On June 10, 76 years ago, the boxer who unified the crowns of the greatest whites and blacks died in an accident. Life, excesses and deeds of the man who challenged everyone
“All coons look alike to me”: all raccoons look the same to me. Sung as a nursery rhyme, especially in the southern states; dedicated to African Americans who in the eyes of whites were not individuals but a shapeless multitude, to be kept at a distance because it was infesting in its proliferation, like the mammal chosen for the song. There is no big difference with the similarity between rats and Jews recurring in the manifestos of the Third Reich. And towards the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, the American Wasp, the white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant, had one more reason to hum it, but with less boldness and with the certainties about their own superiority that had begun to waver.