Myth of 'superhuman strength' in Black people persists in deadly encounters with police - eviltoast
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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.


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