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.
I can’t remember a specific example, but that does sound familiar. I remember someone claiming a possible reason for their strength was that slavers would breed slaves like animals for certain traits.
I think someone who is forced to do hard labor since birth of course is gonna be stronger than a master who can’t wipe his own ass without 15 servants helping him, so they gotta think blacks are naturally stronger.
Not to mention the fact that all of this person’s family are people who were strong enough to survive a miserable voyage, chained up down below. Many people didn’t survive that trip, but the ones who did obviously tended to be stronger and healthier than those who didn’t.
From a genetics standpoint, the evolutionary pressures in Africa resulted in an increase of the populations agility and leaner abdominal muscles when compared to Caucasians. Europes environmental pressures selected for denser and more elaborate abdominal muscles but being less agile overall when the genomes are stacked up. Just to be clear, I’ve been a member of the Anti Racist Action for over a decade. Anyone who associates any personal or physical attributes on an individual without knowing them is ignorant and disingenuine. This is an extremely short sighted move and it literally makes life harder. But, there are some biological variations between genomes which help demonstrate why people get so lost in these outlandish generalizations.
The famous example you’re thinking of is Jimmy Snyder, aka Jimmy the Greek, a sports commentator and sports betting expert who used to work for CBS sports. He was interviewed as part of a series about civil rights in the US, and the interviewer was sort of expecting him to say something pleasant about black folks’ success in athletics opening doors for education and leadership, etc.
Instead he made some pretty astonishing claims that were intensely racist.
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