So, is slavery responsible for the athletic performance of African Americans?

[cthulu2016]

15. No, not slavery

Almost all the top sprinters in the world are of sub-saharan African descent and that's just what it is. It isn't due to selective breeding during slavery or any of that nonsense. (Who would have been seeking foot-speed? I would think slavers would seek strength and endurance, but isn't foot speed kind of the last thing a slaver would want in a population that would like to escape? Sheesh. I never got the whole slavery/eugenics argument about foot speed.)

It just happens to be a (positive and very slight) trait of an ethnic group.

There is nothing sinister about the fact that different ethnic groups have slight physical variations. On average Watusi are tall. Arabs are hairier than Japanese. Samoans tend to be thick-set. Chinese people tend to have straight back hair. Europeans have bigger noses than most folks. These are tendencies... statistical averages.

Some group will have a slightly higher or lower incidence of a certain cancer, a slightly different reaction to sodium... whatever.

Unless a person is a crazy arch-racist who insists on assessing human worth in terms of incidence of hypertension, or hair texture, or resistance to skin cancer then the slight (average) physical differences among groups is nothing scary.

Slight physical variations in a population lead to extreme effects at the statistical tails. For instance, men are only a little taller than women on average but the overwhelming majority of seven foot tall people are men.

Similarly, people of sub-saharan African descent seem to have some tiny average advantage in the composition of muscles and that tiny advantage becomes quite noticable when you narrow it down to the top 50 or 100 fastest people in the world.

There is probably a lot of prejudice (prejudgement) in sports because the fact that the very fastest sprinters are black makes people think black=fast, and that's not true. There are plenty of slow-running black people. There are lots of fast white kids.

The fact that racists will factor anything into a racist world view is just what it is.

There is nothing wrong with running well. I wish I ran better. But when a Ron Paul newsletter talks about how fleet young black men are while stealing your purse it is racism.

But that's racism for you. In the hands of a racist the fact that Barack Obama is intelligent becomes a slur!