And as I already said too, this explanation is completely Americano-centric. It doesn’t explain why the same thing happens in other countries.
As I, again, already said, in France the largest disfranchised minority are “Arabs” (in fact, mostly Berbers), Black people only come second. Your hypothesis works perfectly when you look at the most popular sport : soccer. Both Arabs and Blacks are widely overrepresented.
But it doesn’t work for the 100 m (during the last France championship, 7 out of the 8 finalists were Black) and, as I realized yesterday, for basketball (only two members of the French team weren’t Black). At the highest level, those sports are totally dominated by Blacks, and the main disfranchised minority is completely absent.
So, the “it’s because they’re poor” explanation doesn’t stand.
And note that almost all Black people in France are of West African ancestry. Either they’re descendants of recent immigrants from former French colonies, all situated in Western Africa(), or they’re descendants of slaves from the French west Indies, also bought in West Africa.
Finally, for the French 100m championship, I watched a video, and 4 of the names of Black athletes appeared onscreen (I wish I had the complete list). Two of them were obviously African names. So, no selective breeding for their ancestors.
() To prevent nitpicks : Yes, Djibouti, the Reunion, Madagascar, Mayotte aren’t in West Africa.
ETA : Also, people coming from the French west Indies (descending from slaves) aren’t in fact a disfranchised minority, contrarily to descendants of recent immigrants. So, it makes the “because they’re poor” explanation even less credible.
I noted today something interesting about the Algerian gold medalist. Before the Olympic Games, he trained for 7 months in the Kenyan Highlands. Possibly to train with experienced Kenyan coachs, but this wasn’t mentioned. The emphasis in the article was on “Highlands”.
So, it made me think that the Kenyan dominance might be due in part to people living at a high altitude, hence adapted to a lower level of oxygen (I’ve read that the Ghurkas endurance, for instance, was attributed to this factor). Of course it doesn’t explain why all endurance races aren’t won by Nepalese, but I thought I should still mention it.
Partially a whoosh, but I guess you didn’t notice that.
Also, if you haven’t noticed, I haven’t made a parity argument once. I’ve stated pretty clearly multiple times (here’s one example in this thread) that I don’t have a problem with the concept that parity doesn’t exist across population groups (though not races, as the simple 3 race division of humanity is ill-defined).
My main issue is with people jumping straight to a genetic explanation for non-parity when the science really isn’t settled on that score.
So, again, I’m not saying a genetic difference doesn’t exist but that (1) the concept of such broad racial groups is ill-defined and (2) the concept that the difference is primarily genetic, rather than social or cultural, hasn’t been well established yet.
Thank you for making my point for me. Notice that the same countries show up on the lists? And that they happen to be countries that put a lot of effort into training athletes in these events?
I know you are amending the argument to say that clearly training has something to do with it, but that’s the problem we keep bringing up when we say that the effect of nurture hasn’t yet been normalized.
Clearly between countries, training has a huge impact. If you deny that, you are denying clear evidence.
The question now is how much does training, socioeconomic status, culture, etc affect results within a country. You toss all that out and just put out a blanket “genetic” explanation based only on the results. It’s a first order approximation that ignores 2nd order and above factors.
How does that work? The same arguments were used about professional black baseball players not 30 years ago. But you don’t hear them so much now, because their relative dominance is being whittled away. How are you so very sure that similar cultural factors don’t have an impact in running?
Really?
Counter-example: Jewish basketball players in the 40s-60s.
Clearly, this is a specious argument. But why is the exact, same argument valid now towards blacks and not then towards Jews?
Other counter-examples where genetics is often blamed: Mathematical ability in women, blacks in the 60s-90s MLB but not now, white Americans in swimming, basketball prowess.
Next thing you’ll tell me is that Chinese dominance in table tennis is genetic.
Normalizing for the effects of nurture (which, I guess, we’re now using as a catch-all for a lot of different factors) isn’t nearly as cut and dried as you are making out.
Everybody who is making a genetic argument needs to get on one page.
There’s a lot of posters who have claimed genetics trumps other factors every time. You are claiming training and financial support make a huge difference, and twisting the counter-arguments for the first set of posters as somehow applying to the second set.
Nope, but again, how have you normalized across other relevant factors, including economic status, availability of resources (financial, time, facilities, mentoring, parental support, etc), cultural expectations, etc?
How much do those factors matter, if at all? Your arguments seem to indicate they also matter quite a lot, but you also seem to be assuming black Americans (or Jamaicans or whoever else) experience them in the same way and in the same quantities (per capita) as non-black Americans.
Possibly, but that’s another hole in a theory that’s purely or predominantly about genetics.
Certainly, high altitudes can have a biological influence but that’s not a genetic difference. And the debate is about the role of genetics.
Also, I’ll note that “poor = faster” is an oversimplification of the concept of normalizing for a factor. You note that in France that blacks and North Africans are overrepresented in soccer. Is this genetic or is this also cultural and tied to economic status? To what degree?
If there are social, cultural, or other factors involved in soccer, how is it a real stretch to think that maybe we maybe haven’t identified, normalized, or eliminated similar factors in sprinting. Not just income but all other cultural and social factors.
Given that Sub-Saharian Africans are more genetically diverse than all the populations of the rest of the planet combined, it would seem logical to me that if there’s a gene giving an advantage for some sport or another, it’s much more likely to be found in an African population. And if it is found outside of Africa, it’s more likely to be widespread instead of being present only amongst the Inuits.
In this case my assumption was obviously that it was tied to economic status.
My point was that in different countries, cultural and social factors will vary. It might be that in the USA, there’s a strong correlation between “being Black” and “being impoverished”(yes, I understand that “impoverished” is a simplification), so it might seem natural to assume that the category of people dominating race, or basketball is in fact “impoverished people”, not “Black people”. And indeed it might be a significant factor in the USA.
But this argument breaks down when you look at France. Basketball isn’t a popular sport here, but it’s still dominated by Black people, so it’s not mostly about acceding to a higher status (when it is, like in soccer, you find both minorities). People from the French west Indies are Black but not impoverished, and they’re overrepresented. North African are impoverished but not Black and they aren’t present in these sports. The logical conclusion is that the common factor is “Black”, not “impoverished”.
If there are cultural and social factors at play, they’re, at the very least, not obvious in the case of France. People from Martinique and from Senegal don’t belong, very generally speaking, to the same socio-economical category. They don’t share the same culture, either. There still might be something about “being Black” that makes you qualify for races and is cultural rather than genetic (say, they both look at famous Afro-American athletes and see them as models to emulate), but it seems to me that the Occam’s razor would favor genetics.
Especially when the domination is
1)So blatant. Assuming that 5% of the population is Black (random figure, I’ve no clue about the real one), if 20% of the finalists were Blacks, it would be very significant but maybe you could wawe it away more easily as cultural. When it comes to 80%, I believe there must be more to it.
2)So specific. Black people don’t dominate popular sports (soccer). They don’t dominate easily accessible sports (swimming, boxing). They dominate short distance race specifically.
Given that nowadays, athletes compete at such a level that any slight difference (wearing a better swimsuit, being left handed, producing more red cells) can make the difference between victory and defeat, a small genetical difference in 1% of the population could easily result in the 0.01% of the population who have this advantage and seriously practice the sport winning almost every time.
Highly unlikely any two Dopers will find themselves on the same page…
First, feel free to read prior responses in a thread, including at least two where I’ve given a synopsis of why the Jews aint’ gonna help you here.
In the 30’s, blacks were not part of the starting pool for either the South Philadelphia Hebrew leagues and the like, nor the New York Whirlwinds and the like. Basketball was not a multimillion dollar career with free lifetime women and unlimited fame. In short: no proportionate representation in the starting pool.
Today, every kid of every color with any athletic talent gets an exposure to basketball. They don’t give up the NBA rewards dream until they are drummed out by superior talent. What you see is a 5:1 ratio in the start pool of white to black, and roughly the reverse in the success pool. So you gotta have a lot of nurturing disproportion if you want to argue it’s not a genetic advantage. Where is that nurturing advantage? Better coaching? Less lazy practicing? More stable home life? Better basketball facilities? Fewer trips to the Big House? Less drugs? Less disruption of the neighborhood? Which white kid with a basketball aptitude says, “Nah…I’d rather go into business” until he first craps out on his basketball dreams?
I understand this nurturing thing is soft. That is, fundamentally, the debate. But what I notice is that if we want to defend black underperformance as a group for a given skillset, nurturing is suddenly at the top of the list of good explanations–way ahead of genetic ones, for the average faithful. That means we accept that, although soft, a reasonable assessment can be made.
In any case, you and Tomndebb need to give up bringing up the Jews in the 30s. If we want a case example of how different that world was, look up all 5’ 4" of Hall of Famer Barney Sidron.
As the world becomes flatter for opportunity, I have no doubt we will find various pockets of populations with genes that drive success given equivalent nurturing. The Dominican Republic for baseball and Polynesia for football might be two examples, and those who self-assign to the same SIRE groups get their average lifted up by those biologic hotpockets of good genes for a given skillset. In no way does this mean the difference between any two groups being compared isn’t genetic. The fact that all subpopulations of a given SIRE group don’t share the same gene pool is completely irrelevant. The question is: If nurture is normalized, is a residual difference genetic?
That answer is: Yes. So for me, it’s a question of looking at disproportionate success for a given starting pool, and then trying to decide if there has been (roughly) equivalent nurturing. Where I find nurturing equivalent, I assign the difference to genes. It’s a fun game for the faithful in the Church of Genetic Equality to demand I account for every basketball court, every wayward teacher failing to tell a kid to stay in school instead of practicing basketball, and oh-by-the-way-can-you-point-out-the-allele, but I find myself wandering away from that Inquisition like Galileo muttering to myself, “It’s genes, nevertheless.”
Any top athlete has access to high altitude training; at the elite levels nurturing is definitely normalized to a significant extent.
As the article on the Kalenjin I cited earlier points out, high altitude is an insufficient explanation for running success of the Kalenjin. It’s not like the Nepalese are dominating.
Fine. So the disagreement is whether nurturing has shown to be roughly equivalent. I don’t think you’ve shown that.
Yes, it’s tough when people actually challenge and ask questions about your claims. I was telling you why I was unconvinced that nurturing was equivalent, and explaining what I thought would constitute convincing genetic evidence. You feel “It’s genes, nevertheless.” Fine. I remain unconvinced.
The argument, if I’m reading clairobscur correctly, is that they’ve been exposed to high altitudes virtually their entire lives, leading to a societal advantage.
In that case, that’s quite a bit of goalpost shifting - from normalizing across general population groups to just elite athletes. Also, while any top athlete has access, that doesn’t mean they choose to exercise that access.
Also, you really seem to be missing the point with the examples from previous generations. The point is that hindsight is 20/20.
The fact that we still have people claiming an even more obvious and clear genetic difference (men vs women) is responsible for differences in math achievement while also claiming normalization for external factors is a similar argument that also can’t be reasonably sustained. It may very well be true, but the actual evidence isn’t there. And normalization for all those nurture factors hasn’t happened, even though, by using a criterion similar to your NBA argument, they have.
We know now that a lot of factors were missed back then (just as the supposedly obviously genetic superiority of black MLB players was obvious in the 80s even though we now have some doubts on that score). I’m confident the folks back in the 50s also thought they normalized for extraneous factors. That they were wrong should give us pause that maybe we should be more careful that we may be making the same mistake.
And, again, you seem to be missing my stance. I have no problems accepting that different population groups might actually be genetically different. My problem is accepting that as the default based on the incredibly thin evidence presented so far. There’s been such huge changes in cultures, societies, access to food, clean water, health care, etc. that claiming a genetic cause on the basis of 1 or 2 generations of athletes with, at best, minimal normalization for such factors is more than a stretch. It’s assuming the conclusion.
For example, several of the players had at least one parent who was not only an athlete but a basketball player at a professional and often the national level. And several had white parents.
Take, for example, the French player I’m most familiar with (because he plays for San Antonio): Tony Parker. His father, Tony Parker Sr, was an African-American who played college ball and played overseas professional basketball. His mother was white (though I guess we’re ignoring this part for now - it appears the one-drop rule is in effect).
Elite athlete parents commonly have athletic children. It’s not particularly surprising that the son of a basketball player would focus on basketball.
He’s not the only one, of course, Other members of the team have at least one basketball playing parent.
Some also come from parts of Africa where basketball is locally quite popular. The advent of several prominent African NBA stars (like Dikembe Mutombo and Hakeem Olajuwon) in the last couple decades led to huge interest in pursuing the sport.
Even in the NBA, we’re seeing that the increased interest in basketball in different parts of the world has led to the development of good players from other parts of the world, which now includes getting professional players from China, which would have been laughed at not 20 years ago.
So, a cursory glance of the evidence would lead to an Occam’s razor argument about race. But a deeper look shows that such a cursory glance simply glosses over a lot of inconvenient facts.
And, again, you may be right about the whole thing, but it’s much harder to actually eliminate all those pesky other factors than simply admit victory and conclude genetics provides most of the answers.
The thing is, by the time the kid has any choice in the matter, it’s already been long decided. Here’s what I mean: I have a son who’s almost 2. He’s strong, fast, agile, and consistently above 99th percentile for height. It’s at very least within the realm of possibility that he could become a basketball player. But I can tell you right now: barring some miracle, he won’t. Why not? There just won’t be time for it. My husband and I, white and asian, are both great big nerds with multiple degrees. We found our success in life, as most people do, through education, and we expect that the same will be true for our son. We’re not geniuses, but we’re pretty bright, and expect our kid will be, too. We’re going to encourage him to do as well in school as he can. Of course, if he wants to play sports, we’ll encourage that, too, but if there’s ever a question of what comes first, academics will *always *win. *That *will be his priority, at least in terms of time spent. And if he has trouble academically, then we (and he) will be putting even more time and effort into his studies. The only exception to this scenario I can imagine is if he spontaneously displayed a truly astounding talent for basketball, to the point where it was obvious we’d be doing him a disservice if we didn’t foster it. And even with that kind of talent, he’d still have to have started playing basketball pretty regularly, at a pretty young age. And he probably won’t, because he’ll have other, more important shit to get done.
Bear in mind, my husband is a HUGE basketball fan, particularly of our local college team. You have no idea how ecstatic he would be if our kid ended up playing basketball anywhere, let alone on that team. He’d also be thrilled if we won the lottery. But we don’t play the lottery, and we wouldn’t put effort into making our kid a basketball player, for the same reason. Being such a huge fan, he’s all too aware that the vast majority of people who put all their time and effort into becoming pro ballers wind up with nothing to show for it. On the other hand, most people who put all their time and effort into education end up making a pretty good living from it. And that’s especially true if their parents are also well-educated, and have access to the best academic opportunities for them. So he knows, and I know, that the smart money is on education. And that informs every single choice we make for our kid.
Now consider the fact that black people, on average, earn less, don’t do as well in school, are less likely to graduate from college, and are more likely to have single-parent families than white people or asian people. That means you’re going to have a lot more black parents (than white or asian parents) who didn’t derive much success from education and just want their kids to be happy and have fun. You’ll also have more black parents who care a great deal about education, but who don’t have the time, money, or other resources to help their kids excel. There will be more black parents who want to send their kids to college, but don’t have the money for it, and know that the only way they’ll go is on scholarship, and believe that an athletic scholarship will be easier for their kid to achieve. And there will be more black parents who have to work two jobs and simply aren’t home often enough to make their kids do anything they don’t want to do. In sum, you’ll have a lot more black parents who, for a variety of reasons, can’t or won’t insist that their kid stay home and do homework (and if it’s done, then do extra credit, goddamnit!) rather than head out to the courts to shoot hoops until all hours.
Obviously, there are also a ton of black families whose backgrounds, resources, beliefs, and priorities are just like mine and my husband’s, and a bunch of white families - and families of every other race - whose aren’t. But on average, there will be more black families like the ones I described than families of other races. So ultimately, there will be a lot more black parents who make the same calculation my husband and I did - Put all your kid’s time and effort into education or basketball? - and come to the opposite conclusion: that success in business or academics is a pipe dream, but if he really works hard, the kid stands a chance of success in basketball. And that informs every single choice they make for *their *child. That’s the nurturing advantage. And it’s a hell of a one.
And that’s not even touching on a whole host of other factors, like cultural interest in basketball versus football versus soccer, or hey, what the kid’s interests are. You may not believe this, but not every little boy dreams of being in the NBA until he’s forced to give up that dream. Anyway, my point is simply that nurturing - that is, the choices parents make for their kids - isn’t anywhere near equivalent.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I’ve heard that argument many times, and as I’ve said, it is the crux of the debate, really: is there nurturing that somehow is adequate to explain a ratio difference of 5:1 at the front end for population and 1:4 at the success end for the NBA. I doubt that ratio is much different even at the high school level…I don’t think it’s true that typical white parents steer their kids away from sports just because they aren’t going to make the NBA. There are lots of other good reasons to play basketball. So the starting pool is still markedly skewed disproportionately toward whites.
And as I’ve said, I don’t think nurturing favors blacks here. I think even your kid is gonna get some exposure to basketball and I think if he is really really kick ass you’re not going to tell him he’s wasting his time. You are going to let it play out. While it may be true that in the black community the kid takes longer to figure out he’s not going to the NBA, the really really talented white pool does not get drummed out a priori–they just get it figured out for them faster. Beyond that, the average black kid has hurdles your kid doesn’t have: money, coaching, family structure, drugs, policemen, crappy facilities…and it’s not at all clear to me that black families are so stupid that they can’t figure out it’s a low yield lottery to have an NBA dream. Opportunities are not limited for scholastically talented black kids to such a degree that they are out there playing basketball in desperation that it’s their only route to get ahead.
But maybe we’ll see a sea-change Real Soon Now, if it’s just some cultural shifts and insight into How Life Works that we need to drive into the black community. In the meantime, why not give your kid a shot at basketball? And while you are doing it, encourage the black kids to stay in school. Most colleges and most companies are desperate for good black candidates, contrary to the popular myth that blacks are somehow getting turned away in droves. If too many blacks haven’t figured out the obvious–school beats basketball as a total bet–you will have helped.
The part I’m missing is where the “evidence is thin.” It’s true hindsight is 20/20 but it’s also true that we have boatloads of statistical and practical data. For example, it was argued for years that family income and parental education accounted for black-white differences on the SAT…a number of studies looked at that and found out it was nonsense, with children from poverty-stricken white families outscoring wealthy black children, and ditto for parental educational level.
On the NBA case-study front, I don’t get it where the evidence is thin. You have this starting pool (say; all high school basketball players) disproportionately white and you have a nearly all-black NBA at the playing level, with a handful of exceptions (typically tall, somewhat gawky individuals gleaned from a base across the whole world; their major “talent” seems more related to getting lucky for the Tall gene than anything else…). The black kid who makes it to the NBA has navigated a nightmare of obstacles to get there, many of which (statistically) would have weeded out even more of the black starting pool. The statistics are heartbreaking. For example our idiotic war on drugs help park 840000 blacks in custody or incarceration in 2009. How many of those were young black men robbed of a future–including a chance at the NBA? We put a lot of people in the Big House, and in 2010 managed to put about 7 times as many blacks as whites there…so this notion that the whole nurturing advantage argument for whites is “thin” escapes me entirely.
I don’t believe a thinking individual can look at the Hebrew leagues at the beginning of the last century and pretend that we haven’t progressed in our ability to look more objectively at cause and effect. It’s not that hard an equation to sort out: What is the proportion in the starting pool? What is the proportion in the success pool? What nurturing elements come into play, and whom do they favor?
Could you cite some of these studies? I know on average that black kids get lower scores than white kids, but I was not aware that wealthy black kids score lower than poor white kids.
The first two elements don’t seem to hard- but on that last one, it seems like good research would fill up a library. From what I can glean, your “nurture” argument seems to come down to “black kids have lower opportunities in general, all things being equal, so they must have lower opportunities for basketball”.
This is the only place I have ever encouintered the term “whoosh”.
Exactly what does it mean, anyway?
There is consensus among geneticists that all modern humans are descended from
three female lineages of separate origin several 10,000 years ago. These lineages
are termed mitochondrial DNA haplogoups L1-L2-L3.
Part of the L3 population migrated from Africa and mutated and remutated into all
non-African populations. The original L1 L2 L3 remained intact in only in SubSaharan
populations. All people with SubSaharan ancestry and only people of SubSaharan ancestry
possess one of the three MtL L1 L2 L3 DNA markers, or the relatively rare MtM1 marker.
Since little migration took place between SubSaharan Africa and the rest of the world
throughout recorded history to ~1500 I would think that detection of MtL123M1
DNA would be enough to identify African ancestry with a high degree of certainty.
*** If there is a known, discernable DNA-based division between people with African ancestry
and the rest of the world, then it is not really necessary to go further for our purposes.***
To continue, however, the scatter plot on pdf page 5 of the following cite indicates
there are many other DNA markers besides Mitochondrial available for use in continental
population study, and they depict at least five clearly defined separate genetic clusters.
These clusters correlate well with historical perceptions of the different human races.
Who has a bigger pool of trainees to draw from, and more money to spend on them,
and better facilites to provide them with? The US-UK with their 10 winners, or
Kenya-Ethiopia-Jamaica-Dominican Rep. with their 18 winners? Not even close, is it?
Then you have the additional problem that part-African10% of the US population and
less than that of the UK population produce several times per capita more winners over expectation.
Thank you for making my point for me. 2nd order factors decisively favor my argument
since they work decisively in favor American whites over American Blacks, yet Blacks
dominate much American sport, including especially the sprints and hurdles.
I was following baseball closely then, and although blacks were disproportionately
represented they did not dominate the sport as they were even then dominating
the NFL and NBA, and track. Also, sprinting and jumping ability are relatively
unimportant in baseball. Also, both whites and Blacks have had to compete with
increasing numbers of foreign baseball players.
Sorry, but your argument is factually incorrect.
Accoring to Wiki there were only about 2-3 Jewish NBA starters and 2-3 benchwarmers
~1945-1969. 4-6 players divided by total roster numbers is not going to give you several x%
the Jewish population of the time.
Furthermore, I should not have to specify that the time before full integration of
both professional and collegiate teams does not count, so that rules out the entire era.
We have already discussed MLB. White swimming ability is on the table, and does
not help your argument. I believe statistically significant numbers of young women
have an aversion to mathematical and scientific achievement because of its being percieved
as unsexy, geeky and and uncool. However, athletic performance is encouraged and esteemed
by almost all demographics, so if bad attitude is the reason for women’s lower math scores
it does nothing to support a psychological case against anything I have said.
Table tennis does not require ability to move fast beyond a range of a few meters.
It does require good reflexes and eye-hand coordination, factors I do not claim African superiority for.
It is as cut and dried as ever.
I do not know about the others, but what I am saying if that other factors being equal
the athlete with the most natural (i.e. genetic) ability will win. That is not twisting anything,
it is obvious, and is common sense.
However unless you believe that Kenyan athletes have as much support as US athletes, then it is clear
talent may even be overriding.
You’re really on a tear with this “normalizing” stuff, aren’t you? I have already exposed
your error regarding finances and facilities. Coaching goes with the fianance-facility territory.
It is reasonable to assume parents everywhere do their best to promote their children’s
abilities so that is a dead heat. Similarly most cultures place high value on athletic achievement.
I do not know what you mean by mentoring as distinct from coaching and parenting.
That is a ridiculous question. I’ll answer this time, but don’t count on any more
answers to questions like that.
Appearance consists of the features of the image of an object projected from
eyes to brain. These are the most prominent features of racial appearance:
skin color
hair color and texture
facial metrics, especially:
eyelid structure
nose structure
lip structure
Racial self-identification consists of what race a person considers himself to belong to.
The terms are disjunct, that is, a person who appears European may self-identify
as Diaspora African.
I urge you to stop shooting yourself in the foot with such finnicky and immaterial objections.
Let us take another look at exactly how I used the word “primarily”:
(from post #748)
So as anyone can see I was applying the word “primarily” to 30 hurdlers, and by
implication to elite runners in general , but not to elite politicians, entertainers, judges, etc.
US African Americans average about 80-20% African-European DNA markers.
I assumed that percentage is apprx. the same for other African Diaspora populations,
and that the runners in question were therefore “of primarily African ancestry”.
The assumption is reasonable taking the runners as a group. It may not be for
each of 30 individuals, and is certainly not true for all elite runners who appear
to be Diaspora African, or who self-identify as such. So to be precisely logical
I should have used the word “partially” rather than “primarily”.
However, lowering the bar from “primarily” to “partially” could only serve to
reinforce my side of the argument by allowing me to include such athletes as
the great Cuban 400m-800m runner Alberto Juantorena.
See what I mean about shooting yourself in the foot?
Ok, so at one point do you determine that someone is of “primarily African descent”.
Have you seen pictures of all the sprinters and determined from looking at them that they’re of “primarily African descent” or did you just assume that they were?
Yes, so then by your logic anyone who self-indentifies as “black” should be considered of “primarily African descent”?
Correct? If not please explain why you said you based your judgment on “appearance and self-identification”.
Er…if you’re making you’re determination based on “appearance and self-identification” why would the standards be different for “hurdlers” than for “elite politicians, entertainers, judges, etc.”.
I’m sorry but your logic is grossly lacking.
Ah, so now you’re backtracking. Initially, you claimed that you thought they were of “primarily African descent” due to “appearance and self-identification” but now you’re admitting that you had no reason to believe this other than they were of “African diaspora populations” and so you “assumed” that they were of “predominantly African descent”.
Well, you know what they say you do when you “assume” something.
I’d recommend that next time you start spouting racist myths you use logic rather than pseudo science and bullshit.
Note, I’m not accusing you of being stupid or racist, but your arguments are highly illogical and ill-thought out.
Abigail Thernstrom & Stephan Thernstrom discuss that in No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning. You can also look at the 1995 SAT breakdown by parental education or income.
And while you are doing it, encourage the black kids to stay in school. Most colleges and most companies are desperate for good black candidates, contrary to the popular myth that blacks are somehow getting turned away in droves. If too many blacks haven’t figured out the obvious–school beats basketball as a total bet–you will have helped.
