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.
Is that really true though? Many of these sports myths hold true until they suddenly don’t. Tall people were believed to be awful sprinters until Usain Bolt somehow just smashed everyone. Koreans nerds were the supposed chosen SC2 players but now it’s a chad from Italy
Yes, those people are outliers. Usain Bolt especially is a genetic rarity, being as tall as he is with crazy amounts of fast twitch muscles.
It’s true, but some people go way too far with it. All it means is that people of West African descent tend to have more fast twitch muscle fibers. You could be white as sour cream and get lucky with your genetics and end up the same way. It’s having those muscle fibers that’s the advantage, not having west african heritage. In sports like basketball or sprinting where fast twitch fibers are a big advantage, you tend to see populations of people who are predisposed to that getting over-represented.
Wasn’t there a basketball coach that got fired for saying basically this, albeit not as…elegantly?
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.
I remember my friend’s mom telling me this when I was like 6 and then I told my mom what I learned and she told me not to listen to that lady.
My dad told me as a kid black folks have more fast-twitch muscle fibers.
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?
Possibly, though the difference in strength and endurance between a male and female is much, much larger than between two different races. Male high school athletes outperform Olympic medal winning female athletes in almost every category. The difference is stark.
Yes, that is true until you are 2+ years on estrogen and testosterone blockers, then your advantages go away.
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.
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.
Yeah, using “black” as a noun cleared that up pretty quickly
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 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.
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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Black people. White people.
I’m English, when you call people just a color it’s degrading. So we add the ‘people’.
If you’re English, then you misspelt the word ‘colour’.
Same in the US now, but in our case it’s because although ‘people’ is clearly self-evident if you’re talking about a person/people, during the time of segregation those were the terms used - coloreds & whites. Whites Only Water Fountain. Whites Only Bathroom. Coloreds at the back of the bus, only Whites up front.
https://seeuwiki.com/jolina-dela-cruz-boyfriend-parents-height-age/ Jolina Dela Cruz is the asian-filipino athlete who will soon create a history, then you will forget black and white athletes talks, she is best
