Have been reading Hank Aaron's autobiography. One of the most powerful aspects of the text was his decision to include pages and pages of the white supremacist hate mail he received while working toward breaking Babe Ruth's home run record..

Hank Aaron received nearly one million letters -- including hundreds of thousands of pathologically racist insults and threats from vile and hateful white supremacists, decades before internet trolling was a thing..

What's so terrible about Aaron's ordeal is that this campaign of white supremacist harassment occurred nearly THIRTY years after Jackie Robinson integrated baseball. "Integration" in professional sports, as elsewhere, meant exposing Black and Brown players to white violence.

What's so remarkable about Aaron's achievement is that he not only defied the hatred and harassment of the racist white masses by breaking Ruth's record--he also openly denounced their racism. He refused to be a happy token of integration. He was an outspoken critic and advocate.

I really appreciate how honest Aaron was about the racist brutality he experienced and overcame. He didn't get to experience the unbridled joy that should normally accompany the extraordinary accomplishment of smashing multiple records and being the best in the world at your job.

Living in the age just before the explosion of modern Black celebrity, Aaron didn't experience the adulation and worship of a Michael Jordan or a Serena Williams. Instead, he was virulently hated and despised the more he accomplished, the closer he got to breaking the record..

Of course, some degree of appreciation and acclaim would come later. But the actual experience of extraordinary athletic achievement was, for him, a hellish ordeal because racist white people felt existentially threatened by a Black man's greatness..

I think his experience also illustrates shifts in antiblackness and white supremacy that were occurring in the the 20th century.. Many whites still cleaved to the belief that Black people were physically inferior to whites, and thus, Aaron could/should not break Babe's record.

Hank Aaron's career unfolded in an intermediate period between the heyday of early 20th century eugenicists' belief in Black physical frailty and the rise of what Ann Morning calls "Black Biological Exceptionalism" -- the belief that Black athletic prowess is "in the genes".

Average white adult baseball fans of the 1970s were growing up between the 1920s and 1940s--a period coterminous with the eugenics movement and the Holocaust. Baseball was still very much tied to the myth of white physical superiority, crystallized in the deification of Babe Ruth

Years after hundreds of thousands of white "fans" harassed and threatened Aaron for threatening the home run record of their white savior, it would become common for whites (and others) to believe the myth that Black people have "racial genes" that provide athletic dominance..

Ann Morning's "The Nature of Race" revealed that belief in Black "athletic genes" is now a commonplace form of biological essentialism among college students. Widespread belief in a genetic basis for Black athleticism is also explored in the film "RACE: The Power of an Illusion".

In a strange way, one of the most insidious forms of contemporary racism masquerades as athletic fandom: Black athletes are widely revered as "superhuman" even as millions of people (now) think of Blacks as "not-quite-humans" who are genetically predisposed to physical prowess.

As the terrain of white supremacy shifts over time, the naturalization and normalization of the belief in Black biological exceptionalism have become the grounds of conditional acceptance upon which Black athletes are now "welcomed" and "worshipped" by racist fans..

Aaron might have actually been celebrated by whites in the 1970s if only they'd moved on more quickly to the next phase of hegemonic racist ideology -- the myth that Blacks (especially Black men) are physically superior yet intellectually/culturally inferior due to "race genes"..