I’m Korean, my wife is Black. What race will my children be?
Are you suggest that the dark one will probably run better while the fair skinned one will probably be better at golf?
I would like to note that Althea Gibson, Arthur Ashe, and the Williams sisters have all won at Wimbledon. Tiger Woods and Vijay Singh excel at golf.
Once a black person manages to overcome the societal barriers that prevent them from succeeding at traditionally “white” sports they excel at those as well. Look at basketball and baseball. It’s only been 50+ years since the color barriers were broken in those sports and the sports are dominated by them, basketball in particular. Even baseball: three of the top four in home runs are black. Basketball: the top scorers are all black.
As a casual observation, when the doors are opened to black athletes they utterly dominate. This has been noted as far back as 1936 when Jesse Owens made you-know-who look like a chump.
Why is this a big deal?
The big deal is multi-fold. One is the Incredible Hulk syndrome in which people believe that if a person excels in physical achievement he must therefor be lacking in intellect.
The second is the notion that people who do well in sports do so, because of innate “animal” abilities, this was noted doing the time when the Jews were leading the basketball leagues. They don’t have to try like ‘normal’ people, it just comes to them.
The third is that ignores the fact that most groups use sports as stepping stones to advancement. Historically most sports were dominated by the lower classes who abandoned those roles to the next at the bottom, as they rose. Due to racism, “blacks” were at first denied the opportunity, then regulated to it. It is this extended time at the ladder of sports, that we’re witnessing.
This is the natural culling of the best of best, who happen to be"black", because that’s the one of the ways that “blacks” have always pulled themselves up. The reason you have more “blacks”, is because the pool’s bigger.
Look for a change as more and more “blacks” enter the professional fields and continue entering the middle class and more and different immigrants fill the spaces left.
So, in other words, the reason why this cannot be so is because it “validates” the opinions of people who would hate black people no matter what? The more common sense approach to this is to acknowledge what people see with their own eyes and tell the racists to screw themselves.
Your average person is not racist, and they don’t like to be told that they are because they make an observation with their own two eyes and question why that might be.
In addition to the excellent reply from holmes, let me add…
Casual observation is more often than not wrong. There isn’t a whole lot of science on the subject, but I haven’t seen anything that demonstrates, scientifically, what you’re claiming to have observed. Even if you show a correlation between “being Black” and “being a good athlete”, correlation isn’t causation. You know that.
Would you say that the doors are not open to Blacks in tennis, golf, hockey? Sure, there are few top-notch Black athletes in tennis and golf, but it’s hardly the case that “they utterly dominate”.
PS: VJ Singh is Indian (via Fiji) and would be considered “Caucasian” in the standard racial classification scheme even though his skin is considerably darker than Tiger’s. And Tiger is only nominally Black. Given his ethnic background, it would be more accurate to call him Asian than Black, if you had to pick only one ethnicity.
Airman Doors, USAF I gave you a pretty good answer to an extremly complicated question and you only focused on the ‘racism’ part.
There you go.
No, not at all.
Genetic diversity is a property apparent at the level of a population, not of an individual. When people say that Africans are genetically more diverse than other groups, they mean that any given indigenous population in Africa contains, on average, more alleles (different gene varieties) than populations found on other continents.
You would expect this to be the case if (as most scientists believe) we all sprang from African ancestors. African populations are the oldest; thus you would expect them to harbor a bunch of alleles that haven’t cropped up yet in the newer populations.
Okay, but African-Americans aren’t Africans and ‘blackness’ can mean whatever the hell people believe it to mean.
I guess my problem is that ‘we’ seem to be using Black, African, African-American as if they’re interchangible and they’re not. Who’s to say which alleles are being passed especially in the States?
And what’s with the skin whitening cream on the google ads? Geez.
Well You-know-who believed that Aryan race had traits like being tall, blonde and fair-skinned. Having more of those features meant you were of truer Aryan bloodline. He believed that Aryans were a superior race, and that consequently they produce superior athletes. He wanted to use the Aryan domination of the Olympics as proof of his junk science.
So ironically now you are using Black domination of sports as proof for another form of junk science?
Haven’t there been a number of black tennis and golf players that didn’t do so great and are easily forgotten? Could it be the case that because there are so few minority atheletes in these arenas, their “differentness” makes their accomplishments seem more impressive or important than they actually are?
Well, you mention a whole bunch of sports up there. And they all require a mastery of different skills. I find it hard to believe that black people have a “jack-of-all sports” gene. Does Venus Williams have the same magical gene as Michael Jordan, even though their skill sets are entirely different?
I don’t think it’s a big deal to simply state that blacks are disproportionately represented in atheletics. Whites are disproportionately represented in the Senate. Asians are dispropotionately represented in the field of computer science. Gay men are disproportionately represented in Broadway productions. But do these observations require explanations based in genetics? No. I don’t see why we have to treat blacks and sports any differently.
I might not be a math wiz, and I didn’t post any kind of statistical analysis.
It’s not a representative pool, nor can we be certain that all the fast runners are in it. There might be a large number of fast runners who’ve never tried moving faster than a brisk walk.
If melanin is the key factor, we do have to look at the entire human population. shouldn’t most melanistic people be faster than most non melanistic people?
Yes a lot of white kids run, and the 50 who could beat 10 secs. might be sitting at home playing video games.
The two runners in the article are only 10ths or 100ths off of the magic number. Lack of melanin can’t be that significant.
Do you mean the sub-set of people who chose to be athletes?
Do you think melanin had any thing to do with that 2.6 seconds?
Learned to run? I thought this was a genetic predisposition.
It’s still an artificially selected sample, If you don’t try out you don’t know how fast you can run.
Finally some REAL science!
“Race” is a cultural artifact, there is no such thing as “the black race” (or a black horse). There are humans, (and horses) who have inherited genes that make them melanistic, and THAT’S ALL that gene does. It doesn’t bring ANYTHING else to the table with it! It doesn’t make you run fast, the genes that control the type and quantity of type of muscle fibers does that. And if you got the endurance muscle gene, instead of the speed muscle gene, you ain’t gonna break 10 in the 100M!
You can check with the human genome project, there’s no “crack dealer gene”, and there NO geneticists looking for one. No such thing as crack until the last quarter of the last century. If there was a “crack dealer gene” it would have to be a spontaneous mutation that miraculously occurred at the same time that crack dealing became historically possible. That’s not evolution, it’s ID, and THAT, just ain’t science!
Which is in fact at the root of this subject. An attempt to create different flavors of human, racial speciesization.
Well I guess blacks are human, but their not really the same as white folk…
Which is utter bullshit!
Excellent posts holmes!
I won’t offer any silly Jimmy-the-Greek style theories to explain why black men are, as a whole, much faster than white men. But they are.
To those who want to insist that sociology explains the dominance of black men at running back, cornerback, and wide receiver, I implore you to stop.
Yes, historically, poverty has driven people to seek success in sports. Boxing, in particular, attracts the poorest of the poor. That’s why you had many Irish and Jewish boxers a century ago, and so few now. But football is a very different story indeed.
Here in Texas, football is a religion, at LEAST as much among white boys as among black boys. Millions of white kids grow up playing football and dreaming of being NFL stars. In lily-white towns around Texas, white grade school, junior high school and even high school kids play running back and wide receiver and cornerback. So, if you’re trying to rationalize to yourself, “Wel, maybe white kids just don’t WANT to be receivers… or maybe white kids just aren’t as passionate about football as black kids… or maybe white kids aren’t as DRIVEN to succeed in football as black kids,” you’re wrong. 100% wrong.
(Incidentally, you could replace “Texas” with Indiana and replace “football” with basketball, and the previous paragraph would be equally true.)
And yet, practically NONE of those white kids ever becomes a starting running back, receiver or cornerback at UT, A & M, Baylor, or Oklahoma. Why do you suppose that is? Are Bob Stoops, Mack Brown et al. engaging in reverse racism? Are they shuttting their eyes to the millions of white kids with world-class speed because they PREFER to give scholarships to black kids?
And if “poverty” is really what drives people to success in football, care to explain why we don’t see MExican running backs or wide receivers at major colleges and in the NFL? Mexicans in Texas are a good deal POORER than blacks, on the whole. Why hasn’t that driven Mexicans to become dominant in Texas football?
Two to consider when people are trashing Fisher DeBerry:
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Black athletes know that DeBerry is right, and they regularly joke about it amongst themselves all the time. If a receiver is slow or can’t jump, they laugh “He’s got the White Man’s Disease.”
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If DeBerry had used the usual code words, “We’ve got to improve our team speed,” nobody would have condemned him, but EVERY sports fan would still know EXACTLY what he meant (“We need more black guys!”).
Personally, I’d LOVE to see Ted Koppel get some NFL owners or general managers on “Nightline” and give them the same kind of grilling he gave to Al Campanis. “Jerry Jones, the Dallas Cowboys haven’t had a white starting halfback or a white starting wide receiver in over twenty years. Why not?”
I’d love to see the head of the U.S. Olympic committee raked over the coals. “Why hasn’t there been a white athlete representing the U.S. in the 100 meter sprint in over thirty years?”
Truth is, white athletes don’t have “the necessities.” White sports fans and athletes know it. Black fans and athletes know it. The only people pretending otherwise are doing so for political reasons.
Oh yeah. The football gene.
forgot about that one!
Why do I suppose that is? The only honest answer to that right now is: We simply don’t know.
It could be genetic, it could be environmental, it could be cutlural, it could be any combination of those things. But until we actually make a hypothesis and test that hypothesis, we simply don’t know.
Don’t you mean “were passed”, not “being passed”? I don’t think there’s much gene flow between Africans and black/African Americans now.
The earliest black slaves to make it to the New World were African, correct? So, these people can be viewed as a subset of the African populations they were taken from. The African Americans of today are the descendants of these people. So we harbor the genetic legacy of our African ancestors, even if it has been intermixed with Native American and European DNA along the way. I don’t have a cite, but I’m willing to bet that black Americans are more genetically diverse than their white counterparts.
As for which alleles came over, I don’t think we can know that for sure. I don’t even think knowing is all that important. African Americans are not a genetic image of their African brethen, probably mostly due to European/Native American admixture. But that doesn’t mean they don’t share a relatively recent genetic history.
Yeah, blacks =! African Americans =! Africans in a sociological discussion, but if we are talking about genetic legacies, the differences among these terms become less important. And the truth, holmes, is that black Americans are genetically related to Africans, particularly of West Africa (although East Africans were represented in the slave trade too…we tend to neglect this fact). At an indvidual level, our degree of relatedness differs (Tiger Woods is “less African” than Venus Williams). But it is not wrong to assert that black Americans as a group are more closely related to Africans than they are to white Americans. It would be ridiculous to assert otherwise.
Not that I agree that there’s a genetic explanation for why black people do well in sports, but I think your argument is becoming mired in definitions. The arbitrariness of race doesn’t dispell the very realness of populations and the fact that some groups are genetically more related to others.
That’s why I keep bring up horses, if you want fast horses you don’t look at the color of their hair!
Bad example. VERY bad example. Bloodlines and breeding are considered EXTREMELY important in horse racing. Trainers care IMMENSELY about a colt’s ancestry.
Since I’m sure that’s not what you meant to imply, find a different analogy.
BTW, and just to check - this is a gene (or set of genes) carried on the Y chromosone, correct?
Because looking at the Olympics results in track for women, it seems to be the province of the former Soviet Socialist Republics. And I may be mistaken, but I don’t remember them being overwhelmingly of African descent.
The same results also don’t seem to show all that many countries from west Africa for either men or women - you’d think that this gene (or set of genes) would be purer there - they should be absolutely dominating. Was there some sort of middle passage mutation?
holmes: You did not answer any of my questions. You are attempting to skirt the issue. I asked you many specific questions. You obfuscate instead of answer. You say a question was vague. Fine, don’t answer that ONE. Answer my questions and I, in turn, will answer yours. That is how debate works. Otherwise I must assume that you are less interested in a meanaingful discussion than you are in sticking to some predetermined script.