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Are you going to lavish this attention on disproving the load-bearing quotes? Do you also think that I'm misquoting Bear Bryant and Cap Anson and the NYT editorial board? Or was it just the fun little joke that caught your ire?
In all my years on themotte, the most valuable lesson I've learned is that checking your interlocutor's sources is a superpower. Nobody else will do it, and there's a fair chance he hasn't.
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Before getting into the comment proper I think I should add this to the top: I am feeling some suspicion that you are quoting LLM hallucinations because your Bear Bryant quote doesn't seem to exist on the internet and your Harper's Weekly quote is actually from Current Literature. This seems unlikely given your comment history but it's unclear how it ended up happening otherwise. Could you dispel such concerns by explaining where you got those quotes from?
Lets start with the full NYT article in question:
Pugilists as Race Champions (The New York Times, 1910)
This seems...straightforwardly correct. The fight demonstrated nothing besides the abilities of the two combatants and to a much lesser degree a bit of evidence regarding the physical capabilities of their two races. However some people were treating them as champions of their races that would "prove" the superiority of the winning race, transmuting sport rivalries into racial rivalries. Sports riots are bad enough without bringing race into it. No matter who won they predicted it would inflame racial conflict, and indeed the aftermath of the fight saw nationwide race riots.
There is also a certain irony that, in a post about how "racist Uncle Roys" "weren’t of the opinion that there were mostly-overlapping-bell-curves with different averages, they were of the opinion that blacks couldn’t compete with whites in any field", one of the "load-bearing quotes" had no problems printing and agreeing with a letter from the president of a black college. Based on the fact that you think the NYT cared a lot about the result when the point of the article was that either outcome would be bad, I'm guessing you just grabbed the cherrypicked quote from somewhere like Wikipedia without reading the article. This has the consequence of flattening and distorting their view to fit into a modern narrative. This sort of thing is why I recommended against trying to understand historical beliefs this way.
Searching for this quote has one result: this thread. Chopping it up into subquotes does no better. Searching finds discussions about whether he was racist that would have reason to bring up such a quote, but they don't. At this point I start to wonder if your comment is "LLM assisted" garbage filled it with hallucinations that I'm wasting my time by responding to, but I already wrote the NYT part and you otherwise seem to be a legitimate poster so I guess I'll keep going. Even if it was real it's not really a terribly strong statement, people in sports make dubious assertions like that all the time and nobody finds it significant if they're wrong when they don't involve politically-relevant identity categories.
This is too vague to look up whether the actual quote is real and searching keywords like "cap anson black discipline" doesn't find anything.
That quote isn't from Harper's Weekly, it's from the article "The Psychology of the Prize Fight" from "Current Literature". Also, while I wasn't able to get the full original article, this has a fuller quote and already indicates you left out some context. They also said "Expert opinion has inclined to the theory that the negro is the strongest man physically" and your quote clipped the relevant middle of the sentence from "[A] white man fighting with a negro to whom he is not physically inferior ought not to be defeated if the contest be prolonged.", so they don't seem as confident in the outcome as portrayed. Look, there are countless modern sports articles invoking scientific findings to make highly dubious claims about sports. This is not something that particularly reflects on either the ideas they invoke or even the general beliefs of the public. It reflects that there is demand for both sports coverage and for a subset of that coverage to contextualize it in terms of science.
Fundamentally, despite the fake or misleading quotes, I'm sure you can indeed find plenty of historical quotes that were both straightforwardly racist and incorrect. I just don't think that means very much, because "a lot of people who believe in X say things about it that are wrong or grossly exaggerated" is true for pretty much any X. And then of course it's easy to get your impression of historical views and events from people who have hammered them into the ill-fitting mold of their own ideological convenience.
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You posted a wall of text that amounted to "Suck it, HBDers, your forbears were wrong in the past and consequently you're wrong now". You didn't indicate which quotes were load-bearing and which weren't, so it seems to me they're all fair game. Anyway, I can't find any of the quotes except in secondary sources written by their opponents much later.
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