and intentions behind the statement.
One of the horrors of slavery was, in fact, the forced “breeding” of slaves. Even thinking about it makes me feel sick. That doesn’t mean the statement “group X was bred differently from group Y” inherently racist. The racism comes in if that statement is said with the implication that the people in question were subhuman, or otherwise less (or more) valuable as people.
A good example that another commenter mentioned is the Ashkenazi Jews, which systematically eradicated a genetic disorder by tracking who should not have children. Saying “they bred the disease out of the population” may be imprecise and a poor choice of words, but it is not racist. It is a factually correct (albeit poorly phrased) statement about an impressive medical feat that has (presumably) improved a lot of lives.
In order to fight racism you need to be more nuanced than what you are being when you say that “statement X is racist, regardless of the intention behind it”. A statement being poorly phrased can lead to it being misinterpreted, not to it being racist.
It was sort of the opposite at the very start of integrated sports. In the US and UK, at least, it was widely believed that Black men could not play sports simply because they did not, in fact, play (professional) sports. (And of course women were barely allowed to play sport at all in that era.)
Claims that Black people are naturally better at sports came later on, along with reasons why they couldn’t swim, or play tennis or golf, or ride horses, or do any of those sports that coincidentally have more access for kids with wealthy and/or suburban parents.
System justification is an easy game to play. A story for every occasion.
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