From Auction Blocks to End Zones: The Enduring Logic of Eugenics in the Valuation of Black Bodies

Abstract

This project studies the connection of eugenics with American football, mainly looking at how measurement methods that were developed during slavery and early race science have been changed and used in today’s football institutions. The idea initially came to me last year while I was actively researching anthropometrists/eugenicists Charles Davenport and Morris Steggerda’s mid 20th century race-crossing experiments in Jamaica, with these two as the lead eugenicists of said experiments. From that research, I got a strong understanding of the physical tests and measurements used to uphold racial rankings under the pretense of scientific impartiality. What amazed me more was how similar these techniques are to the way athletes, specifically football players, are assessed in modern sports. Measurements like shoulder width and hand size that were once important in anthropometric studies are still basic metrics used in the game of football today, particularly during combine testing. Noticing this intersection made me dive deeper into a wider history: the institutional growth of football happened at the same time as the emergence and the peak of eugenic ideology. Not to mention eugenics itself started in the 1860s, which was around the same exact time when Princeton presented its first organized team (1869). At the most basic level, eugenics can be defined as the pseudoscience of determining human value and abstract qualities based on phenotype, or as Galton himself puts it, “the science of improving stock, which is by no means confined to questions of judicious mating, but which . . . takes cognizance of all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had”. It’s not the fact that measuring differences between different races was necessarily racist within itself, but rather that Galton specifically wanted to use these measurements as justification to assert social and racial dominance over Black people and any other ethnic group that is not of Anglo-Saxon descent. Seen in this way, exploitation works in many linked methods. On one side, we have open and one-sided systems of control like slavery and Jim Crow separation laws. On another side, there are systems that seem mutual but still forceful, such as professional sports including football and basketball. These setups look to provide chances and rewards; however, they depend on the use and control of Black physical labor. For the sake of this paper, football is used as the main point of study. It’s important to note that although racial violence is less openly accepted in America after slavery was abolished, exploitation has not vanished, it just transformed. When Black athletes started joining professional football, physical dominance targeting them was no longer considered acceptable. Teams could not maintain control over Black through obvious violence any longer. Rather, fresh stories came up portraying Black athletes as naturally fit for the sport because of assumed physical benefits. In 1988, a CBS reporter by the name of Jack Snyder made a comment that was rather telling about how white America sees the Black body: “The Black is a better athlete to begin with because he’s been bred to be that way, because of his high thighs and big thighs that goes up into his back, and they can jump higher and run faster because of their bigger thighs. This goes back all the way to the Civil War when during the slave trade… the owner, the slave owner would breed his big Black (man) to his big woman so that he could have a big Black kid.”. Unfortunately for the Black athletes, this was a common thought process amongst white Americans and these viewpoints ‘justified’ discrimination while still refusing complete recognition of their humanity, strengthening a system that chiefly appreciates Black bodies for their work capacity.