Given that racists and slavers used the “natural physical strength” of black people to justify putting them on hard labor and some medics still think that blacks has higher resistance to pain, I wonder if when black athletes started to join mixed race sport teams, some racist would have used the same “biological advantage” argument that now transphobes use against trans athletes to claim it was “unfair” for black to compete against whites to justify segregation.
This is a bit of a friend-of-a-friend story, so it is difficult to evaluate the veracity but here goes.
I once met a woman from Germany (2011, so some time ago now). Her friend had been to the US via some school exchange program. If I recall correctly, the state she went to was Texas but I could be wrong. Anyway, the teacher of the class this friend went to still thought that Adolf Hitler was the ruler of Germany, so she had instructed all students to stand up, do a Nazi salute and say “Heil Hitler” when she first entered the class room. She immediately left the class room, crying.
From what I remember, this supposedly happened a few years prior to me meeting this person and being told the story, so maybe 2008? I can only really vouch for the first part of this story, I was really told this. I cannot know if the rest is true, but I believed her back then at least.
Long story short, there are some backwards people on this world indeed.
My civics and history teachers ware more subtle. Occasional mentions of a news article about some welfare queen, how great Disney was for Times Square, how great it is to be invaded by America(Japan was their only example), or how the Walton heirs were the richest people behind Bill Gates(they weren’t). I think one of the biggest Aged Like Milk comments was how real estate was such a great and sound investment. This was around 2003.
Meanwhile, I only heard one mention of climate change from the science teachers in those four years. I think the biggest lesson I got from school was to never trust authority and always press for sources.