I don't know whether this helps but Don W posted it on the CF Home page about a year ago. Sorry it is so long.
Informal internet polls show a significant majority of the general public believe Black athletes have natural advantages over White athletes. More importantly this viewpoint is reflected within academia as, based upon certain tests and statistics, scientists frequently claim the advantage is “substantial and unmistakableâ€; this despite science’s consistent failure in other areas of research to clearly differentiate between “nature†and “nurtureâ€. To side-step this sensitive subject some avoid the question by equivocating; and assert there is effectively no such thing as Race, or alternatively believe the Black advantage is due to slave breeding (despite there being no details of how this could be effectively achieved within the time period and sustained over a similar length of time), or exists only in sports that require power or running speed. When it is pointed out to those who believe in the Black advantage that Whites dominate a majority of sports in the world, some of which also require power and speed, it is stated with the utmost confidence that Blacks would rule in those sports too if only they bothered to compete or had the opportunity to do so.
Such arguments are, of course, impossible to entirely refute but let’s try by starting with what Science knows for sure. Firstly, "outcomes" - for example the percentage of Black and White players in a professional league or the comparative number of Gold medals won by a specific group in a particular event - are not sufficient in themselves to support a scientific theory. Science would not, for example, assert that men are smarter than women merely because most Nobel Prize winners are male. Nor would science claim that Christians make the best scientists since the pioneers such as Bacon, Newton, Copernicus, Leibniz and Faraday were all Christian. Malcolm Gladwell in his recent book Outliers shows that it takes special and serendipitous circumstances for individuals to excel. Despite this known fact outcomes are used by many as an infallible support for the relative performance of the races. The problem is exacerbated as outcomes are used selectively and are consistently biased towards one specific point-of-view. For example outcomes may, within the social sciences, be used to demonstrate the equivalency or superiority of a historical underclass but are not tolerable as support for a contrary conclusion. Whites are never asserted by science or the media as being “the physically strongest race†despite them winning the vast majority of Olympic weightlifting and strong-men competitions. Economist Dr. Thomas Sowell in his book Race and Culture - a Worldview showed, after a decade of research of groups around the globe, that culture has far more impact than genetics (race) on the social and economic performance of nations and groups; and outcomes are dominated by cultural, geographical, socio-economic, and cognitive psychological variables. This aspect of the matter is not enthusiastically pursued by those in the social sciences.
The second thing we know is that the media can influence public opinion. Advertisers and marketers would not spend billions of dollars annually if science showed that they were wasting their money. As was detailed in Erik Rush’s book Negrophilia the media require visible minorities and their cultures to be endorsed, promoted, and even idolized. The media routinely use laudatory terms for the athleticism of Black athletes and downplay the successes of White athletes. An example: since the heavyweight boxing division has, for the best part of a decade, been dominated by Whites, most media boxing experts pronounce the division now lacks interest, glamour, and is of low quality. Other media techniques are to focus their cameras on the few Black athletes in sports that are dominated by Whites, and explain away the successes of White athletes as being due, not to innate athleticism, but merely a result of hard work and determination. A white sprinter's recent “surprising†victory was put down to the fact he "overcame the wind better". What is not generally known is the institutionalized extent of this phenomenon. In many countries media companies must have strict controls over images and words in relation to race. At this year's Wimbledon telecast John McEnroe gave his judgment regarding the five, all time, fastest runners in tennis - none were Black. Even though it was only an opinion, and the vast percentage of tennis players are White, he was required, ten minutes later, to “reconsider†and add a Black player to his list (Gaël Monfils). To his credit McEnroe made it clear by his tone of voice he resented being “asked†by the network’s Race Equity Police to edit his opinion. I recently attended a national gymnastics competition and during a break a local girls club gave a short demonstration. Despite there being about fifty young students in the display it was evident that only two were clearly Black. I was positioned behind the TV cameras and could see the transmitted images clearly; and saw that the operators focused almost exclusively on the two little Black girls. To be totally fair to the media they also manipulate the public's perception of reality in other issues, including: gender, economic, cultural, social and scientific matters. Some of the techniques they use are: disproportionate and unrepresentative exposure time, location and captioning of photographs (caption different from photograph), and language tricks. Concealed sub-texts are also common: an ostensible scientific documentary on the science of the high jump event featured two athletes: one a well-known white champion and the other an “up and coming†black athlete. Although the champion’s best jump was significantly the higher of the two the hidden objective of the documentary was to illustrate that the Black athlete used natural ability while the White athlete relied upon an ingenious “techniqueâ€. To demonstrate the technique a small pole was used to show how it could, when thrown correctly, rotate and bounce over a high bar which gave the impression that the white guy had as much spring in his legs as a solid piece of wood. The narrator confidently concluded that the Black jumper would soon beat the champion once he had mastered the technique. Four years later he is still well behind.
The next thing we know for sure is that science has not formed a reliable opinion on the subject; and topics that involve Race are only infrequently addressed by academia. When they are the findings are ambiguous at best and absurd at worst. Two examples: a European study regarding soccer referees in the English Premier League was carried out to determine whether the referees were biased against Black players as compared to White players when awarding a free kick for a rules infraction (a foul). The study was portrayed as being highly scientific by taking into account the number of minutes a player was on the pitch, the position played (essentially defence or offence) and other likely variables. However, one potentially influential variable was ignored as it was just assumed by the investigators that both groups actually committed real fouls at an identical rate. The scientists were clearly too afraid to even raise the issue that the foul rate (or the “diving†rate) could perhaps correlate to race. The irony of the study was that the data showed the referees were significantly biased, but against the White players. This could indicate that referees are also afraid to be accused of bias against Blacks so compensate accordingly. None of these issues were a problem for the scientists: they simply omitted these finding from discussion and the major conclusions of the study, and the media failed to report them. A US study of college basketball players was carried out to determine the relative vertical jumping ability of Black and White players. The test apparatus included a contact surface with sensors which determined the force applied by players after jumping from an elevated platform and rebounding off the surface with the results graphed against time. The report concluded that Black players applied a greater force than the Whites to the extent that it could be determined whether a player was Black or White simply by looking at the graph. The problem with the design of the test, not identified by the authors, was that the players were only representative of college basketball athletes; but it is known the background cultures of Black and White athletes differ significantly. What the study was likely measuring was the effectiveness of the background cultures to identify and develop kids with jumping skills for the sport of basketball. Indeed the critically acclaimed book Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports by journalist Jon Entine is replete with pseudo-science of this type. For example in real science the concept of raw “data mining†– searching information for correlations between variables irrespective of any empirical scientific support - is strictly avoided as being non-scientific. An example would be the conclusion that men are smarter than women because data shows they have larger brains when, in fact, there is no prior study determining that brain size correlates to a specific intelligence.
A final thing we know is that genetics can influence sports performance. Further, based upon simple probabilities the less athletically complex requirement of a sport (assuming there is such a thing) the greater will be the potential influence of genetics. It would be absurd to state otherwise. A person from a pigmy group (less than 1.5m in height) will never be a world class high jumper and groups with a higher incidence of endomorphs will not tend to excel in endurance events (as mass uses energy). In other words body geometry (in the examples above: height and mass but could include such things as joint geometry) can influence sporting performance. We can reasonably infer from our knowledge of anthropology that some human population groups have congregated themselves by certain discernable physical features. Scientists would say morphologically. Other population groups, for whatever reason, have not done this to the same extent and have mixed together to a far greater extent, irrespective of morphology. The result of this is that a statistical Bell Curve of any particular characteristic will be necessarily different for these two groups. However this distribution will be meaningless with respect to the potential for any individual in a particular sport because - other than the obvious (such as that endurance athletes need to have a low body weight) - we don’t know, for most sports, what the critical variables are; nor do we understand, in a practical sense, the behaviour of a normal distribution at its upper extreme. One of the most studied and least complex sports, the 100 metre sprint – has only two basic variables: cadence and stride length – yet it has Olympic medalists that vary by nearly 20% in height (30 cm or 12â€) – Enrique Figuerola to Usain Bolt. So while we should expect to see different groups with statistical differences in body geometries there is little reason to believe we can use that observation to theorize on race and sports excellence.
An additional subtle problem exists: any scientist, irrespective of their prior credentials, who forms an opinion contrary to the present academic elite’s viewpoint, will effectively stall their career in that area of study. Dr. J Philippe Rushton, psychology professor at the University of Western Ontario, opined on race and intelligence and race and crime and was pilloried in the press. The same occurred for authors Drs. Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein (The Bell Curve). The pejorative term Scientific Racism is applied to such people, but not to those scientists who find advantages for non-White groups. Such double standards inhibit real science and render race science a literal farce.
As noted above the media affect our perception of reality. A quiz will determine whether you have been influenced by the media.
1. Which sport requires the greater athleticism: A) Basketball or B) Gymnastics?
2. Which sport requires the greater athleticism: A) (American) Football or B) the Decathlon?
3. Which sport requires more fast-twitch muscles: A) 100m dash or B) Olympic weightlifting?
4. Have Black athletes been shown to have faster reactions than Whites: A) Yes, B) No?
5. An African has only won the Olympic 100m gold medal once. Was the sprinter: A) Black or B) White?
The first two questions involve the combination of athletic speed, strength, agility and body awareness. These features are more demanding in gymnastics (six events for men) and the decathlon (ten events) than for the ball sports; so objectively the correct answer to both is B). The answers are important because Whites dominate gymnastics and the decathlon to the same or greater extent than Blacks dominate basketball and football, yet somewhat illogically most people would claim Michael Jordan or Walter Payton to be better athletes than Roman Å ebrle (world record holder and Olympic champion in the Decathlon) or Nikolai Andrianov (seven times Olympic champion in gymnastics).
Question three is somewhat easier to answer now science has found a poor correlation between sprinting performance and muscle type. Weightlifting demands maximum power (not strength) for all aspects of the event whereas power is most important only during the start and drive phases the 100m dash, so again the correct answer is B). Question four: investigation has shown that no race (of people) have faster reactions than any other, based upon sprint reaction times, so the correct answer is B). The answer to question five is B): Reggie Walker, a white South African running for UK. If you think this was a trick question, or some kind of anomaly, I could have asked: Is the world record for the triple jump held by a Black Athlete or a White? Or: Of the ten highest jumpers in the world are more Black or White? Or: has a white African athlete run indoors, at non-altitude, as fast as a black African athlete over 60m? (No = A, Yes = B). All answers would be the same – that is: answer B). This quiz has been designed for the purpose of determining the influence of the media and no other interpretation should be placed on it, but if you answered A) to two or more questions then you have been deluded by the media’s tactics.
In summary: Hard Science has so far been unable to definitively solve the riddle of why some human groups perform certain activities at a higher level than others. Our cultural and political elites however refuse to leave it as an interesting cultural phenomenon as the present belief is compatible with a number of their biased interests which are beyond the scope of this article. Instead they would have us believe a farrago of inconsistent pseudo-scientific theories, which to any honest and critical thinker are totally unacceptable. Most troubling is that those who resist the media’s template are deemed to be a type of modern-day heretic.
If you disagree with the thrust of this article there is a final quiz question for you: on my wall at home I have a framed certificate that show I held a national age-group sprint record. What is my race?
