Myth of 'superhuman strength' in Black people persists in deadly encounters with police - eviltoast
  • TTH4P@lemm.ee
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    7 months ago

    “We consider the perp both inferior and also impossibly strong” - police

    …sheesh why does that sound so familiar?

  • Neato@ttrpg.network
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    7 months ago

    Also that black people don’t feel pain as much so they don’t give them anesthetic. Just more lies to justify hurting people.

    • usualsuspect191@lemmy.ca
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      7 months ago

      Gross.

      Total aside: there is a group that you can visually identify when it comes to anesthetics. Redheads tend to have a higher tolerance and can need as much as 20% more for the same pain management effects.

      • dirthawker0@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        ITYM resistance to anaesthetics, not tolerance. I have a friend who has this gene, even though he wouldn’t be considered a red head, it’s mostly dark brown with slightly lighter strands.

      • BakerBagel@midwest.social
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        7 months ago

        Doctors were taught the same about black people for 50 years. And a higher tolerance for pain would mean that they need less anesthetic, not more

      • Neato@ttrpg.network
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        7 months ago

        Yup. It’s fucking awful.

        In the 2016 study, for example, trainees who believed that black people are not as sensitive to pain as white people were less likely to treat black people’s pain appropriately.

        What’s more, a meta-analysis of 20 years of studies covering many sources of pain in numerous settings found that black/African American patients were 22% less likely than white patients to receive any pain medication.

        • LennethAegis@kbin.social
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          7 months ago

          I don’t get it. If they believe that black people are less sensitive to pain, then wouldn’t a black person complaining of pain actually have a much worse injury and need higher priority treatment?

          I know the answer is just racism, but at least get your logic straight.

          • Neato@ttrpg.network
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            7 months ago

            Yeah, but they aren’t using logic. Like with women, it’s just an excuse to not listen to people they don’t like.

  • Semi-Hemi-Lemmygod@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    A friend of a friend was at my house party one night, and was going on and on about how black people are stronger than white people, which is why there are so many in sports.

    I said “Yeah, that explains why the NHL is all black men.”

  • jpreston2005@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Finding an outstanding misdemeanor warrant for Muhaymin, all four officers attempted to arrest him by wrestling him to the ground. They noted in their official statements that the 43-year-old Black man had “superhuman strength.”

    Muhaymin’s autopsy report said he was 5 feet, 5 inches and weighed 164 pounds.

    Police out here thinking every black man is pound-for-pound the strongest person in their weight class. Believe in yourself as much as police believe in black peoples strength.

  • twig@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    7 months ago

    So this is a horrific stereotype, and it has an even more sinister historical precedent.

    Back in the era of slavery (that is specifically in the US, the slavery of Africans abducted from their home countries), there were specifically slave “breeding farms” where slavers would commit massive amounts of sexual assault of captive slaves in order to produce slaves they selected by their own arbitrary metric for specific physical qualities… and to save on what can, again horrifically, be referred to as “import costs.”

    I’m not saying this “worked” or produced the results that slavers wanted. What I am saying is that this specific way of subjugating and dehumanizing people has had lasting effects in both perception of black folks and in the ways that systemic racism works.

  • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
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    7 months ago

    It’s called “excited delirium” and it exists just as much as smoking marijuana makes Black men super predators.

    • BakerBagel@midwest.social
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      7 months ago

      Probably cukd have used an /s tag on that so people would know you were being facetious. There are still a lot of people who believe both of those things

      • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
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        7 months ago

        The latter bit was obviously not true. I trust people to be smart enough to make the comparison and understand my intent.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    7 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    Deputy Steven Mills of the Lee County Sheriff’s Office was on patrol one night in 2013 when he received a call about a naked Black man walking down a rural road in Phenix City, Alabama.

    Seth Stoughton, a University of South Carolina law professor who served as an expert witness in the George Floyd murder trial, says the term “plays into the racist trope” of a “scary Black assailant.”

    Although “superhuman strength” became widely publicized around the 1991 police beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles, its origins date to the post-Civil War Reconstruction era.

    The 1915 film “The Birth of a Nation” characterized Black men as rapists and beasts and used that trope to justify lynchings while glamorizing the Ku Klux Klan.

    More than 4,400 Black Americans were killed by lynch mobs between 1877 and 1950, according to data from the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit that provides legal representation to people illegally convicted, unfairly sentenced or abused in custody.

    Frank Rudy Cooper, a law professor who directs the Program on Race, Gender and Policing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, says how officers are taught to protect themselves puts them on edge and affects how they approach certain communities.


    The original article contains 1,091 words, the summary contains 202 words. Saved 81%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • taanegl@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    It’s a question of weight distribution of the body. As long as you don’t let whoever’s trying to subvert you to move your muscles or limbs, it’s actually pretty hard to ground somebody.

    Perhaps… they’ve had a lot of training… for some reason…

  • billwashere@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Let me preface this with this sort of behavior back during slavery was abhorrent. While it’s not true today, selective breeding of a physical trait is a thing that works. Animal husbandry, GMO crops (go look at what corn was 100 years ago), heck even dogs (look at a pug and a wolf and see how much they changed). If I’m not mistaken, even Yao Ming was a product of the Chinese government encouraging two large Chinese basketball players to marry and have children.

    Now would a bastard cop use this flimsy excuse to bully a person of color? Of fucking course they would.