LOL. Did you read the article?
First, it shows more suburban than urban kids–as a percentage–play team sports. That means the starting pool is even more disproportionately white.
Second, here are the reasons for boys quitting:
Not fun 39%
Injury 29%
Grade focus 26%
No like coach 22%
Teammates 18%
Bad at it 15%
Fam worry 12%
(Yeah, I know. I can count too. But it’s your study. )
So 15% of the 161% are cited as having bailed because they admitted they were just crappy. But lemme let you in on a well known secret: If you are crappy at something, it’s not fun. You get hurt. You find other things more important. The coach sucks. Your teammate sucks. And your family worries about you.
Also, when you get to high school level and beyond, you get your ass kicked unless you are really, really, naturally talented. Because the ONLY thing that gets you substantial success once the truly competitive league play is arrived at, is a combination of natural ability and an environment that nurtures it.
For NFL and NBA play, the genetic advantage of the black pool of players is so markedly overwhelming that, even with a huge nurturing disadvantage (coaching; family life; access; facilities; drugs; crime; on and one…) they kick ass.
One more thing you apparently didn’t bother to read in your hurry: “Living in poor corners of cities culls even more kids from sports. Nationwide, according to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, only a quarter of eighth- to 12th-graders enrolled in the poorest schools played school sports. (Those are schools with the highest rate of free-lunch eligibility, which are also among the schools with the highest dropout rates, meaning that even lower percentages of the kids in those communities are playing.)”
This ridiculous notion that black kids in the city are out in force obsessively training to be NFL/NBA stars while white kids in the suburbs eat bonbons and practice piano is a pile of fantasy horseshit for those determined to diminish the steady march of genetic science. What the average black kid faces every day just to survive is overwhelming enough. The actual percentage that gets a chance to get groomed for sports success is substantially smaller–not larger–than the already small proportionate representation by population ratio.
You say this about nurture as if it’s a fact – do you know how many black kids live near public basketball courts, and how many white kids? Do you know how many hours each group spends playing basketball per week? Do you know how many black parents encourage their kids to play basketball vs white parents? I don’t think you know these things (or the myriad of other factors that could affect athletic success), so I think it’s ridiculous to make any conclusion about it.
Maybe black people have some natural advantage at certain sports – but it’s not reasonable to conclude this is so based on some supposed “huge nurturing disadvantage”. Why did Jews dominate basketball early in the century? Did they have a nurturing advantage over other groups? If so, what was that nurturing advantage? Considering the many, many differences in society and culture, it’s entirely possible that there is some societal or cultural reason for at least some of the disparity today as well.
Why do Jamaicans dominate sprinting, with many, many more champion sprinters per capita than the much, much larger country of Nigeria? Couldn’t it have something to do with nutrition in Jamaica? Or maybe the cultural obsession with sprinting sports?
Why do white people dominate tennis right now? Isn’t it possible that white kids play tennis a lot more, on average, and black kids play basketball a lot more, on average?
The most obvious “nurture” statistic, were it available, would seem to be time spent on the court/field. I don’t know if this is so, but if black kids spent significantly more time playing basketball than white kids, on average, then that would seem to indicate a significant nurture advantage for black kids, as far as that sport.
The NFL attracts white and black. Why aren’t the positions filled proportionately? We all know the answer even if it’s politically incorrect. The outliers for speed positions are vastly disproportionately black.
This isn’t yachting or luge. This is running. Everyone runs. Some groups have better outliers. And don’t you think that’s logical? Or do you think every attribute is precisely identically distributed in every sub group?
The myopia is almost as silly as the hard core gender is a construct folks thinking Ronda Rousey has a chance against Floyd Mayweather.
Presumably those surveyed could give multiple reasons.
Again, this seems like a handwave. Do you have any way to back this up beyond your say-so?
You’re assuming a perfect winnowing process, wherein every child who plays sports is determined to go pro, and at each level the least talented are skimmed off until all the remains are all the best athletes who started the process.
Life, however, doesn’t work that neatly. Playing sports professionally is a pipe dream, available to a few thousand people in the entire country, and people are well aware of this, parents included.
What makes you think I missed it, or that it counters my point? I originally cited that article to dispute the idea that black children had some head start or advantage in youth sport participation.
Some sort of factual underpinning for these claims would go a long way toward advancing them.
Right quick, since we’ve covered all this.
The Hebrew League: Basketball did not pay millions of dollars per year and blacks were not allowed. Give it up. Cultural hobby leagues in the 20s and 30s have nothing to do with the modern NBA.
Black kids on the playground: You aren’t going anywhere in BB if you don’t at least get into, and stay a couple or 3 years in High School. That percentage is much smaller than it is for whites. So the starting pool ratio is much worse than 1:5 (the population ratio). High performance whites with high ability for BB have every nurturing advantage. The idea that they are lazy and unmotivated compared with blacks is silly.
Jamaicans have a fabulous gene pool and a fabulous sprinting culture. White Jamaicans don’t do shit at sprinting. This combination produces a success rate so dominating that a billion Chinese with government workers rooting out athletic talent cannot even begin to compete.
Yes; more white kids play tennis. You betcha. No one argues the starting pool for tennis is disproportionately black. But with football and BB, the starting pool, the motivation to stay in (because of the huge reward) and the nurturing advantage for any player with natural talent is all in favor of whites. Genes overcome that advantage to such an incredible extent that the success outcome ratio essentially reverses the proportion of the starting pool ratio.
I am assuming very few kids in the top tier of talent electively bail until they are outcompeted.
I am assuming that if blacks sucked at the NFL and BB, we would find all kinds of nurturing disadvantages to explain it–using the exact same information we have now.
I am assuming white kids are not naturally lazy or unmotivated to be as good as they can be if they are really good.
I am assuming the observed empiric advantages I listed out above for muscle type, bone strength, body shape, muscle mass, androgen levels and others are good studies with consistently reproducible results–essentially unopposed.
I am assuming those who don’t want to recognize the reality that mother nature does not endow all groups with the same average gene frequencies will grasp at any straw to cling to the hope that white men can jump–they just choose not to because white men prefer chasing prizes other than fame and fortune.
I don’t accept this just because you say it. How do you know that black kids who play basketball aren’t more likely to graduate? How do you know black kids don’t play a lot more basketball than white kids? Without cited facts about this stuff, you’re just guessing, and I’m not just going to take your word for it.
Read the cite in Post 161.
Fewer poor kids play team sports.
I suspect black kids who do play (organized, high-school) team sports are more likely to graduate, both because of the positive effects of team sports, and the fact that you can’t play then unless you are in school.
The questions are:
What are the sizes of the relevant starting pools for blacks and whites ? Much, much larger for whites (x5, just on population)
Do more blacks than whites play basketball at the organized team sport level such that that ratio is diminished? No; the opposite is true. Fewer black kids get involved in team sports because more of them are poor and between being black and poor they have many more obstacles preventing them from participation.
I hold that participation in an organized team sport (think HS basketball team at least through Junior year) is requisite to success at a professional career. The selection system is such that it’s pretty unusual just to grab an inner city drop out off the local basketball hangout. He needs to prove his worth at the organized team sport level to be considered for the Pros.
But hey; YMMV. It’s lots of fun to pretend that, where blacks are successful it must be nurturing, and not the genetic differences I’ve presented.
And to the point of my assumption about genes as the key factor, I am sure you will be shortly arriving back with some opposing studies showing how gene variant frequencies are nearly similar across self-identified race groups, and how empirically-measured group average physiologic “differences” are actually crummy and suspect studies.
That doesn’t answer the question. How many hours a day are black kids playing on a basketball court vs white kids? What about the details – what if the rough averages are about the same, but the top 20% or so of black kids spend something like all their free time on the basketball court, while the top 20% of white kids only spend a few hours more than average?
Presumably, white kids play a lot more tennis and hockey than black kids, on average, whether on a team or just for fun. Isn’t it possible that there are some sports that, for various reasons, black kids play significantly more, on average, whether on a team or not, than white kids?
"As President Lyndon Johnson said in 1965, “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say you are free to compete with all the others, and still just believe that you have been completely fair.” "
There are other ways to (metaphorically) “hobble people in chains” than slavery and genocide – it seems appropriate to me that affirmative action could apply to any groups that have been negatively affected by past (and present) discriminatory policies and practices such that they are not on a level playing field today.
This isn’t piano. This is running and jumping. It doesn’t take 40,000 hrs of training to be good at it if you have the natural ability. Do you watch or play sports?
Well, yes, I am; that’s actually really obviously true. But I’m also under the impression that whether or not we can identify who was black in the 60s doesn’t have a whole lot to do with the point you were making.
You said that slavery and segregation were the “sole bases” for affirmative action. What you’ve got is the first paragraph of the first non-Wiki result from when you googled “affirmative action,” which is LBJ giving an aspirational speech about fairness.
What I have, in my tenderfooted exuberance, is the fact that JFK’s original executive order which is the origin of the term affirmative action makes reference to “race, creed, color, or national origin,” and LBJ’s follow-up makes reference to “race, color, religion, sex or national origin.”
If the “sole” bases were slavery and segregation, what’s creed, national origin, sex or religion got to do with anything?
I’ve played lots of sports and continue to play. The more you play, the better you get, on average. On average, kids who play basketball 10 hours per week are going to be better than kids who play 2 hours per week. I’m sure there are occasional exceptions, but the rule will hold for large numbers.
Do you seriously believe that the amount of time kids play basketball has little or nothing to do with how good they are likely to be at basketball?
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