I’m far from an expert on racial distribution in sports so forgive me if any of this is wrong, but when was the last time we had a white heavyweight boxing champion? And who’s been dominating tennis and golf the last few years (especially when compared to the number of black people playing those sports)?
And then, according to this article in the NY Times, of the professional football players responding to the study mentioned in the link (or 80% of total players), 65% are black and only 29% are white. Asians, Hispanics and ‘other’ make up the rest.
So how is it that this discussion has come to focus almost solely on basketball?
How about we just drop the point about blacks outside of america, because that’s two people now that have misunderstood the point I was trying to make. My wording must have been imprecise.
Anyway, the central thing I’m saying is that for a minority population in a country to make up 82% of players, it stretches credulity to suppose the difference could be entirely cultural. It strongly suggests a genetic factor, though it’s not a smoking gun.
No. Hockey is to Canada as football is to the U.S. NFL is much bigger in the US than NBA. The best Nielson rating that the NBA has ever been able to muster in a final since Jordon left is 12. They are in the same ballpark as the World Series. Superbowls come in at around 40 and hit 49 in 1982.
What do you mean by dominance? Like the European “dominance” of today. Do you have any stats on their representation in professional basketball ? Anything close to 70 or 82% of the league?
Isn’t it convenient that the period you are refering to excluded blacks from participating?
Hockey is to Canada what football, basketball, and baseball combined are to the USA. And basketball season overlaps hockey season. It’s hardly a mystery why there aren’t very many Canadians in pro basketball.
If you want to look at whether or not a disproportionate representation means anything, one of the things you have to consider is the starting pool. Without the starting pool being a proportionate representation, the final representation is not very meaningful.
In the 30s, the basketball was not a particularly glamorous career. Professional basketball was the domain of the blue-collar, hard-scrabble immigrants with few other choices. It was nothing like the modern NBA where enormous fame and fortune accompany the job. So there would be many reasons for an individual to abandon a basketball “career” in favor of more lucrative careers, or careers offering more of a chance of achieving a high public profile. Secondly, in the 30s professional basketball was not open to everyone. In particular, it was not open to people of color.
That Jews were over-represented reflects as much a limitation in their career choices as any other single factor. Paul Gallico’s commentary about basketball placing a premium on “the scheming mind, fashy trickiness, artful dodging and general smart aleckness” and therefore appealing to “the Hebrew” reflects a rather quaint effort to explain Jewish over-representation, but it’s pretty clear, if you look at the culture of the time, that Jewish representation was indeed culturally-driven.
Can we make that same explanation now with a straight face? Well, the NBA is a different career than in the days of the South Philadelphia Hebrew Association. It’s a career valued in first place by anyone who takes up basketball, along with their support group. A kid showing real talent–regardless of color–is not going to give up basketball until he is outperformed, because achievement of a pro basketball career is richer in money and more rewarding for fame. In the 1930s, a banker would be a better choice than a basketball player.
What about cultural desire in the first place? Is there any evidence that whites enthusiastically support, love and worship basketball to the extent blacks do, and therefore take it up in the first place? That’s an easy answer. Look across every school program, from elementary through college, and you’ll see robust enthusiasm, with absolute numbers far exceeding equivalent numbers on the black side, because of the disproportionate numbers of whites in the first place.
In summary, far more whites play basketball in the first place. Far more whites desire basketball stardom with a professional career. Along the way the opportunities to achieve that goal are far more available to whites: better coaching; better family stability; better facilities; fewer distractions such as crime and poverty…better everything on average.
Normally some libertarian who actually knows something will usually rescue these kinds of threads.
Here is your answer.
Because people ACT as though there are races. They act this way because STATUS is more easily obtained in-group then extra-group, specially among men.
Because in group empathic understanding especially among young women, creates a bias toward in-group mate selection. (except at the margins where it’s random for the same reason.)
Because there are significant differences in IQ DISTRIBUTION between racial groups, which serves to reinforce status signals.
Basically, people tend to like spending time with and around people who are like them. and even though, in the ‘market’ (public life) people can cooperate using market protocols (manners and ethics and morals) status signals in family and group (extra-market) are self-reinforcing.
Lots of research on this. People like Tim Harford (a popular economist) and the greats such as Gary Stanley Becker (the first person to discuss the economics of race and family) have covered this issue in detail. I may be one of the few people explaining the status economy as a decision making criteria. But the IQ issue is well understood even if politically unpleasant. IQ has almost perfect correlation with lifetime achievement and all counter arguments have been disproved by the study of twins raised separately. IQ regresses toward the mean, but is otherwise heritable, and is heritable within races because of breeding patterns within those races due to the reasons stated above. But the racial differences are real, substantive and they are problematic for one absolute reason:
It appears, that as a rule of thumb, it requires an IQ of 133 to invent an abstract ‘idea’, an IQ of 122 to invent a machine, and an IQ of 105 to repair it. This means different racial groups will run against permanent class barriers without redistribution of wealth. While we can increase IQ’s by increasing information density (exposing people to patterns) and increase them by education (by about 20 points) these requirements for innovation are fairly constant. Exceptional abilities also differer among racial groups (asians with object memory, whites with spatial abstractions and european jews with language).
These are serious issues for the future of mankind. They are not political niceties without consequence. And it appears from movement patterns that people in north america are adopting the south american model for the same reasons as did south americans - wealthy cores surrounded by rings of poverty.
It may be that we can find a solution. But it will not come by denying the reality of what is evident in the TOTALITY of the data. And the totality of the data supports these general hypotheses.
And yet I bet the average black young male plays far more hours of basketball than the average white young male does. Because in a lifestyle that’s “better”, as you say, you’ll have MORE distractions in the form of “family” meals (it’s your turn to set the table!), SAT prep courses, Hebrew school/church youth group, violin/cello/piano practice and recitals, cross country practice, soccer practice, tennis lessons, swim team, (hey, because we want junior to be well-rounded), as well as academic team, debate team, Monty Python Appreciation club, chess club, AP courses, Toastmasters, drama club, sneaking sips of whiskey out of grandpa’s liquor cabinent, and anything else that Middle-to Upper-Middle Class White People Do More Frequently Than Poor Black People.
You have not proven that white youth desire basketball stardom more than black youth.
You have not proven that white youth try as hard as black youth to achieve this goal.
Just about everything you have posited has been speculation. And not even well-thought speculation at that.
I hear “the blacks” dominate in <insert sport here> Wow.
“Those guys” can really shoot/run/jump
that is…when “they” can’t swim/skate/kick/lift/bat.
Did you hear?
“They” are also starting to take over tennis/golf.
At least “they” can’t invent/repair abstract ideas/machines.
OMG GregClark/Henry Harpending/Richard Lynn have ideas that contain RACE REALISM!
Why won’t those denylists/egalitarians/creationists see the obvious!
Oh, and if we include the women, a whole lot of Asians (Koreans), not that there aren’t a bunch of male Asians (Japanese) with great “games” too.
CMC fnord!
The argument that black poverty is behind the enormous over representation of blacks in the NBA is pure poppycock. Less than a third of blacks are classified as living in poverty and twice as many whites in the US live in poverty as well.
And besides, the greatest basketball player of all time, Michael Jordon was raised middle class and shortly after getting into the NBA returned to his university to complete his last year to achieve his degree.
You have not proven that black youth desire basketball stardom more than white youth.
Just about everything you have posited has been speculation. And not even well-thought speculation at that.
Okay, you’ve had your fun. Care to go back and post something honest now?
Meh. I think I knew some of that about Woods at one time but I forgot. Still, I think it’s more than clear that his black heritage predominates. I suppose if you want to parse it fine enough you could claim there are virtually no blacks in America because almost everyone who people think of as black has some white European in their genealogy, according to Henry Louis Gates anyway, who has done some very interesting work on what DNA shows about the genealogy of blacks in the U.S. I’ll try to find a cite if you don’t want to take my word for it, but his findings are pretty much common knowledge by now.
And as far as how to define “dominating” with regard to professional golf? I think it might well be put it this way:
I’m aware that certain posters on this board like to get in a snit over U.S.-centric comments and pretend they can be negated by dragging in stuff from everywhere else around the world, but the fact of the matter is the post you quoted was in regard to current circumstances in sports in the United States, and I’m sure you know that. But just for clarity, when I cite that professional football teams are comprised 65% by black players, I’m not talking about soccer and I’m not talking about Europe.
Still, let me parse the current state of things a litte more precisely:
Black players comprise 82% of players in NBA teams.
Blacks players comprise approximately 65% of players in NFL teams.
Blacks are so dominant in the field of boxing that no one even wonders when we’ll have another white heavyweight champion anymore. (Don’t know about the state of things at the lower levels; I haven’t watched middleweight or welterweight boxing in years. Still, I wouldn’t be surprised to find that black boxers predominate there as well.)
And in two sports where there continues to be very little black representation - golf and tennis - Tiger Woods and the Williams Sisters have been the predominant force for the last decade.
It’s unquestionable to anyone not bound up in political correctness that when you have 16% of the population overwhelmingly dominating the world of sports like this, the only conclusion that can be drawn is that blacks have a superior genetic ability when it comes to athletics.
So why can’t we stop with all this nonsense of pretending there must be - has to be - some other explanation? I’ve seen posters on this very board admit as much myself, but with the claim that if we acknowledge some…or any…genetic difference between the races it opens the door for bigots who want to claim blacks aren’t as intelligent as whites. So in other words, we have to turn a blind eye to the obvious and pretend that something we perfectly well know in our heart of hearts isn’t true because if we admit that it is true it opens the door to bigotry in other areas. To me this is not only disingenuous but flat out dishonest, and it gives ammo to people like Rush Limbaugh who likes to say that ‘to tell the truth is self-defeating, if you’re a liberal’.
If I were a black person witnessing all this hooey I’d be highly offended. It’s as if white liberals are taking the position that absolutely no ammunition exists at all to disprove allegations of black intellectual inferiority, and so the only way to fight the idea is to cling for dear life to the fiction that no difference exists between the two races at all, in any area.
So let’s stop with all the dancing on the head of pin in this regard and then confront and disprove allegations of black intellectual inferiority whenever and wherever it rears its ugly head. Black athletic ability no more reflects upon black intelligence than white athletic ability reflects upon the ability of whites to draw with a pencil. The one has absolutely nothing to do with the other. And the sooner people start confronting the kind of bigotry that says it does head on instead of pretending that no differences exist whatsoever, the better it will be for everyone.
I agree with the sentiment, but using the idea of race is problematic. Race is a an incredibly broad vague term – so broad and vague it has little to do with genetics. Dealing with specific populations across the world makes more sense.
Agreed.
I do think you are overstating your case for black dominance in sports though. The sprinting dominance of west african descended blacks is hard to question. Basketball is still dominated by west african descended blacks, although there are, in my mind, many social and cultural explanations that help to explain that.
But why bring in tennnis and golf? The Williams sisters and Woods have had a good run, but saying that these sports are dominated by blacks is like saying that the NBA was dominated by white Canadiens the year that Steve Nash won the MVP. It also doesn’t even fit in. One could imagine that a population possessing some type of genetic advantage for movements involving speed, explosiveness, and leaping might do quite well in sprinting (obviously) and sports that involved these type of movements (ie basketball, football). But why would there possibly be an advantage in tennis and golf?
If it’s pure poppycock, then surely you can find a cite that shows the socioeconomic breakdown of NBA players so you can prove I’m wrong. Do black NBA players come from the “better” kinds of families that Chief Pedant describes, or do they tend to come from poor, urban, single-parented households, where there’s little pressure other than to stay out of trouble?
Because Chief Pedant might have a point if black NBA players tend to come from families with the same variables as the “average” white person. If black and white youth are pushed towards the same interests, withstand the same negative and positive reinforcements, and are exposed to the same opportunities, then we can say something about whether there’s a biological explanation for why one group is overrepresented in the NBA versus the other. In the absence of such data, then it’s just the same easily refuted bullshit he keeps pumping out over and over again.
Also, I hope you aren’t assuming that poor white people and poor black people aspire to the same things. Now that would be poppycock. Poor whites might aspire to NASCAR or MLB, where blacks are both underrepresented. Gee, I wonder why we don’t ever hear about how whites are genetically predisposed to NASCAR or MLB? Could it be that we are used to viewing white people as nuased creatures who can do well in a variety of contexts, but we (not including me) are primed to seeing black people doing well only in limited number ones?
That’s great. Really. But for every Michael Jordan, there’s a Lebron James–born from a teenaged, single mother. Or an Allen Iverson (a convicted felon born into poverty) or Dwayne Wade (born in southside Chicago, bounced from multiple homes after his parents divorced, and practically raised by an older sister.) Yes, there are Kobe Bryants and Grant Hills, from solidly middle-class families. But are they the exception rather than the rule? I don’t know. Neither does Chief Pedant or you.
I have not stated that black youth desire basketball stardom more than white youth, or made any statement about their innate abilities as you and others have. So you’re wrong; I haven’t made any speculations, well-thought or otherwise. I have simply pointed out that having the “best” of everything could actually be a detriment to reaching basketball superstardom instead of an advantage. If you are exposed to more opportunities, as Chief Pedant’s “better” white family would naturally provide, then chances are you will not have tunnel-vision for one thing (i.e., basketball).
It’s blatantly obvious to me. The question is: why isn’t it to you?
Why? Does black DNA have some super power to overwhelm any other DNA? Woods is only one quarter black, which means that less than one quarter of his DNA has any connection to Africa subsequent to the 15th century as the overwhelming majority of blacks in the U.S. have both European and American Indian ancestors.
Yet you have decided that his “black heritage predominates.” Why is that?
It seems the longer these threads go, the more asinine the arguments become. The vast majority of top golf competitors have been white. So if anything, SA should be arguing that Tiger’s European heritage is giving him that innate advantage on the field. But it’s as if his brain–and others like his–are trained to think that way only when it concerns black athleticism. White advantage is all attributed to hard work and smart play. The pattern is obvious and obnoxious.
It also supports Malcolm Gladwell’s argument that I posted earlier: when people attribute their performance to something other than innate ability, they don’t perform maximally welll. It’s clear to me that when black people start doing well in areas previously dominated by whites (e.g. basketball, boxing…and now we see it with tennis and golf) whites start psyching themselves out. They see themselves as losers before they even start playing, because they think black people are naturally inclined to outperform them.
