I didn't realize there was a thread in progress when I started another thread. Here is my post on that thread:
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The argument seems to be that West African genetic inheritance, supplemented by a brutal, accelerated selection process during New World slavery--only the strongest survive--can account, these many years later, for the fact that Olympic sprint finalists (it is claimed) trace their ancestry back to slaves.
It's a seductively simple theory. It transforms what had been thought a stigma--slave ancestry--into a mark of athletic superiority. "What does not destroy me makes me strong." Nietzsche approves. It thus meets compelling psychological needs.
So here, on the face of it, are some problems with the theory--some questions for Michael Johnson and those who embrace this theory. I offer them in the spirit of open inquiry--and as a literature scholar who has read Herbert Gutman and knows that theories about slavery are a dime a dozen and mean nothing without painstaking factual research:
1) We know that the majority of African American slaves were, at emancipation, of mixed descent. They were no longer "pure African" (although slaveowners sought and prized such blue-black slaves for field work), but were--in large part as a result of white slaveowners visiting the slave cabins--of mixed (mulatto) origin. Frederic Douglass and Booker T. Washington were both half-white; their fathers, both believed, were their masters. To what extent does this non-West African genetic material factor in? If Wallace Spearmon, a notably lightskinned and very fast sprinter, wins a medal, does his presumably significant admixture of "white blood" diminish the explanatory power of Johnson's theory? And of course in the post-Emancipation period, both voluntary and involuntary race-mixing occurred with notable frequency, so that--as Henry Louis Gates has been showing for several years on his PBS show--the majority of African Americans are, by now, throughly mixed. How does thoroughgoing racial mixture factor into the theory?
2) In the article, we're told that Jamaica was "the last stop on the slave trail." My understanding is that Jamaica was, in fact, much earlier in the process. The slave transports from the coast of Africa landed first in Brazil and the Caribbean; slaves were then transported from there--often after a seasoning period--to the slave markets in Charleston and New Orleans.
3) Where exactly is this "superior athletic gene"? Since the process Johnson outlines requires not just this gene but a brutal winnowing process that weeded out the weakest among the slaves, he seems to be claiming that the superior athletic gene was, in effect, selected for. Does natural selection, so to speak, really work that quickly? And if it does, is there really ONE gene--possessed exclusively by some West Africans, increased significantly in the New World population of black slaves through a brutal slavery-made selection process--that can account, in and of itself, for the wholesale domination of the Olympic sprint finals by the male and female descendants of those slaves. One gene? Or is the phrase "superior athletic gene" a metaphor of sorts; a place holder for some mystified, as-yet-to-be-determined physiological factor? (I personally think that culture plays a huge role.)
4) Anybody who has read Olmsted's THE COTTON KINGDOM (I taught it last term) knows that the form of slavery practiced down in Mississippi and Louisiana during the "Cotton is King" period--1820 through 1860, say--was indeed particularly brutal. Families were broken up; slaves were marched hundreds, even a thousand, miles in slave coffles. Long slow distance, indeed! If anything, that process, and the highly regimented field labor that followed in the cane and cotton fields of the Deep South, should have selected for endurance, NOT speed or coordination. Sheer dogged endurance. Strength, yes. But not the sort of explosive, highly coordinated strength that is required, these many years later, to win an Olympic gold in the 100 meter dash. If we're talking about what slavery actually was, what sort of labors it required out of the black people who were forced into it against their will, then we're forced to acknowledge that those who survived it clearly possessed remarkable endurance and a measure of strength. But explosive speed? Slavery didn't select for that.