Prominent Black athletes were positioned only where their perceived natural athletic strength fit.

Evidence

Civil rights activists had other reasons to be hopeful that year. Jackie Robinson desegregated Major League Baseball, and around the same time, the National Football League and the National Basketball Association were also desegregated. For decades thereafter, Black baseball, football, and basketball professionals were routinely steered into positions that took advantage of their so-called natural animal-like speed and strength (apparently, nonathletic Black folk were not really Black). — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 915

Categorization

• CANDY: The parenthetical jab that nonathletic Black people were not really Black is a dark, tweetable irony about stereotype logic.