Bizarre Urban Myth

Factual Questions
41

I think a lot of people are trying to quantify a very complex issue into a nice, easy, linear format.

Fact: There are a lot of black athletes out there.

Fact (according to the original post): There aren’t a lot of black swimmers.

Fact: Just because someone’s black doesn’t mean they can’t swim.

Fact: Just because someone’s white doesn’t mean they can’t run/jump/whatever.

Okay, I can go on with facts all day long. But this isn’t about facts, it’s about conjecture. Could there be some sort of genetic trait in blacks that make their musculatur/skeleton/whatever different than whites? Why not, they have a genetic trait that makes their skin contain more pigment. Anyone who says that the entire human chromosome has been completely mapped is a flat-out liar. There ARE a lot of genes that have been traced… but not everything’s been discovered yet.

Why are some people completely hung up on the idea that everyone’s the same? I have no idea. But simple sight confirmation is needed to tell you that people are different, racially, socially, physiologically, whatever. And these differences tend to come in groups. If, STATISTICALLY SPEAKING, a large group of people have both Difference 1 (D1) and Difference 2 (D2), while another large group has neither difference, it’d be safe to say (STATISTICALLY SPEAKING, for any of you hot-heads waiting to accuse me of racism) that D1 and D2 are connected somehow, and if someone has D1, there’s a good chance they’ll have D2.

Maybe there aren’t a lot of black swimmers of note because not a lot of blacks WANT to be swimmers (but that doesn’t follow well, either, because there’s a lot of people of a lot of races wanting to be football players or basketball stars). But I only bring up that point as an example that there may be five reasons, ten reasons, or even a million reasons why we don’t hear about a lot of black swimmers.

-SPOOFE

42

I’d like to bring to your attentions the following transcript from a session of Talk Back Live on CNN — How Important Are Genes In Determining Athletic Performance?

Writer Jon Entine, author of Taboo, and several athletes were invited to this particular show. The performance of black swimmers was not explicitly mentioned, but I for one would not be surprised if this urban myth had a few ounces of truth to it. If anyone sees this book by the way, you might want to take a peek in it and see if there’s a chapter on swimmers.

43

I had an adolescent version of this discussion when I was a Basketball player in High School. Because the black atheletes seemed so much better than us white boys, we liked the idea that they had a genetic advantage.

But a rich white friend of mine dispelled it one day. He said :

“while you are at teh mall, the black guys are playing ball. While you are out at dinner with your parents, tehy are playing ball. While you are skiing, they are playing ball. If you want to be as good as they are, you need to work as hard as they do. You just have more things to do because you are wealthier.”

I conjecture that in addition to access to pools, it is just not culturally valued to non-white populations. I don’t know of a lot of Japanese swimmers either. Maybe it just isn’t their bag.

44

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you two future Nobel laureates in science.

Peace.