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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Are athletes of African descent genetically superior?
Jan 28, 2000 | It's no secret that blacks dominate much of the world of sports. In track, the purest test of athletic ability, runners of African descent hold every single men's world record at every standard distance, from the 100 meters (where no non-black athlete has held the world record since 1960) to the marathon. In pro football, the positions that require the greatest combination of speed, power and explosiveness -- wide receiver, cornerback and running back -- are almost entirely played by blacks. In pro basketball -- the sport that requires the greatest combination of leaping ability, power bursts and agility -- almost all the starters and virtually all the superstars are black. In baseball, blacks are also disproportionately represented, although not to the same degree that they are in the more athletically demanding basketball and football.
None of this is news to anyone who watches American sports or track and field -- and it hasn't been news for over 30 years. You have to go back to the early '60s, if not earlier, to find a time when blacks didn't completely dominate basketball and, to a lesser degree, football. The days when NFL teams routinely started two white wide receivers (remember Boyd Dowler and Carrol Dale?) seem as paleolithic as the jump pass and the quick kick.
Black athletic domination is so accepted today that it's easy to forget how astonishing it is. But what is even more astonishing is that everyone -- with the exception of the athletes themselves -- is afraid to talk in public about it. Even acknowledging that blacks are superior athletes veers uncomfortably close to a question still too traumatic for America's delicate racial sensibilities: Why are they?
The politically correct answer is that blacks dominate sports not because of a biological advantage, but because of an environmental disadvantage. Black athletic achievement is a direct result of racism: For blacks, athletics was practically the only way out of the ghetto, so they had extraordinary motivation to succeed.
There is obviously much truth in this answer. Before scoffing at the idea that environment alone could produce so many world-class black athletes, we would do well to remember that cultural and environmental factors are notoriously easy to underestimate. No one suggests that Ashkenazi Jews or Asians are genetically selected to be superior classical musicians, yet they are disproportionately represented in that field. (For that matter, no one suggests that blacks are genetically selected to be virtuoso improvising musicians -- yet they dominate jazz as much as they do football or basketball.) Why not run out looking for Japanese genes that select for flower-arranging, or Southern American Scottish-Irish genes that lead to NASCAR driving?
Moreover, there are good reasons to wantto believe that black athletic domination has no physiological basis. Science has a long and disreputable history of making false extrapolations from inconclusive hard data -- extrapolations that often merely parrot the prejudices of the age. In the case of blacks, whom whites have perniciously associated with "brute animality" ever since they first encountered them, those prejudices have gone underground, but can be easily reawakened. And certainly with a "soft" social phenomenon like athletic domination, as opposed to a "hard" one like blacks' genetic susceptibility to sickle-cell anemia, hard-science explanations must be looked at with skepticism.
But setting a world record in the 100 meters is a more quantifiable achievement than ripping through a Rachmaninoff concerto or blowing a trumpet solo on "So What." And as both black athletic domination and our knowledge of genetics, physical anthropology and physiology have grown, it has become increasingly hard to assert that environmental factors alone can explain black superiority in sports. Jon Entine's "Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We Are Afraid to Talk About It" will make it even harder.
