I don’t buy the cultural explanation. If the answer is just “Blacks play more football than whites,” the disproportion should be across the board, not just in the speed positions. I don’t know what the explanation is, but I don’t see why a physical one should be dismissed out of hand. There are physical differences between blacks and whites; skin color, for one, as well as other features. Why is it impossible that Blacks and whites would differ in muscle distribution, as Asknott suggests above.
Since possible racial differences may be detected at the highest levels of professional athletic competition the does that mean that there is little comparison to the general population? I’m asking rhetorically as I think the answer is definitively yes. But, still there is that question and I think it makes people feel uncomfortable. But why?
Come on. Tell us why you need to know. Are we to believe you’re not itching to label the OP ?
One interesting stat is that, as far as I can tell, there has only been one sprinter of non-West African decent to run a sub-10 second 100m dash. The fastest time for a white athlete is currently 10.03 (AFAICT). It may dip to 10.0s if this time is verified. There have been at least 52 sprinters of West African decent to do so. Chance alone would not explain that disparity. This article examines the disparities in fast-twitch muscle fibers in people of different ethnicities. As far as football is concerned, I think it’s probably a matter of the above and culture.
It absolutely needs to be considered, just like you would in any lab experiment. I just don’t think that participation levels can explain the vast differences you see. When you look at the 100m dash finals, at the highest levels, there aren’t going to be many white faces there. White folks participate in track and field, and many other sports that require speed, but simply do not show themselves to be fast enough to compete at the highest levels.
My brother, Bubba Zagna, is an orthopedic surgeon, and, as it happens, a white guy. Many, many years ago he was at a medical convention where one of the speakers was to talk about the differences between Black and White body types and how that led to differences in sports injuries, particularly football injuries this being Texas and all, and he asked Bubba if he would serve as a model for his talk.
As the talk proceeded the speaker would say things like (and I’m just pulling this stuff out of my ass), “Blacks tend to have a more pronounced gleutial vortex which helps to stabilize the flagettal merticulum, leading to fewer injuries to the upper transcribulum, but subjecting the lateral probisculum to greater stress. Now the gleutial vortex in the typical white man is, uhm… well, Dr. Zagna isn’t a very good example of this. His gleutial vortex is more typical of the Black body type…” And on and on it went with my brother serving as a miserable example of the White body type but typifying the Black body type. By the end of the talk it was almost a comedy routine.
So I guess there are a couple of lessons from this. One is that, yes, there was a time when scientists and other professionals could talk about this kind of thing without fear of being driven out of the field. The other point is that individual differences will always far exceed group differences.
The numbers I posted last night strike me as pretty definitive evidence that there is a genetic component to this phenomenon. There is, after all, only one sport we are talking about here. There’s not blocking-and-tackling football and running-and-catching football. Kids go out for football and drift to the positions they are best suited for.
I suppose you could claim that culture contributes to a particular mind set that serves a running back better than a down lineman, but that seems a stretch to me.
Warren Moon would disagree with you. He stated “In Canada I was able to play without stereotypes or racism”. His desire to remain a quarterback was well known and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he wasn’t drafted by any NFL team. It was racism.
If it can be shown that there are genetic differences between Blacks and Whites that lead to superior performance at the physical level, then that lends support to the claim that there are genetic differences in intelligence, also, and that’s the concept that makes people uncomfortable.
Whether or not that is a legitimate leap of logic is debatable, but that’s clearly where the discussion will go next.
An NFL team today would plant Al Sharpton as their quarterback if they thought that he could bring them to the superbowl and put butts in the seats.
Perhaps the use of coffee is benificial to kicking but detrimental to speed. 
First, I think it is meaningless to discuss this issue in terms of physical advantages that “whites” or “blacks” might have. These categories based on color of skin are way too broad. There are many populations with wide ranges of traits within each “white” and “black” race. “White” and “Black” are not biologically useful terms.
However, it is obvious that populations around the world DO have physical differences. And, we would expect these differences will help or handicap individuals with those traits during different activities (ie one would not expect a population that tends to be much shorter than average, such as pygmies, to be well suited for activities that reward height, such as basketball).
I have seen studies ( i will try to find a cite – maybe someone else on here has seen these?) that studied anatomical traits of certain west african populations and found traits that would provide advantages in events such as sprinting. And, sprinting events HAVE been dominated by these populations or their descendants (african americans and blacks in the caribbean).
So, it may be that the ancestors of the majority of blacks in the US were from these populations, providing blacks in the US with a small advantage in events that require sprinting, etc.
Note: this has nothing to do with skin color, just whether one has genes that may be more common in a particular population. I would not expect blacks from other populations in the world to share this advantage and it may be that certain white populations also have similar advantages in such events.
As for traditionally “white” positions, such as quarterback or kicker, I suspect that social forces are more responsible.
Not a lot of Kenyan sprinters or NFLers, tons of Kenyan marathoners. Some of that must be cultural (they do have a fanatical distance running/training culture it seems, and no parallel sprinting obsession).
Never said it was. But…
What you wrote there is not science-- it’s anecdote. Or, at best, it’s the begining of science. Science is where you make a hypothesis, and then test it. All you’ve done at this point is make a hypothesis. I’ll be convinced when I see some tests done. Real tests, using scientific methods.
Now, it could very well be that the population “African-Americans” is skewed toward certain physical advantages as compared to “White Americans”. I think there have been some studies on this, although I don’t recall the results. And keep in mind that the population “African-American” has a significant amount of European ancestry in it, and what is true of that population may not be true of any particular African population.
I would prefer to call it observation. Anecdote is “the black guys in my school were faster than the white guys” Observation is hundreds of thousands of races, with people from vastly different socioeconomic backgrounds, under strictly controlled conditions, showing a general trend.
We may not be able to identify exactly why this trend exists, but don’t try to claim that the trend itself is fraudulent. We have very large, diverse populations of people being tested under controlled conditions, and we see the far outliers of the test tend to have a particular ancestry in common.
It’s like measuring tallness. If 90 of the 100 tallest people of the world were black, would you claim there’s no racial component to extreme tallness?
As I said, it is at best a hypothesis. Hypotheses are made from observations. But that is the beginning of science, not the end.
I did not try to claim it was fraudulent. Please do not imply that I said something that I clearly did not.
I haven’t made any claims. Please go back and read my post again. I explicitly said that there could be some racial component that is causing the observed phenomenon.
God help me for asking this but has anyone ever performed a genetic comparison of African American football players against native Africans to see if they could trace their ancestry? I wonder if it would be possible to determine if the players in the running positions came from West African roots and players in the blocking positions came from different areas. Just a wild idea.
I don’t think we have the ability to do that. When people trace their ancestry through genetic testing, it generally is done by tracing the paternal line (through the Y chromosome) or their maternal line (through mitochondrial DNA). But that only tells you that one of your great-great-…-great-grandparents came from some general area (with a certain probability). It doesn’t tell you where all the other ancestors came from.
And even if we had the technology, most Blacks in the US have been living here for a long time, and they are unlikely to be representative of any existing or past population of Africans (even if you ignore all the European ancestry mixed in). There’s been too much time for everyone to mix it up, so to speak.
There’s also a fear, I suspect, that the idea of black athletes having “genetic advantages” would be used to diminish their accomplishments. As it is, sports culture generally holds that white athletes are scrappy and smart and work hard and play the game right, while black athletes have all the physical advantages.
Historically I think you are going to find that most slaves in N. America came from Western Africa. This page seems to support that notion:
http://wysinger.homestead.com/mapofafricadiaspora.html
Now – what proportion of the black American populace today may have roots elsewhere in Africa, or are not descended from slaves, I don’t know. And of the handful of African Africans who have played in the NFL, I’m aware only of West Africans (Igwebuike, Okoye, Ogunlewe) – though now I see at least (and perhaps at most) one Ugandan made it . . . .