{"id":24951,"date":"2012-08-24T21:21:17","date_gmt":"2012-08-24T21:21:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=24951"},"modified":"2012-08-24T21:21:17","modified_gmt":"2012-08-24T21:21:17","slug":"%e2%80%9cslave-genes%e2%80%9d-myth-must-die","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=24951","title":{"rendered":"\u201cSlave genes\u201d myth must die"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cSlave genes\u201d myth must die<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Salon<\/a>
\n2012-07-24<\/p>\n

Amy Bass<\/a><\/strong>, Associate Professor of History
\nThe College of New Rochelle, New Rochelle, New York<\/em><\/p>\n

Michael Johnson links African-American sprinters to slavery, and revisits a particularly ugly pseudo-science<\/em><\/p>\n

In 1988, Jimmy \u201cThe Greek\u201d Snyder<\/a> (in)famously stated that the prowess of African-American football players could be traced to slavery, saying \u201cthe black is a better athlete to begin with because he\u2019s been bred to be that way \u2026 [They] jump higher and run faster.\u201d The reaction to such obviously racist remarks was fast and furious: Amid the uproar, CBS Sports fired him. So when Olympic gold medalist Michael Johnson<\/a> predicted this month that African-American and West Indian track athletes would dominate the London Olympics because of the genes of their slave ancestors, I paid little attention, thinking there was no way this could become a viable conversation yet again. \u201cAll my life I believed I became an athlete through my own determination, but it\u2019s impossible to think that being descended from slaves hasn\u2019t left an imprint through the generations,\u201d Johnson told the Daily Mail<\/em>. \u201cDifficult as it was to hear, slavery has benefited descendants like me\u2014I believe there is a superior athletic gene in us.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a historian, what I find to be stunning about what he said is the claim that the supremacy of black athletes in track had never \u201cbeen discussed openly before.\u201d Actually, with his words, Johnson plunged himself into a century-old debate that seems to rear its (rather ugly) head every four years, just in time for the opening of sport\u2019s largest global stage. Johnson supported his theory with the example of the men\u2019s 100m final at the Beijing Olympics: Three of the eight finalists came from Jamaica, including record-breaking winner Usain Bolt<\/a>, and two from Trinidad; African-Americans Walter Dix<\/a> and Doc Patton<\/a> and Dutch sprinter Churandy Martina<\/a>, who hails from Curacao, rounded out the line.<\/p>\n

But racial assumptions don\u2019t work as easily as simply noting that four years ago all eight finalists in the quest to be \u201cworld\u2019s fastest man\u201d likely had ancestors who were slaves, because race is, well, never simple, but rather works as an amoebic identity formation that changes throughout history. It\u2019s a social construction deeply entangled with definitions of class, gender, sexuality and so on…<\/p>\n

…Such scientists first engaged in racialized theories of athletic aptitude in the 1930s, during the large-scale breakthrough of African-Americans in track and field:\u00a0 following DeHart Hubbard\u2019s<\/a> gold medal at the Paris Olympics in 1924; the success stories of Ed Gordon<\/a>, Eddie Tolan<\/a> and Ralph Metcalfe<\/a>; and, of course, Jesse Owens\u2019<\/a> legendary performance at the Berlin Games in 1936. Although the number of African-American track champions would greatly decline in subsequent decades, the belief in some sort of quantifiable connection between race and physical ability would not wane, with scientists creating comparative analyses between \u201cwhite\u201d and \u201cblack\u201d calf muscles, bone densities, heel lengths and so on. \u201cIs there some difference between Negroes and white in proportions of the body,\u201d asked Iowa State physical educator Eleanor Metheny, \u201cwhich gives the Negro an advantage in certain types of athletic performance?\u201d<\/p>\n

While one such study was plagued with what to do about subjects of \u201cmixed parentage,\u201d and Metheny admitted that \u201cNegro\u201d was heterogeneous by its very constitution, few scientists defined \u201cNegro\u201d or \u201cwhite\u201d beyond skin color, never pausing to wonder how they quantified categories that were subjective to begin with.\u00a0<\/strong> These scientists easily translated the racially infused stereotypes of the 19thcentury minstrel stage, in which physical traits such as fat lips, wide-open red mouths and large noses existed alongside the perceived innate ability to dance and sing, to have athletic bodies.\u00a0 In doing so, these studies \u2013 which took place in labs at Harvard, Vanderbilt and Duke \u2013 produced some of sport\u2019s most venerable racist convictions: Black athletes are more adept at sprinting, more relaxed, make better running backs than quarterbacks, and jump farther, all of which reduced their athleticism to a solely physical condition with no room for intellectual capacity, training nor discipline.<\/p>\n

One notable exception was W. Montague Cobb<\/a>, Howard University, the first black physical anthropologist in the United States. His extensive work on \u201cthe physical anthropology of the American Negro<\/a>\u201d never referenced slavery directly, but did make several assertions regarding the environmental and physical challenges African-Americans historically faced as a means for survival in the modern world. Yet Cobb, whose most famous subject was Owens himself, refused to simplify the complexities of race, which he insisted could not be a fixed category because of \u201cinterbreeding.\u201d Indeed, he concluded, Owens was more \u201cCaucasoid rather than Negroid in type\u201d based on measurements of his foot, heel bone and calves. Jesse Owens, according to Cobb, did not have the body of a \u201cNegro star.\u201d…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cSlave genes\u201d myth must die Salon 2012-07-24 Amy Bass, Associate Professor of History The College of New Rochelle, New Rochelle, New York Michael Johnson links African-American sprinters to slavery, and revisits a particularly ugly pseudo-science In 1988, Jimmy \u201cThe Greek\u201d Snyder (in)famously stated that the prowess of African-American football players could be traced to slavery, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1649,12,6940,10],"tags":[11642,11643,10962,7222],"class_list":["post-24951","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-articles","category-slavery","category-uk","tag-amy-bass","tag-michael-johnson","tag-salon","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24951","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24951"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24951\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}