Text 437, 266 rader
Skriven 2004-10-20 16:29:00 av Michael Ragland (1:278/230)
Ärende: Re: Why are blacks better
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Some relevant quotes IMHO:

"Why are we not talking about white athletic superiority in winter
sports…or in swimming, or automobile racing, or horseracing, or golf,
or tennis and so forth?"

"Throughout American slavery and the Jim Crow era, the idea of black
physical superiority has been tethered to a belief in black intellectual
inferiority -- a stereotype that still exists in American racial
folklore. "

"Sports," explained Edwards, "is a very complicated social
phenomenon...genetics [may matter] at the individual level, but
collectively it [black over-representation in certain sports] has to do
with a lack of alternative high prestige occupation opportunities which
are comparably visible to sports."

"There's no genetic explanation in and of itself.  It's the genetics
that have been reproduced as a result of the social practices that shape
that genetic pool.  The biology has been shaped by the sociology. 
So I would argue that the prowess of black athletes is directly in
response to the demand of a white supremacist culture for black athletic
achievement to be ingrained into that black culture. Therefore, the
genetic selectivity of athletic activity became more
pronounced. But see how it backfires: because to assume that black
athletes, without work or discipline, are superior -- so that Michael
Jordan didn't have to go to the gym earlier, Magic Johnson has to have
natural skill, whereas Larry Bird is working hard -- that's ridiculous."




Black Athletic Prowess: Nature or Nurture?
Photo: US sprinter Maurice Green, one of the black athletes who will
compete at the Sydney Olympics. Photo: Corbis Images 
Black Athletic Prowess: Nature or Nurture

By Hisham AidiAt the Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia, black athletes
from all over the world will compete against the world's best. And if
past Olympics are any indication, they will excel in a variety of events
that blacks have historically dominated. While there is little denying
black dominance in track, basketball, and boxing, for example,
conflicting theories have been proposed to explain it.

For Carl Lewis, the gold-winning sprinter, the reason seems clear.
"Blacks -- physically in many cases -- are made better," he once
said. "We generally carry less fat, the athletes.  I can look at
[our bodies] and tell that.  We have long levers.  And those are the
two things that help us sprint better." 

Tennis champion Arthur Ashe was more ambivalent in accounting for black
athletic prowess, but reached a similar conclusion. "The results are
outstanding, nothing short of stellar," he wrote in his seminal book, A
Hard Road to Glory, a history of African Americans in sports. "Sociology
can't explain it.  I want to hear from the scientists.  Until I see
some numbers, I have to believe that we blacks have something that gives
us an edge."  

"Damn it," he added, realizing the unsettling implications of his
conclusion. "My heart says 'no,' but my mind says 'yes.'"

While some prominent black athletes have not hesitated to refer to their
race to explain their excellence, historically the subject of black
athletic aptitude has been a prickly issue that has gotten sportscasters
fired and academics branded bigots.    Throughout American slavery
and the Jim Crow era, the idea of black physical superiority has been
tethered to a belief in black intellectual inferiority -- a stereotype
that still exists in American racial folklore. 

This attitude has found ample expression in the American media.
Appearing on Nightline in 1987 to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the
integration of baseball, for example, LA Dodgers executive Al Campanis
spoke warmly of his late friend Jackie Robinson. Then, responding to
anchor Ted Koppel's question on the paucity of blacks in baseball
management, Campanis said blacks "may not have some of the necessities"
to serve as managers or general managers.  "Well, I don't say all of
them, but they certainly are short in some areas," he explained. "How
many quarterbacks do you have, how many pitchers do you have that are
black?"  Some days later, the LA Dodgers fired Campanis after 44 years
of service.

Similarly, in another highly-publicized incident in January 1988, CBS's
famed football broadcaster, Jimmy "the Greek" Snyder, told a television
crew that a highly selective breeding process accounted for black
success in sports.  "The black is a better athlete because he's bred
to be that way," he said. "During slave trading, the slave master would
breed his big woman so that he would have a big black kid, see. 
That's where it all started."  Snyder's remarks, made on Martin Luther
King Day, caused an uproar and he was subsequently fired.

Snyder was essentially subscribing to what academics have called the
"breeder theory," articulated most eloquently by black anthropologist
William Montagne Cobb in 1939.  "No other group of Americans in such
large numbers has had to pass such rigorous tests of survival as has the
Negro," wrote Cobb. "From this standpoint he is the most highly selected
stock in America... physically strong, showing great endurance at
strenuous labor under severe climactic and nutritional hardships and
producing a disproportionately large number of champions in
representative fields of athletics.The debate over black athleticism has
historically pitted proponents of this "genetic/breeding" argument
against those who underline cultural and socio-economic factors.

Berkeley sociologist Harry Edwards, a scholar and Black Power activist,
is one notable proponent of the "socio-economic factors" argument. In
1971, Sports Illustrated published an article arguing that "slavery
weeded out the weak," and that "there is an increasing body of
scientific opinion which suggests that physical differences in the races
might well have enhanced the athletic potential of the Negro in certain
sports."  Edwards responded with a blistering article titled, "The
Myth of the Racially Superior Athlete." 

"By asserting that blacks are physically superior, whites, at best,
reinforce some old stereotype long held about African Americans -- to
wit, that they are little removed from the apes in their evolutionary
development," Edwards wrote. "It opens the door for at least an informal
acceptance of the idea that whites are intellectually superior to
blacks."  

Because the debate has been so contentious, the topic of black
athleticism has become a minefield that most public commentators have
preferred to sidestep.  Some critics see such wariness as
hypocritical. "Few object when medical scientists talk about...the fact
that blacks have a higher incidence of hypertension than whites and
twice as many black males die of diabetes and prostate cancer as white
males," Malcolm Gladwell, a black Canadian critic, wrote in the New
Yorker. "So why aren't we allowed to say that there might be
athletically significant differences between blacks and whites?"

While few have dared to openly discuss this explosive topic in recent
years, of late the gag order seems to be lifting, partly due to the
publication of a well-researched and powerfully-argued book, Taboo: Why
Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid to Talk About It. 
The author, John Entine, claims to have written the book "for those
intrigued by one of the more remarkable phenomenon of our times -- the
monumental success of the black athlete in defiance of considerable
odds" -- a record of achievement, he argues, that cannot simply be
explained by "a dearth of opportunities elsewhere."  Instead, argues
Entine, "The decisive variable is in our genes," and it is due to more
than "cultural serendipity" that "Brazilians are time and time again the
best soccer players, the Chinese among the best divers, black Dominicans
among the best baseball players, and African Americans the top
basketball and football players."
 
Entine blasts the "stereotype of the genetic see-saw with the physical
ability on one end and smarts on the other" as an unfounded and
quintessentially American cliché.  The stereotype of the "dumb jock"
is a "somewhat recent and very North American belief," he writes. "For
much of modern history, physical and mental fitness were linked with a
positive bias.  The Greeks believed that physical fitness was
essential to achieve a proper balance of mind and body...Moreover, a
great deal of evidence suggests that in fact there is a positive
relationship between physical and mental fitness."

Entine also calls "Africa is the mother-lode of the running world," and
writes that "athletes from each region tend to excel in specific
athletic events as a result of both cultural and genetic factors: West
Africa is the ancestral home of the world's top sprinters and jumpers;
North Africa turns out top middle distance runners; and East Africa is
the world distance running capital…Whereas only one in every eight of
the people in the world are black, more than 70 percent of the top times
are held by runners of African origin." 

Although Entine rejects the idea of black intellectual inferiority,
Harry Edwards is unswayed by his argument.  In a roundtable with
Entine on BET Tonight, Edwards rejected the notion that blackness is an
athletic advantage. 

"Blacks do not dominate most sports," he said emphatically. "Blacks
are concentrated in four or five sports -- literally, baseball,
football, boxing and track -- and not even field, the hammer throw, the
distance throw and so forth.  The overwhelming majority of sports,
over 95 percent, are dominated by whites.  Why are we not talking
about white athletic superiority in winter sports…or in swimming, or
automobile racing, or horseracing, or golf, or tennis and so
forth?""Sports," explained Edwards, "is a very complicated social
phenomenon...genetics [may matter] at the individual level, but
collectively it [black over-representation in certain sports] has to do
with a lack of alternative high prestige occupation opportunities which
are comparably visible to sports."

Similarly, cultural critic Michael Eric Dyson, author of Race Rules,
disputes the "genetic advantage" thesis.  "Once you buy into the
genetic argument, you're heading down a slippery slope," said Dyson in a
phone interview from Chicago. "If you buy that argument, you'll have to
buy Charles Murray's argument too," he added, referring to the co-author
of the infamous The Bell Curve, which argues that people of African
descent statistically lag behind whites in intelligence. 

"There's no question that black athletes have proven themselves to be
superior in many instances," says Dyson, "but that's because they were
given an opportunity.  Before Joe Louis was allowed to fight, before
Bill Russell was allowed to play in the NBA, before Jackie Robinson in
baseball, they were closed out and shut out.  They had their so-called
Negro Leagues, but they were not allowed to test their talents against
the best and brightest in white America.  Once they were allowed to do
that, they proved themselves capable of overcoming the odds and
displaying their athletic prowess.  

There's no genetic explanation in and of itself.  It's the genetics
that have been reproduced as a result of the social practices that shape
that genetic pool.  The biology has been shaped by the sociology. 
So I would argue that the prowess of black athletes is directly in
response to the demand of a white supremacist culture for black athletic
achievement to be ingrained into that black culture. Therefore, the
genetic selectivity of athletic activity became more
pronounced. But see how it backfires: because to assume that black
athletes, without work or discipline, are superior -- so that Michael
Jordan didn't have to go to the gym earlier, Magic Johnson has to have
natural skill, whereas Larry Bird is working hard -- that's ridiculous."

Bryan Burwell of HBO Sports and HoopsTV.com sees a genetic explanation
for black athletic achievement as a gross oversimplification. "I don't
recall anybody trying to figure out why Albert Einstein was brilliant,"
he says.  "You fall into a dangerous trap when you play this
game…There are no absolutes in figuring out athletic performance. 
There were a billion people before Michael Jordan who had his athletic
ability.  There's something at the level of personality. Tiger Woods
destroys Entine's theory.  He's not 'black' -- he's 'Cablasian.' He's
good not just because he hits the ball far, but because he has worked
hard to perfect his swing.  He beats people on the green, that's not
physical -- that's mental. Broad sweeping statements are usually
wrong…and if there was a grand genetic lottery that we won, I must not
have won the lottery ticket, because I was one of the most mediocre
college athletes."
Michael Blakey, professor of anatomy and anthropology at Howard
University and curator of the university's Cobb Biological Anthropology
Laboratory, also fundamentally disagrees with Entine's thesis. "The
idea fostered by Taboo denies that blacks used discipline and hard work
even to achieve in the sports arena," he wrote in response to written
questions. "Entine cites studies as supporting a racial basis for
sports ability when in fact those studies show that fast twitch muscle
fibers he associates with people of African descent increase through
training and that early motor skills associated with blacks are the
result of the necessary independence of young children in low income
households, not racial biology."

And so, the debate rages on.  Pushed by political winds and scientific
evidence, the intellectual pendulum will continue to swing back and
forth from "genetic" arguments to cultural and socio-economic
explanations.  And in Sydney, when a dozen muscular, dark-skinned
sprinters line up in the blocks to compete in the 100-meter dash, the
debate will no doubt continue.About the Author
Hisham Aidi is a freelance writer living in New York City. To contact
the author to discuss this article, write to Hisham_Aidi@africana.com. 
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