Did racist use the "biological advantage" argument when Black athletes started competing alongside white athletes?
Did racist use the "biological advantage" argument when Black athletes started competing alongside white athletes?
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.
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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.