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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.
Was it one teacher or multiple? I live in a fairly progressive US state, but I definitely had a one or two backwards teachers with axes to grind.
This is a bit of a friend-of-a-friend story, so it is difficult to evaluate the veracity but here goes.
I once met a woman from Germany (2011, so some time ago now). Her friend had been to the US via some school exchange program. If I recall correctly, the state she went to was Texas but I could be wrong. Anyway, the teacher of the class this friend went to still thought that Adolf Hitler was the ruler of Germany, so she had instructed all students to stand up, do a Nazi salute and say "Heil Hitler" when she first entered the class room. She immediately left the class room, crying.
From what I remember, this supposedly happened a few years prior to me meeting this person and being told the story, so maybe 2008? I can only really vouch for the first part of this story, I was really told this. I cannot know if the rest is true, but I believed her back then at least.
Long story short, there are some backwards people on this world indeed.
My civics and history teachers ware more subtle. Occasional mentions of a news article about some welfare queen, how great Disney was for Times Square, how great it is to be invaded by America(Japan was their only example), or how the Walton heirs were the richest people behind Bill Gates(they weren't). I think one of the biggest Aged Like Milk comments was how real estate was such a great and sound investment. This was around 2003.
Meanwhile, I only heard one mention of climate change from the science teachers in those four years. I think the biggest lesson I got from school was to never trust authority and always press for sources.
There are some gullible people in this world as well.
How on earth is someone supposed to know details about the Hitler salute and not know that 1. The US was a war with him 2. That he was only the ruler 60 years past.
Not only that but addressing someone as their head of state isn't a thing. Nobody calls Indians Modi, or British people Sunak.
Your story is either that of a cruel joke or completely fabricated.
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Just the one.
There was mention in a textbook of native Americans having slightly different shaped teeth, sorta scoop shaped on the inside to be good at scraping stuff. Can confirm tho, my teeth are a little scoopy, am a bit native American.
While it wouldn't be weird for there to be slightly different bone shapes between ethnicities, it's concerning that it would be part of a grade school curriculum and not an advance college course for dentists or forensics.
It wasn't fully without context. We were learning how native Americans were able to tan hides without tanneries. One of the methods that they used is to scrape the skins clean and some other stuff that I don't remember because it was like 5th grade or something, damn part of that involve them scraping the skins with their teeth, which were specifically adapted and well suited for the task.
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?
Northern Europe perspective: This was a minor but ongoing part of public discourse until well into the 90s, to my recollection.
It didn't take real root, and my theory of that is that our racists are generally fascists who consider physical strength and fitness to be high values. Intellect and arts are for weaklings. Going into detail on how the Africans had an advantage on speed, strength and agility but were still somehow inferior required too much mental gymnastics.
Classic fascist narrative: The enemy is both strong and dangerous, and weak and dumb.
One time the kkk created a baseball team and lost to a all black team. I bet some of the kkk members were saying shit like that afterwards lol.
Have you ever tried to steal a base in a full length robe?
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'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.
"they (a group of people) are bred different" then that's racist
But American slavers quite literally bred black people. Yes, like animals. Hell, making it here on a slave ship could be called a form of breeding. Those ships were a perfect hell where only the strongest survived.
Jimmy was callous, out of place, racist, all that, but there was a solid grain of truth in there.
What they don’t tell you: a lot of the “breeding” (rape) of enslaved people wasn’t based in modern understanding of genetics, and instead was based on insane shit like ‘everyone from this ethnic group must be better at growing rice.’
While undoubtedly horrible, I wouldn’t expect the Middle Passage to be more of a selective force for a population than any other disaster (war, famine, plague, etc) where healthy, strong people have the highest chance of survival. Especially when you consider that the majority of Black Americans have at least some white ancestry, which would contribute as well to their athletic ability along with their black ancestry.
Ah!
wouldn’t expect the Middle Passage to be more of a selective force for a population than any other disaster (war, famine, plague, etc) where healthy, strong people have the highest chance of survival
Never looked at it that way! Still, I'd call the Atlantic crossing to be especially brutal. Given my druthers, I'd chance any of the four horseman over a ride in a transatlantic slave ship.
Something to think on, as well as:
he majority of Black Americans have at least some white ancestry
Knew that one, it's obvious to us Americans, but still, some good food for thought.
Slightly beside the topic, did you know that Barbados and some other islands in the West Indies were prized because their location was directly in the path of the prevailing winds/currents that brought ships from Africa? As one person put it, you could practically launch the ship from the port in Africa and do nothing and it would likely end up in Barbados
Most Asians are lactose intolerant.
Oops, I did a racism.
Not the same thing though is it?
Not really.
Why are most Asians lactose intolerant? Why isn't their earwax the same as mine? Why are their teeth shaped differently? It's because they're bred different.
Acknowledging differences between various groups is not racist. Treating people differently based on the group they belong to is. Making assumptions about an individual based on the group you've assigned to them is.
That’s a pretty big leap to go from “most Asians are lactose intolerant” to “they’re bred different”.
I get what you’re saying, and mostly agree. But “they’re bred different” implies some sort of sub-human deliberate motive beyond just a consequence of a population living in isolation for centuries.
Having different genetics is fundamentally different from being "bred" like cattle
They evolved in different environments and over time overcame different things maybe? Like how white people absorb vitamin D like sponges because they get eight minutes of sun a year.
Guy who thinks it’s appropriate to say black people are physically different from other people due to slavery: I bet you would even call ME racist for wildly misrepresenting the point!
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).
This is why having a gentle hand in conversations about racism can really serve to change minds. The whole thing is such a sticky wicket anyway, it’s too easy to allow anger to control the course of discussion.
How DARE you?!?
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.
"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?
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.
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.
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this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2023
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