Great Black athletic feats fed rather than refuted biological racism

Evidence

If anything, Jesse Owens’s golden runs deepened the color line, and especially the racist ideas of animal-like Black athletic superiority. … But Jesse Owens did not possess the “Negroid type of calf, foot and heel bone” that supposedly gave Blacks a speed advantage, Howard anthropologist W. Montague Cobb found in 1936. Since some track stars could pass for White, “there is not a single physical characteristic, including skin color, which all the Negro stars have in common which definitely classify them as Negroes.” Cobb did not receive many admirers in a United States where people were convinced about the benefits of natural Black athleticism and biological distinctions. Almost everyone still believed that different skin colors actually meant something more than different skin colors. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 878

Categorization

• XREF: This is a clean case study for testing Kendi’s inversion: an empirical counterexample (Cobb’s anatomical data, Owens lacking the ‘Negroid calf’) failed to move racist ideas because the ideas served an existing policy/rhetoric of Black athletic inferiority-superiority.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does the athletic-racism case support Kendi’s thesis that policy/self-interest precedes ideas, or does it show ideas here precedeing any obvious policy? Crawford’s and Cobb’s empirical refutations being ignored is striking evidence for the inversion.