Just to follow up on this, I found that Michael Phelps is 6’4" and weighs about 200 pounds. Ian Thorpe is 6’5" and when he was swimming competitively, he was about 230 pounds. I think if you stood these guys up next to a running back or some NBA guards they wouldn’t look out of place. In fact they’re both bigger than some of the best point guards in the NBA and I think they’d be on the tall side as running backs. Their body types probably aren’t ideal for those sports (Phelps’ legs are proportionally rather small compared to his torso). They’re big athletes, though. Maybe they’re slender compared to power forwards but they’re not gymnasts or jockeys.
I wouldn’t be surprised if you told me that Sweden had Black members of their Olympic team. Its not just swimming. Its almost all winter sports as well.
One explanation I received from a black woman for the lack of interest in skiing was “Its the middle of winter and you’re going to a fucking moutaintop for your vacation?” Of course this woman as from Detroit so I had to snicker a little bit because there are warmer places to live than Detroit but she seemed to think “the farther from the South the better”
No, no its purely cultural. You see blacks don’t have access to water and whites don’t have access to land. Cuz rich kids get driven everywhere and the sidewalks are purely ornamental and black kids can’t afford membership to the country club where all the swimming pools are.
But a scientist only looks at just one variable when they can either control the other variables or at least believe that the others are equally distributed across the populations. If you were thinking like a scientist you’d laugh at someone who jumped from the observation that Blacks are not as well represented in the ranks of elite swimming as White Australians and White Americans to the conclusion that biologic factors MUST play a role.
I think the problem is that it is obvious that you are trying to make a case for explaining away the effects of racism by saying “they’re not poor because of 400 years of slavery another hundred years of segregation, they’re poor because they’re stupid, after all they got the right to vote almost 40 years ago, WTF is taking them so long?”
Give it twenty years for the children of these kids to hit high school. Suddenly people will be asking if there’s some special quality that makes blacks such good swimmers.
Post #69:Here’s another one: Forensic scientists and archaeologists can tell race by looking at a skeleton. You ever wonder how?
If you can look at a skeleton and determine ‘race’ that would mean there is no variation within populations, and the populations are distinctly different from each other. Or is ‘race’ not related to populations? Maybe ‘race’ is not genetic, is that it?
I for one am happy to see that we’ve managed to arrive at the conclusion that there is no such thing as race, as it means there can be no such thing as racism and we all can now live happily ever after.
Why is it that the people most sensitive to racism - even to the point of making accusations of racism where it doesn’t exist - are also the quickest to claim there’s no such thing as race?
Does this really need to get asked every thread? Because it gets answered in every thread and keeps popping up.
There is no biological basis for stereotyped notions of race, which is what people mean when they say “there’s no such thing as race.” Culturally, people have been dividing themselves up along racial lines for ages and discriminating against other groups of people forever. That’s real. So if some idiot says “I hate niggers,” he’s really hating a group of people even though the connection between those people is nonsense or doesn’t exist.