Barbelith Underground > Laboratory > Slavery and American Sport

The first time I encountered this argument:

As we all know, slave-owners broke up the family unit: they would separate husbands and wives, and treat their slaves like breeding stock. As we also know, there's an epidemic of sexual irresponsibility among black men—leading to a whole generation being raised in single-parent homes. Is it possible that black men are chronically unfaithful and incapable of monogamy because they have been conditioned to be thus by generations of slavery?

which Jack Fear describes as another fallacious racist canard, this time wrapped in pseudosociological language

was in works by African-American feminists, and used as an anti-racist argument - basically, the reason African-Americans and African-Caribbean peoples tend not to conform to normative ideals of the nuclear family as much as either white people or Africans-whose-ancestors-weren't-enslaved isn't because they are somehow genetically predisposed to "irresponsibility", but because of the way that their culture and family structure was destroyed by slavery.

(Of course, it wasn't put as simplistically as in that sarcastic one-paragraph description of it, and nor were heavily normatively loaded phrases such as "sexual irresponsibility" or "chronically unfaithful and incapable of monogamy", but with that moralistic language replaced by more neutral sociological language it was essentially the same argument.)

That aside, the selective-breeding-in-slavery thing... I remember something in a book that I studied in school for English (probably at about 13/14). Unfortunately i can't remember the author or title, but it was a book by a female African-American author, (probably) aimed at a teenage audience and set in the segregation-era Southern US. There was a peripheral character who was very tall, strong and dark-skinned, and was referred to by another African-American character as being "from breeded stock" - there was then an explanation of selective breeding.

Something like that being put in a novel obviously isn't evidence that deliberate selective breeding on slave plantations actually happened, but it's at least evidence that, among African-American communities in the Southern US, it's a familiar and plausible concept. Knowing what else happened in the slave plantations of the US and the Caribbean (which were an order of magnitude different from any other form of slavery in known human history), it seems plausible, if horrifying, to me too.

I scratched my head at this: the assumption that the achievements of blacks in America must somehow be because of (rather than despite) their treatment at the hands of the white man, until i realised that i was coming at it from a somewhat opposite angle to Jack Fear (probably because of my own specificity as a disabled person whose experience of sport at school was mostly one of torture, and therefore finds it extremely hard to think of "athleticism" as a positive achievement).

I think the "dumb jock" thing comes into play here, and i think it's wrong to see that archetype as being one of as recent an origin as the reviewer quoted by Grant sees it. The false idea that physical strength correlates negatively to intellectual prowess (what i've heard referred to as the "Hulk-to-Hawking continuum") is, AFAIK, mostly one arising from the pseudoscientific ideas used by colonial-era "sociobiologists" to justify racism, colonialism and slavery, the "reasoning" being:

a) non-whites are physically stronger than whites
b) an increase of physical strength in a human being correlates to a decrease in intellectual ability
c) the "direction" of human evolution is from physical strength and mental weakness towards physical weakness and mental strength
d) non-whites must, therefore, be less intelligent than whites (because of a) and b) ) and belong to an earlier stage of human evolution (because of b) and c) ), and so "inferior" to whites, which justifies invasion of their lands, enslavement, etc.

(Of course this is pseudoscience because it is based on a completely mistaken view of evolution and because the correlation b) simply does not exist...)

IMO it's this archetype which survives today in the form of the stereotype of the "dumb jock" and the assumption that athleticism and intelligence are mutually exclusive. (It can also be seen in characters like Lenny from Of Mice And Men and the commonly held idea that mentally disabled people have "superhuman strength", which IMO informs a lot of the techniques of disablist abuse found in institutions "for" such people.)

(I'm tempted to spin off here into a discussion of Cartesian/Enlightenment ideas of mind and body as antagonistic opposites to each other, but that's probably tangential enough to deserve another thread, probably in Head Shop rather than Lab)

I think it's reasonable to assume that if plantation owners were selectively breeding their slaves according to a "eugenic" programme, they would have been breeding for both increased strength and decreased intelligence, and have seen those characteristics as linked together. Of course, the key thing is that if - and also the question of whether such attempts at selection could have been successful in as few generations as there were during the historical period of American slavery. My (slightly sketchy) knowledge of genetics suggests not - but i don't think it's necessarily racist to consider the possibility...