Final answer:
Social Darwinism in the late-19th and early-20th centuries distorted Darwin's theories to justify racial hierarchies, influencing perceptions of nonwhite athletic ability as grounded in inborn physical traits, rather than skill or training.
Step-by-step explanation:
During the late-19th and early-20th centuries, Darwinian thinking was co-opted into a pseudo-scientific rationale known as Social Darwinism. This misrepresented Charles Darwin's theories of evolution, instead using them to justify racial hierarchies and colonialism. Proponents of Social Darwinism, such as Herbert Spencer with his phrase "the survival of the fittest", suggested that certain races were biologically predisposed to succeed or fail in society. Thus, nonwhite races were often depicted as inherently inferior or stuck at an earlier stage in an erroneous evolutionary scale.
In the realm of sports, this thinking translated into beliefs about the natural abilities or shortcomings of various racial groups. For instance, the supposed exotic vitality of nonwhite races could be twisted into a stereotype that attributed their sporting success to primitive physical prowess rather than skill, intelligence, or training. Just as eugenics attempted to validate these racial biases with seemingly scientific data like brain size measurements, sports were another arena where such harmful stereotypes were perpetuated.