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