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this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2023
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No Stupid Questions
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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.
Here's his quote:
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.
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!
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:
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.
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.
Having different genetics is fundamentally different from being "bred" like cattle
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!
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?!?
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.
"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?
I mean, eugenics is wrong because deciding which are and arent good traits in humanity is inherently dehumanizing and a blurry ass fucking line, not because humans are unbreedable. I dont think merely mentioning that slavers would treat their slaves like property is racist, as even though I'm not super well read on the matter, they probably did?