Reply to post: Re: "why Blacks are such fast runners?"

Google and its terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week in full

James O'Shea

Re: "why Blacks are such fast runners?"

"Probably due to eugenics as a side effect of the slave trade. The slave traders picked the strongest "specimens" from Africa and shipped them to the Americas as slaves."

Oh, really? So, why, exactly, would it be that be why so many of the top distance runners in the world are East Africans? (Kenya, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Uganda, Eritrea...) Hint: the majority of black African slaves in the Americas came from _West_ Africa; slaves in the Caribbean and North America mostly from the Gold, Ivory, and Slave (duh!) Coasts in the Bight of Benin and surrounding areas, while those in South America largely came from what's now Angola as well as the Portuguese areas in and around the Bight of Benin. Still West Africa, though, and while many West Africans and a lot of East Africans are Bantu-speakers, Ethiopians and a good chunk of Kenyas aren't. The Bantu-speaking group is rather like the Indo-European-speaking group: there's a whole lot of 'em, and the ones at the far ends (West Africa, northern East Africa, South Africa) ain't particularly closely related to each other. There isn't, and wasn't ever, a monolithic 'black race', any more than there ever was a monolithic 'white race'; see further 'Indo-European Language Group' and why it's called that. You might want to reconsider your position.

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