Sports used to be the only way out of poverty for some folks. It wasn't that long ago that the racial myths/slurs/clueless insults were commonplace.
*TriggerWarning (it's disgusting) Reminds me of those old John Wayne movies where they talked about women's wide hips/butt being an indicator of child bearing skills
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2018/o...cam-newton
Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder had a good run as CBS’s lead sports prognosticator. And then 30 years ago, on the Friday afternoon before Martin Luther King Day, the gruff 70-year-old sat down to lunch with a black Washington DC television reporter and told America what he really thought about the players he covered every week.
Snyder characterized the black athlete as superior “because of his high thighs that go up into his back”. He sourced this opinion in antebellum times, “when during the slave trading, the slave owner would breed his big black to his big woman so that he would have a big black kid”.
And he made plain his reservations about black athletes taking roles of greater intellect and authority in sports. “They’ve [blacks] got everything,” he said. “If they take over coaching like everybody wants them to, there’s not going to be anything left for white people.”
Snyder expressed some regret for his remarks shortly after they aired (“I thought I was being instructive, when in fact, I was destructive,” he told the Washington Post), but by then a firestorm of outrage had already gathered.