Jon Entine on Deberry

[JD074]

They had Jon Entine on Anderson Cooper 360 talking about Fischer Deberry's comments about race. I haven't read Entine's book or visited his web site much. I was actually a little surprised that he presented himself pretty well. Maybe he was just choosing his words carefully in an attempt not to offend people, but for whatever reason his comments were actually pretty tame and didn't bother me that much. He didn't seem to have the weird man-crush on black men like Sailer seems to have.

Here are some of the things that he said, paraphrased:


It's not a black/ white issue because East Africans do very poorly in sprints.

Whites tend to dominate weightlifting and field events.

It's not about race but "population differences" (or a similar term, population something.)

The two West African advantages that he mentioned were lung capacity and muscle fiber.

It doesn't mean that there aren't fast whites, and there are some fast white sprinters. There are whites who are good running backs and sprinters.

He specifically said "on average," West African blacks tend to be faster.

We should be able to have open, honest conversations about this issue, and not be so easily offended all the time.

This idea of differences between population groups is not controversial in the scientific community.


Altogether not as bad as I would have guessed.

The one thing that stoked my curiosity was the comment about white running backs. Given that there haven't been any prominent white running backs in the NFL in over twenty years, and very few prominent white running backs in college, I wonder if he was referring to any white RB's in particular, or if he just meant that, hypothetically, there are white athletes who are capable of excelling at that position. Maybe he's noticed some of these good college players. Edited by: JD074

 

[White_Savage]

Entine is not soooooo bad. At least he mentions sports Whites dominate, and doesn't make an all-out assault on White male masculinity like some other authors we know and love.

However, he is just flat wrong on a couple of facts, like claiming Whites have slower reflexes, when objective tests denote the opposite. (Heres an interesting phenomena I observed during the world series slo-mo. 90 mile an hour ball leaves pitcher's hand. Batter prepares to swing, makes the deciscion to let it go, then a slit second later, decides that it's headed towards him and shifts out of the way quickly. This seems like quite a good feat of reflexs and most of the people I saw do it were White.)

 

[Don Wassall]

Here's anopenly black supremacist screed by a (presumably) white AP reporter. It's dated November 5, 2005 but was just emailed to me today:
<STRONG =er>Sportsview: Discuss Race With Common Sense [/b]

By JIM LITKE

Before Joe Paterno gets dunked in the same tub of recycled hot water where Fisher DeBerry nearly drowned last week, let's get one thing straight: They're right. Both of them. Black athletes run faster.
Not all black athletes, of course. Distinctions are never more important than when discussing race, which is why a generalization like the paragraph above is bound to cause headaches. But the most recent, most credible research on the subject arrived at the very same conclusion, over and over. And that was five years ago.
Too often in the past, saying blacks were superior athletes was little more than a backhanded compliment, intended to smear them in the same breath as inferior human beings. Like many of us, author Jon Entine hoped that notion was history by the time he wrote "Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid to Talk About It."
But as the furor over DeBerry's remarks demonstrates, and while few would argue with what the Air Force Academy coach said, even fewer are comfortable talking about why it's true.
Entine is not, perhaps because he is careful about drawing distinctions, even among black athletes. He says descendants of East Africans _ Kenyans, for example _ are predisposed to lean body types better suited for distance running. Descendants of West Africans, on the other hand, have more muscular body types favoring speed.
DeBerry didn't bother with such distinctions when he explained a 48-10 pounding of his football squad by TCU this way: "The other team had a lot more Afro-American players than we did and they ran a lot faster than we did."
And earlier this week, asked about the offensive explosion in college football, Paterno stuck his toe gingerly into the same pool.
"You got to be careful how you say things sometimes, DeBerry got in trouble," Paterno began hesitantly. But then the Penn State coach added, "The black athlete has made a big difference. They've changed the whole tempo of the game."
For a full, frank discussion of why that's so, read Entine's book. For a quick explanation, scan the ranks of NFL cornerbacks and world-class sprinters.
"I did hear the gist of it and I think I know the point that he was trying to make," said Indianapolis Colts coach Tony Dungy, one of the NFL's most thoughtful leaders and a former cornerback himself.
"I didn't really read anything into it other than he wanted more speed on his team. ... I didn't think it was a racist comment. It may have been politically incorrect to say it that way," Dungy added, "but I didn't view it negatively at all myself."
Neither did Jon Drummond, a U.S. gold-medal sprinter who, like Dungy, is black.
"I laughed the first time I heard what the Air Force coach said. In fact, the flip side is a running joke in the sprint world. We're always saying, 'Find a white man who can run real fast and you'll find a man making a whole of money.'
"So do I think a guy should be reprimanded or fired for saying blacks are faster? No," Drummond said. "I think we've definitely come a long away from the attitudes in place a generation or two ago. But do I think that coach needs to have a conversation, have somebody pull him aside and explain that it's still a very sensitive subject? Absolutely."
The subject is still so raw that the right-thinking people at the Air Force Academy made a wrong-headed decision and forced a tearful apology from DeBerry the day after his original comments. All that proved is that people of every color can be made to atone in a hurry.
But DeBerry's sin wasn't as egregious as that committed by Paul Hornung, who said Notre Dame, his alma mater, should lower admission standards to net more blacks. Nor was it was as foolish as the pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo that Al Campanis and Jimmy "The Greek" Snyder tried to pass off as observations. Hornung got off light, but the same nonsense cost Campanis and Snyder their reputations and their jobs.
It's shameful how little the debate has advanced since. Entine believed when he finished "Taboo" five years ago that any discussion about race in the open "beats backroom scuttlebutt." But every time it spills back into the headlines, he's not so sure.
"I think what DeBerry said was absolutely accurate, though he didn't say it as elegantly as he should have. The problem arose because of the historical context in which the discussions have been carried on ... that because blacks are better athletes, they somehow have less between the ears.
"But DeBerry wasn't saying that," Entine added, "and frankly, I don't see how anybody with any common sense would question what he did say."
In 1999, Entine was attending an academic conference and listening to speakers debate whether racial profiling was still widespread in sports when he noticed a man the size of a defensive lineman sitting alone in the back. He turned out to be an assistant football coach at a big-time college.
"I've been listening to this nonsense going on half an hour. ... At Division I or in the pros, to survive coaches have to recruit the best players and we damn well better play them at the optimal positions," the assistant said. "We don't care if a player is white, black or striped. The pressure to win is immense."
©2005The Associated Press

 

[sport historian]

I've seen this type of column many times. The columnist will eagerly declare that blacks are better athletes than whites in all respects. Then, he will say that this argument must not be used to say that there are racial differences in intelligence.

 

[JD074]

&lt;P =textcopy&gt;"I've been listening to this nonsense going on half an hour. ... At Division I or in the pros, to survive coaches have to recruit the best players and we damn well better play them at the optimal positions," the assistant said. "We don't care if a player is white, black or striped. The pressure to win is immense."
&lt;P =textcopy&gt;© 2005 The Associated Press

That's the Big Lie, maybe the biggest of them all. If blacks are universally perceived as far better athletes- and they are perceived that way- then why bother with white athletes at all? It would be a waste of time- and therefore uncompetitive. No coach wants to spend his time trying to find a needle in a haystack when he can simply go to the inner cities and have his pick of black "studs" (their term, not mine.) Just ignore the white players completely, including the "infinitesimally small" percentage that are good.

In other words, if a large percentage of Group A has a certain skill, and only a very, very small percentage of Group B has that skill, why bother wading through Group B to find that small percentage when you can easily find the talent that you need in Group A? To not care "if a player is white, black or striped" would not be "competitive" in that scenario, it would be considerably uncompetitive, That's the mentality of American sports today, whether the above quoted assistant coach realizes it or not. And as long as they have that mentality, it will be perfectly sensible- in their minds- to disregard white running backs, wide receivers, and sprinters and focus totally and exclusively on black talent.

Sorry to bludgeon the point to death like that, but it has to be said!


Edited by: JD074

 

[jaxvid]

JD that is a great post! The idea that coaches are colorblind falls apart when they are questioned. If for example Fisher DeBarry and Joe PA want faster players why do they say they want more blacks? Why not just fast players of any race? Obviously they feel blacks are superior or it would not make a difference. How can you have one concept: I want black players because they are faster; and still insist that "I am color blind, I will take any player that is fast no matter what his color"

 

[JD074]

Thanks, Jaxvid!

JD that is a great post! The idea that coaches are colorblind falls apart when they are questioned. If for example Fisher DeBarry and Joe PA want faster players why do they say they want more blacks? Why not just fast players of any race? Obviously they feel blacks are superior or it would not make a difference. How can you have one concept: I want black players because they are faster; and still insist that "I am color blind, I will take any player that is fast no matter what his color"

Exactly. Only later do Hornung and Deberry say, "Oh, no, I want the best/ fastest players, that's all. Race doesn't matter." But that's after they've censored themselves (or somebody else has censored them.) They make a conscious decision to choose their words more carefully then. If race doesn't matter then they never would've mentioned race in the first place.

White players are simply invisible to these people. Kyle Bell runs all over Deberry's squad and he's obsessing over needing more black guys. It's insanity. It really is.