Sports that require speed and power.

Is it environment or genetics that cause the most athletic positions in sports to be filled by blacks. The tailback or running back possition in American football is a position that requires speed and power. Think of hall of fame running backs Walter Payton, Earl Campbell, Jim Brown, (and every starting running back in the current NFL) to find a white hall of fame running back you would have to go back to the days when the NFL was segregated (i.e., culture dictated conditions). If you look at running backs in the SEC, arguably the most competitive football conference in America 11 out of 12 teams have a starting black running back (the four back ups for the starting white rb are all black). Is this because there aren't a lot of southern white boys interested in playing that position? Not likely. By the time aspiring running backs make it to the college level, there isn't a lot of politics going on, players are selected to help maintain the coaches multimillon dollar salary, it's performance based.

To pile on, look at the next olympic 100m race, look at the next marathon winner. Are those elite running positions disproportinately held by west african blacks because they "want it more" or because of environmental conditions. Nope. Those guys have a combination of genes that make them fast and powerful.

So is it unreasonable to assume that a race of people could possess another type of genetic superiority (on average) over other races, e.g., processing information. Of course not. The problem is that it is just not as easy to measure information processing performance as a 100m race (and obviously a lot more politically sensitive). But we can look at the fields that demand high levels of intelligence, bankers, lawyers, doctors, physicists, etc. and see that Jews, Indians, Asians are disproportinately represented based on population. It could be politics but I suspect that, like the football coach, those positions are given to "players" that managers believe will give them the highest return.

Or is it possible that Blacks excel in the areas you mention because those are the avenues Blacks think allow them easiest access to wealth and or those are the avenues society "allows" Blacks to participate in?

Do you think Blacks are genetically better at rapping than other races? Similar to your theory about sports, all the best rappers have been Black and very few successful rappers have been white. Therefore there must be a a genetic component to rap, right? And since it makes sense for Blacks to be genetically superior in one way (rapping) it must make sense for whites to be genetically better in other ways like academics. Makes perfect sense!

Idiot.

good points. This was posted somewhere else and I replied that the choice of pursuing professional sports as a career is highly influenced by the surrounding culture, with some seeing this gamble of time and resources as more lucrative than others due to differences in opportunities and social pressure. Your points are more succinct. Nice post.

I can't argue with you that the best rappers are black, I'm a Chuck D fan myself, but are there a lot of white kids looking at rap as a career, is it really that competitive between whites and blacks? Anyway I don't buy your analogy, too subjective, are sonnets rap?

Football is super competitive and it seems logical to me that when you have a population that is 75% white and only 13% black and every NFL tailback is black there is some kind of advantage going on besides your proposed explanations of

"Blacks excel in the areas you mention because those are the avenues Blacks think allow them easiest access to wealth and or those are the avenues society "allows" Blacks to participate in?"

I think the genetic argument is stronger than your societal arguments.

tubbs wrote the following post at 12/04/2007 10:37 AM:

Or is it possible that Blacks excel in the areas you mention because those are the avenues Blacks think allow them easiest access to wealth and or those are the avenues society "allows" Blacks to participate in?

One way to move the debate forward would be to look at breakdown by position on a football team. Are positions where speed is especially important? For example, in the NFL, are blacks over-represented at wide receiver or cornerback, where speed is critical, compared to their representation overall? Are whites over-represented at offensive line, where speed doesn't matter so much? (I haven't looked at the numbers, but this would be a way of getting beyond shouting "it's race!" "no, it's culture!".

I don't think cultural explanations do much to explain the black advantage in sprinting. After all, black sprinters are not just faster than American whites; they're faster than sprinters from every other race everywhere in the world.

Your sports analogy completely blows up when you look at a sport that controls for both heredity and environment -- soccer. In that sport, the world's top athletes come from a wide variety of ethnic, socio-economic and geographic backgrounds. The world's current best player, Kaka, is an upper-middle class white Brazilian with obvious European genes.

The "black running back" phenomenon is almost entirely explained by environment -- blacks, particularly in football hotbeds of the south, have far fewer economic opportunities and are often steered into playing the position because it's the easiest way to get attention from college scouts and earn a scholarship (RBs at the high school level handle the bar far more and are more important to a team than the QB).

Your sports analogy completely blows up when you look at a sport that controls for both heredity and environment -- soccer. In that sport, the world's top athletes come from a wide variety of ethnic, socio-economic and geographic backgrounds. The world's current best player, Kaka, is an upper-middle class white Brazilian with obvious European genes.

So, the question whether there are racial differences in athletic ability depends on the race of the world's best soccer player? Does that mean that blacks were superior athletes back when Pele was the world's best?

The "black running back" phenomenon is almost entirely explained by environment -- blacks, particularly in football hotbeds of the south, have far fewer economic opportunities and are often steered into playing the position because it's the easiest way to get attention from college scouts and earn a scholarship (RBs at the high school level handle the bar far more and are more important to a team than the QB).

I'm sorry, but that makes no sense at all. Everybody likes to go to college for free -- even white people! More fundamentally, who is supposed to be steering these players into positions where they can get scholarships? It is the coach of a football team who decides who gets to play tailback. Presumably the coach picks the guy who he thinks will do the best job.

Yeah and white guys are "steered" towards offensive lineman because they get to handle the ball less. I don't want to get sarcastic, I'm just trying to make a point...there are way more white guys going out for football and they would love the glory of playing the position of tailback and many work out hard to acheive the position but in the end they just don't have it (it's not because they don't want it).

American football is I think a better filter because the positions are so much more specialized than soccer. Plus I don't know Jack about the game of soccer. However, I do think it is much less reactionary than say tailback which is either evade or run over (speed and power).

I don't see this as a big deal (like Saletan said its all about averages). We should celebrate the differences... we all love dogs sometimes we want a shit zu and sometimes we want a doberman or a retriever. They have strengths and weaknesses but they are all dogs.

And Jewish dominance in basketball is explained how? Must be genetics

<link>

"

"The reason, I suspect, that basketball appeals to the Hebrew with his Oriental background," wrote Paul Gallico, sports editor of the New York Daily News and one of the premier sports writers of the 1930s, "is that the game places a premium on an alert, scheming mind, flashy trickiness, artful dodging and general smart aleckness." Writers opined that Jews had an advantage in basketball because short men have better balance and more foot speed. They were also thought to have sharper eyes, which of course cut against the stereotype that Jewish men were myopic and had to wear glasses, but who said stereotypes had to be consistent?

At the turn of the century, European Jews flooded off immigrant ships into the ghettos of the booming Eastern metropolises. New York and Philadelphia were the epicenters of the basketball world, with the dominant team, the Hebrews, ensconced in South Philly.

"Basketball is a city game," notes Sonny Hill, an executive adviser with the Sixers who has run a high-school summer league for more than 35 years. "If you trace basketball back to the 1920s, '30s, and '40s, that's when the Jewish people were very dominant in the inner city. And they dominated basketball."

And European basketball greatness? Must be the genes. Can't be environment

<link>

Bargnani (Barg-NAH-nee) would be the latest in an unprecedented foreign invasion of the NBA. International talent comprises a league-record 18% of its players. That includes a league-high seven international players on the defending champion San Antonio Spurs, who open the playoffs this weekend looking for their third title in four years, and six on the Phoenix Suns, whose coach made his name in Italy and has used the team-oriented, run-pass-and-shoot game to build the league's fourth-best record this season.

There was no Jewish domination in basketball anything like the black domination of basketball today. (This is something I actually know a little bit about, since my Irish Catholic father-in-law was a New Yorker who went to St. John's on a basketball scholarship in 1941.) There were a fair number of Jewish players, just as there were a fair number of Jewish boxers back then, for the reasons that Sonny Hill notes (as well as a reason he doesn't note, i.e. a higher percentage of Jews were poor then then are poor now). But Jews never dominated either sport. Jewish success in basketball 80 years ago shows that genes aren't everything. But no one ever said they were.

And finally neither of the "race realists" on this thread have explained the genetic dominance of Blacks in rap music (or whites in country music). Do white people have some genetic predisposition toward saying "y'all" and "c'mon down"?

Wake me up when you find a white player anywhere with the athleticism of LeBron James or Michael Jordan. I'll be sleeping for a long time.

"There was no Jewish domination in basketball anything like the black domination of basketball today."

So Blacks used to be less genetically gifted at sports but they've improved while Jews have declined? How do you explain the difference in domination of these sports (really all sports) over the years using the genetic argument?

Were whites more genetically gifted at football and baseball prior to those sports being integrated? Whites used to dominate football, what happened to their genes to change this? What happened to Black genes in the past 60 years that makes them much better runnning backs today than when football was dominated by whites?

tubbs

Short answer to your volley of questions: whites did better when blacks were not permitted to play. This is so obvious that I feel ashamed for you that I have to write it.