Red_Army wrote:I think the idea that black people were bred like dogs to be superior athletes is ridiculous.
It is. Nobody made that claim, although Pants-of-dog decided to try to respond as if that were a claim made.
Red_Army wrote:I'm sure healthier, more athletic slaves were more valuable, but I don't think there was a systematic effort on the part of all slave owners to create stronger/faster/etc slaves.
The Atlantic passage alone tended to eliminate weaker stock, and the process of "seasoning" further eliminated weaker stock. So what was left were people who could survive significant labor hardship, environmental extremes and disease. That was what was left to breed. The idea that slave masters were budding Georg Mendel types or something is far-fetched as science wasn't that advanced, but selective breeding had been common among farmers/ranchers for long before the process could be understood in clear scientific terms.
Red_Army wrote:We know there was a ton of old feeble white men raping their slave women so that obviously flies in the face of this theory because they didn't cull all the products of this rape.
That wasn't the case either. Most of the slave masters were some pretty tough motherfuckers. They would gladly have used white slaves, but they simply couldn't afford it financially. Whites died in numbers too large to financially justify their importation for field labor in the South. That's why they were often doing skilled labor or house work.
Just as native American populations were wiped out by European diseases, European populations were wiped out by factors they rarely encountered in Europe--e.g., malaria, working in 35C temperatures, etc. Temperature alone... there just wasn't a lot of people working in 95F temperatures in Northern Europe, and the culture of Southern Europe mandated siestas. The whites that survived that were tough sons of bitches. So were the blacks.
Red_Army wrote:All the slave breeding I've read about involved women giving birth to many children throughout their lives to be sold at profit for the slave owner.
That is true. Masters could choose who would be the father. It was a brutal system.
Red_Army wrote:Quantity is quality when you're selling children.
Or the quality of the father--the biggest and strongest, or hardest working. Remember, a man can impregnate 100 women, and this does nothing to him physically. A woman can die in child birth with her first born, and typically does after 8th or 9th child--that was common in early America. Financially constrained women often choose the best provider as mating partners, not the one they think has a cute tush, pretty smile or nice dimples.
Red_Army wrote:Slaves were almost entirely unrestricted in their choice of sexual partners (although families were regularly broken up for the profit interests of their white owners).
Well, that is the quality over quantity ethos in effect.
Red_Army wrote:This fantasy that slaves were bred to be supermen is just white people ashamed that blacks are naturally better athletes and there is zero evidence that it occurred.
They were not bred to be supermen, obviously. They invested almost nothing in the education of blacks and even meant to prevent them from becoming literate. The environmental pressures of slavery in a somewhat desperate early America certainly sufficed as selection pressure, whether you consider it natural or a contrivance of slave masters is somewhat immaterial.
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