From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle.

Good morning, good afternoon and good evening and welcome to the Tangu Podcast, a place we get

views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit of my take.

I'm your host, Isaac Saul, and today we're going to talk about the Jews.

When I was in college, a friend told me that black people were overrepresented

in professional basketball because American slavery was an exercise in survival of the fittest,

and that the black Americans who made it to the modern era were therefore predisposed to be more

athletic. At first blush, this explanation

made some sense. Even as an adult, I can see how it feels intuitive. I honestly wouldn't

be surprised if it's a commonly held belief today. Of course, the idea only really works if you're

ignorant like I was the first time I heard it. So by this explanation,

you have to think slavery was a highly selective process of breeding big, strong men to labor

in the fields, basically the story that you see in Hollywood. In reality, slavery was a brutal,

messy exercise and violence and greed. It fueled rampant malnutrition and disease

that limited the lifespans of slaves who were sold and traded and killed with little thought or reason.

To the extent that slave breeding happened at all, it was usually through haphazard force coupling

or masters raping their female slaves and then enslaving their own children.

The work itself was varied too, more than just manning farms. It involved domestic work,

crafting, cooking, and child care. Basically, the only way this seemingly intuitive theory works

is if you actually don't know anything about slavery at all, or genetics for that matter, or since physical

characteristics of a group require hundreds of generations to manifest, not just four or five.

Deconstructing a silly idea like this is simple enough, but to close the loop, you have to be

...