Note this story, about France’s World Cup team. It relates the story of how France, in the aftermath of Jesse Owens’ domination of the 1936 Olympics, conducted a search for black athletes of their own in French West Africa. They found that the black inhabitants of their colonies displayed no special aptitude for sport, which wasn’t surprising considering their general undernourishment and impoverishment.
Nurture matters.
What always surprises me about these discussions is that it’s rare for anyone to consider that any “advantage” that Blacks in the US may have is not because they are African, or descendant from some “selective” slave population, but because they are mostly mixed race people.
Now, I’m not saying that Blacks do have some physical advantage, but if it turns out they do, then one possibility would be that the mixing of the two populations produced a population that was better at certain things (on average) than either parent population was (on average).
Pretty much this idea. While my example isn’t entirely on point, my brother was the intel officer for US Navy SEAL Team 4, for a couple of years. One day, when I was visiting him, he was the Duty Officer [Officer Of the Deck, OOD, in Navy parlance] for the day. It was a weekend, so the OOD didn’t have all that much to do, except be there (at team HQ) to handle things that came up. Instead of leaving me at his house to find something to do by myself, we both went to the team HQ, and used the nice video equipment in the intel vault to watch rented videos. According to regs, there was nowhere in the entire HQ that I could be left alone (no, not even the bathroom), so when he had OOD type things to do for a few minutes, he always had to hand me off to one of the on-duty enlisted sealies to “babysit” me. NONE of them were the “Arnie” or “Rambo” type musclemen. They were ALL average size, average weight people. Those are the type of people who can survive, endure, and succeed in “withstand[ing] long-term environmental stress” (such as SEAL selection and training). That’s why it’s the “average”. It’s what our ancestors survived and succeeded under. Those are the ones who survived the Middle Passage. Not the “Super-Athletes”. In other words, if you subject a population to the kind of stresses that American blacks were subjected to, in becoming “American”, it’s the “muddled middle” you are selecting for, not the “Super-Athlete”.
That is a very good point.
Obviously, the weaker, smaller, less intelligent lost in their inter-tribal wars that resulted in their capture and selling them into British Colonial slavery.
The stronger smarter tougher better fighting blacks in Africa, their decendents, are still there because they were of the tribes that won.
You’re assuming that they won due to physical superiority, and not numbers, luck, better leadership, or some other non-genetic factor. For that matter, you are implicitly implying that one side, the “superior” side won all the time instead of tribes winning some battles and losing others.
Obviously you know absolutely fuck all about history, or war. Jaysus.
Quite mate, quite so. The entire degree of mixedness gets bloody well overlooked when Americans go on and on about blacks. Probably because you lot haven’t have much direct exposure to Africa - West Indians and Black Americans have to be among the world’s champion mutts. Asian, African, American Indian, European, etc. all mixed in over a centureis long process.
But what do the closet racists drone on about? The African component.
Their whole line of argument is pseudo-scientific sophistry Boring, very boring.
We tend to forget that African-American ≠ African. African-American = mixed ancestry, averaging about 20% European. Just look at one of the African soccer teams at the world cup. They don’t look at all like a team of African-Americans-- not because of any “selection” during slavery, but because of admixture with non-African populations.
A lot of white people of the day worked pretty non-stop. If you were on a farm, you were working from sun-up to sun-down. All through history, in point of fact, most people anywhere on the world were pretty damned busy from sun-up to sun-down at whatever it was that kept them alive. Looking back at history as being the history of Alexander Hamilton and Oliver Cromwell is pretty non-representative of the life of most people – though of course, most people didn’t shape history, they just hoped to survive through it.
On the old frontier in the US, something like 1/3rd of all homesteaders perished during their first winter. Are Californians disproportionately represented in sports? 40% of indentured servants perished before gaining their freedom. Are the Irish disproportionately represented in sports?
To summarize my point, all of humanity was shaped to be the strongest, to survive through a famine, to have the endurance to work all day, etc. by the cruel mistress called Life before 1900. Hardship and death by failure to meet that hardship wasn’t something that was limited to the slaves. It has almost certainly shaped mankind, but white people haven’t been spared from it and black people haven’t gotten more than anyone else.
The one thing I can buy is the idea of people of African descent whose major recent African ancestry comes from the Savannah might be better set up as runners, just by the body type that seems to be dominant in those places (long legged - presuming as I am that long-legged is favourable to running). But that’s not “Black Africa” it’s a specific climate zone. Forest folks are right stubby people.
Then - apparently, I am a druid.
Eh? What do druids have to do with West Africa mate?
I am a right stubby person. So stubby that I must be a right foresty person, like a druid.
I think the primary question here would be the degree of de facto polygamy among the slaves. If social setup allowed only a small percentage of males fathered a large percentage of the children, it’s easy to guess what sort of males that would be - the strongest, richest (in whatever sort of stuff they were paid/rewarded with), most respected and “well-connected” in the community. Which, among agricultural laborers, all boils down to, once again, the physically strongest. The sort of guy who does the most work and sometimes gets responsibility as overseer from the master. By contrast, if they had either lifelong or at least sufficiently long monogamous relationships/marriages, there wouldn’t be comparable selection.
The bit about “rape” by whites might be relevant if it American black athletes were actually mixed race. Is that in fact the case? Or are the mixed race blacks busy working in nice professional jobs while leaving sports to the unmixed ones?
Incidentally, African Americans are a lot less mixed with whites than let’s say black Brazilians or people in the Dominican Republic. It’s just that Brazilians “celebrate” it while Americans “repent in sackloth and ashes” over it. Well, and did Brazilian slavery “breed” Brazilian blacks to be better athletes? LOL 
Originally Posted by Susanann
That is a very good point.
Obviously, the weaker, smaller, less intelligent lost in their inter-tribal wars that resulted in their capture and selling them into British Colonial slavery.
The stronger smarter tougher better fighting blacks in Africa, their decendents, are still there because they were of the tribes that won.
Yep!!
Probably 99% of the time, the tougher bigger stronger won and sold the defeated into slavery - so the weakest came to America.
I really doubt that there was any real difference in leadership, or technology between the different tribes hundreds of years ago. African tribes were never known for their “equality” or their " military balance".
The tribes that survived and stayed in Africa, were the fittest = survival of the fittest was a universal law.
Winning some battles and losing others? I think a tribe would have to win a bunch of victories in order to be able to make contact, and establish trading deals with the slave traders. The idea that if a tribe wins 1 out of 10 battles and then is able to sell the usual winner into slavery is too big a stretch to even imagine. It is a figment of someones imagination that a losing weak tribe could occasionally win and do a flip flop - that would be akin to some other army winning a battle against the mighty Roman army and selling some Romans into slavery - it doesnt happen.
Weak tribes that consistently lost tribal wars are the ones that ended up in America.
Bottom line: we got the weaker runts
I shan’t touch this long fantasy at all
Jaysus, are you not paying attention? Mace already noted the baseline is something like 10% mixed European ancestry on average, never mind the American Indian, Asian, Chinese, whatnot.
Any American black is bloody well mixed race, It’s damned bloody obvious to anyone who’s got real exposure to Africa.
Are they? Or are you merely asserting that.
Druids were merely religious figures in Celtic communities, which were mostly certainly farmers. Doesn’t make them forest people.
But has fuck all to do with my comment, besides being daft as a line of thinking.
Probably 99% of the time you say idiotic things that have fuck all to do with any history or any sense of how wars operate.
Fitness has fuck all to do with how you get caught in a slave raid, or if you army gets ambushed and defeated, and your villages get sold off into slavery.
By this sad and pitiful logic, Western European “fitness” must have been undermined by the taking of Slavic slaves (obviously less fit since they were taken as slaves, defeated in war,…) sold off into European.
Utter tripe.
False, utterly false. Jaysus what the fuck leads people to write such ignorant tripe. West Africa had extensive kingdoms and empires in the Sahel from the Middle Ages forward. (Mali, old Ghana, etc).
Bottom line: Writing bigotry under the cover of utter and proactive ignorance is really quite sad.
The thing about a selective breeding program is that it’s selective. I’ve never heard any evidence that any slave owners were selective in slave breeding. As far as they were concerned every slave was an asset who could be sold. So slave owners went for quantity rather than quality. All slaves were encouraged to breed - the fast and the slow, the strong and the weak, the sick and the healthy. So there would have been no net improvement in the overall slave population.
You’d be wrong on these assumptions. European slave traders would deal with specific tribes. (For obvious reasons, usually those on the coast.) And these tribes would trade slaves captured from other tribes for European goods. And the favorite goods were firearms and ammunition.
So a tribe that started selling slaves got access to better weapons. And having better weapons let them win more battles and get access to more slaves to sell.
Or better, the European traders would deal with specific States, as the Akan and other coastal states were kingdoms, not stone age tribes.
(Of course above by this Susanne there is some nonsense about British slave trading, showing utter ignorance, as the British traders got into slaving late and got out early. It was the Portuguese and the Spanish - and the French - that were the biggest traders - although Dutch and English had their sad part in the story).
But spot on, there is absolutely nothing about a group’s “fitness” to have the ‘luck’ to have the Kingdom’s leadership negotiate a trading deal with the Portuguese for muskets, which then gives them massive firepower advantage over neighbours. That’s sheer dumb luck. But even when you have two kingdoms cross supplied by, for example by English and Portuguese fighting proxy wars, it says pretty much fuck all about the “fitness” of any given village population that a bunch of slave raiders with muskets falls upon them, any more than it says something about their fitness if their bloody coastline gets hit by a hurricane. It’s profoundly ignorant to make such an idiotic superficial argument.
All this leaves aside MAce’s excellent observation regarding the mixed background of all blacks in the Americas. Americans run on and on about blacks as if their population was something purely plucked from Africa. It’s bloody obvious say in contrasting West Indians and Nigerians in London that these two sets of folks are not of the same. For all the Americas you have a pot pourri of Asian, European, Africa (from all over the Americas facing coast for that matter), American Indian and whatnot ancestry mixing over centuries.
And yet all America racialists fixate on is the African ancestry. Right stupid analytics that it.
Or better, the European traders would deal with specific States, as the Akan and other coastal states were kingdoms, not stone age tribes.
(Of course above by this Susanne there is some nonsense about British slave trading, showing utter ignorance, as the British traders got into slaving late and got out early. It was the Portuguese and the Spanish - and the French - that were the biggest traders - although Dutch and English had their sad part in the story).
But spot on, there is absolutely nothing about a group’s “fitness” to have the ‘luck’ to have the Kingdom’s leadership negotiate a trading deal with the Portuguese for muskets, which then gives them massive firepower advantage over neighbours. That’s sheer dumb luck. But even when you have two kingdoms cross supplied by, for example by English and Portuguese fighting proxy wars, it says pretty much fuck all about the “fitness” of any given village population that a bunch of slave raiders with muskets falls upon them, any more than it says something about their fitness if their bloody coastline gets hit by a hurricane. It’s profoundly ignorant to make such an idiotic superficial argument.
All this leaves aside MAce’s excellent observation regarding the mixed background of all blacks in the Americas. Americans run on and on about blacks as if their population was something purely plucked from Africa. It’s bloody obvious say in contrasting West Indians and Nigerians in London that these two sets of folks are not of the same. For all the Americas you have a pot pourri of Asian, European, Africa (from all over the Americas facing coast for that matter), American Indian and whatnot ancestry mixing over centuries.
And yet all America racialists fixate on is the African ancestry. Right stupid analytics that it.
I might point out that my comment was a ‘joke’ or ‘jest’. In future, I will utilize the available comic markers (:)) to help you discriminate these.
Other than that, have at 'em, you’re doing great!