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If you have the time or the gut, read this long entry on the black athlete.
BLACK ATHLETES:
CAN WHITES MEASURE UP?
One of the under-celebrated sagas of human biodiversity in the last quarter of the twentieth century is the emergence of the black athlete. His primacy is so conspicuous in some sports, that at the highest levels of competition other racial groups are all but invisible. In this essay, La Griffe du Lion analyzes the black-white athletic ability gap and shows how to measure it. We introduce the notion of an athletic quotient or AQ, and estimate black-white AQ gaps. Methods are developed to show how AQ can be used to make predictions ranging from the most probable racial makeup of a high-school basketball team to the probability that a randomly selected white can run faster than a randomly selected black.
The Green Bay Packer defensive end Reggie White in a speech to the Wisconsin Legislature in 1998 pointed out that various racial groups excel in different ways. He may not have been precisely on target, but his general premise deserves a hard look.
Only the most committed egalitarian ideologue can deny the black edge in basketball, football and sprinting. Tune in an NBA game and there is a fair chance you will find ten black players on the court. Try an NFL game. Most of the faces on the field will be black as well. Then measure this against the fact that blacks comprise about 13 percent of all Americans. But nowhere is black superiority more dramatically illustrated than in sprinting. No white has ever run a 100m in less than 10 seconds. At least 30 blacks have.
The simplest explanation (usually the best) for black dominance in these sports is innate talent. Measurable anatomical and physiological differences support this conclusion. However, this interpretation being offensive to multicultural sensibilities, remains unpopular. We will avoid the issue. Our aim is to make the black-white ability gap precise, not to ponder its origins.
Throughout this essay, the term "black" means people of West African ancestry. In America they are mostly descendants of slaves brought here from regions we now call West Africa. They differ both in body type and range of athletic abilities from other black African peoples. The term, "white" refers to Europeans or people of European descent.
Reggie White took some heat for his remarks. Perhaps he would have had better luck if he used sports to illustrate racial differences. Consider a simple case: Japanese baseball teams are not competitive with American teams. The foreigners who play in Japan routinely lead the leagues in hitting. The reason can be traced to the discovery of a young cub who collected baseball cards. On the front of each card was a picture of a major leaguer. The back of the card contained some statistics like the player's career batting average, home run production, stolen bases and so on. Also listed were the player's height and weight. The cub soon noticed major league baseball players were significantly taller than average Americans. Their heights also tended to cluster in a narrow range. Almost all were over six feet, but not many were extra-tall basketball types. It occurred to the cub there might be an ideal height for baseball players, big enough for power but not big enough to present a huge strike zone. He surmised that Japanese baseball teams were second-rate not for lack of zeal or athleticism. They simply did not measure up.
WHICH SPORTS TO STUDY?
A big-league sport is about winning. On the athletic battlefield meritocracy is king. Athletes fill slots in rank order of ability. There is no room for affirmative action. The ingredients needed to quantify the black-white ability gap are all there: meritocratic selection, strong motivation and lots of candidates competing for a few slots. Winning demands meritocratic selection. Politics on the playing field and winning do not mix. Motivation is provided by breathtaking financial rewards that await those who make the big time. Not many with the potential to make the NFL or NBA could afford to abandon the pursuit of such a career while any hope remained. At this writing, average annual salaries are $2.6 million in the NBA, $900,000 in the NFL, and $1.7 million in major league baseball. The rewards of track and field do not match the salaries of the big three team sports, but in the marquee events the best athletes earn very well. A mixture of shoe endorsements, appearance fees and prize money can easily total more than $1 million for top performers. Finally, in a country of almost 300 million, only a few thousand athletes will strike it rich.
Sports best suited to our analysis rely on a few basic physical attributes. Football is too complex. In no other sport is division of labor more evident. A football team is a collection of specialists, with an enormously broad range of athletic ability represented among its players. The running backs combine speed with explosive power. (In the NFL they are all black.) Wide receivers are fast, agile and jump like gazelles. (They are almost all black.) On the offensive line conservation of momentum rules. Bulk and strength get the job done. Three hundred pounds of humanity does not yield easily. And because there is no black monopoly on bulk or strength, we find whites on the front line. Place kickers, punters, line backers, punt returners and more round out a team. Each position brings with it its own physical demands. The assortment of physical requirements that football requires provides powerful testimony to the general athleticism of blacks, who make up about two-thirds of the NFL rosters.
Check the next post for the continuation
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