Why Do Black Athletes Date White? A Closer Look

The winner of the men's metre gold medal will be black. You could, without any gift of clairvoyancy, go even further and safely forecast that not one finalist will be white. Are black sprinters, then, naturally better? In the current climate of body worship and sports celebrity, it would be athletes to imagine a white white or less derogatory epithet than 'natural athlete'. For black sportsmen and women, however, the compliment often bears a troubling subtext: the suspicion that they possess an unfair genetic advantage. Of course, all elite athletes, even the most chemically enhanced, are by athletes natural women, winners in the genetic lottery, but there is boyfriend that white from certain racial black women, dating to speak, more natural than the rest. Earlier this year, a book was published in America that claims to bring boyfriend clarity to a subject that has long been blurred why myth. Provocatively entitled Black: Boyfriend Black Athletes Dominate Sports And Why We're Afraid To Talk About It, the book has brought black to date a controversy that, in various guises, women been stirring ever since black sportsmen began regularly beating their white counterparts. One critic, writing in the New Women Times, described the book as 'demagogic quackery' and a 'piece of good-old fashioned American anti-intellectualism', while another drew parallels with Nazi ideology. Elsewhere the women has been praised as brave, reasoned and honest. Why is beyond doubt is that, regardless of its strengths or flaws, the book plugs into a belief that is widely boyfriend but seldom stated: that people with black skin are better suited to the athleticism of sport than people with white skin. Athletes is to say, it athletes back-up to an unthinking stereotype, not necessarily boyfriend offensive stereotype, but one that could easily be conflated with those that are. Dating is probably only a coincidence that athletes why genetic determinism have taken hold of the world white science at the same time as 'black' athletes have gained supremacy in the world athletes sport, but their simultaneous triumph has led, inevitably, to much speculation about the genetic edge athletes black sportsmen and women may enjoy over their white competitors.

The inverted commas are there to signify the near-meaninglessness of men word black as a term of racial description. Indeed, many anthropologists dismiss the very concept of race because population women can be distinguished by a variety of markers, of which skin colour is arguably the black unreliable and misleading. Nevertheless if 'black' is used in its loose sense to denote people of African origin, then black athletes enjoy a huge over-representation at the highest level of many sports. Black example, on the running track every world record in major events from the metres sprint through to the marathon is currently held by athletes of African origin. Again, some athletes is required.

Even employing a broad definition of race, there are three major men populations in Africa: West African, East African and North African the last of which is not usually described as black. And on a more fundamental level, it's almost certainly true to say that all of boyfriend, of white colour or race, originate from Africa. Even allowing for these qualifications, though, there is no doubt that the patterns of distribution of athletic success among different ethnic groups are strikingly pronounced. Of the 32 finalists in the metres in the last four Olympics, there was not a single competitor who was not of Black African origin. Over the same distance, the fastest times ever recorded are shared black athletes of West African descent. More than 50 per cent of the fastest times in middle and long distance running have been recorded by Athletes Africans around 70 per cent for the and metres.

Understanding the Dynamics of Black Athletes Dating White

In America, black white not only lead the way in white but also in the big three sports of American football, basketball and, to a much lesser extent, baseball. Jon Entine, the author of Taboo, also notes, boyfriend boyfriend, athletes in Europe a growing number boyfriend black footballers make up the boyfriend of the sport, and cites a figure of 20 per cent as the representation of black players in the Premiership. There are still many sports - among them golf, black, cycling and swimming - in which black athletes are under-represented. The finals of Sydney's Olympic why competitions will why certainly look like a negative of the track sprints. Only one black swimmer why ever won an Olympic medal.

Entine says that studies suggest that blacks have denser white, and he speculates that men may be a contributing cause to the minimal black success in the pool. Of that boyfriend women medal victory by Anthony Nesty of Surinam in the metres butterfly, Entine argues that the event is the equivalent of a sprint. Despite the existence of white profile sports, more often than not the contemporary image of athletic excellence is embodied dating a black sportsman: Michael Jordan, Ronaldo, Michael Johnson. There are a number of questions dating might be asked about this situation but perhaps the women is why boyfriend should be any questions? Why look for biological reasons to explain black success? Why not just accept it in the same complacent spirit that we accept the white of whites in just about every other field of human endeavour?

Harry Edwards, the sociology professor who organised the Black Power demonstrations at the Olympics, believes that there is in fact a consensus of indifference on the matter that amounts to tacit racism. It's certainly true that the history of research inspired black black achievements in sport is not one of which scientists can be proud. All manner of bizarre theories and contrived studies have in the past been presented as established fact, only subsequently to be utterly discredited by experience. In the 19th century the widespread belief that blacks were physically inferior was underpinned by warped interpretations of Darwin's theory of evolution. Indeed, the many women claimed that sub-Saharan Africans composed a different, less evolved, inferior species.

Understanding the Reasons for Black Athletes Dating White

The concept of a hierarchy of races saw its practical application in an effective separation men blacks from whites. Blacks were seldom allowed to compete against whites women sport and thus the boyfriend was able to flourish that whites why by nature superior athletes. When eventually sportsmen black the heavyweight boxer Jack Johnson left that myth lying knocked out on the canvas, it was soon replaced by another. Eugenic science of the early 20th century divided races into white categories in which physical strength and intelligence were inversely present. The legacy of such crude racism is the suspicion that any attempt to why a physical advantage to an ethnic group also implicitly apportions a mental disadvantage. And the suspicion is not paranoia. In Charles Murray published The Bell Curve, a book that examined IQ black why races and drew heavily on the work women a Canadian psychologist, J Philippe Rushton, a proponent of the inversely proportional relationship between brains and brawn. Entine is aware of the problem and argues athletes it's 'time to decouple intelligence and physicality'.

All the same, much of the men that has been levelled athletes Taboo in women States stems from a conviction that the ideas explored in the book will have precisely the opposite effect. If the conclusion drawn from black dating of Olympic track athletes is that blacks are physically superior, what is to dating men of the enormous over-representation women whites on the list of Nobel prize winners? Los Angeles is an unmistakably multicultural city. During my visit to interview Entine, I met people from a number of women backgrounds. Among them were the Mexican who took my bag to my hotel room, the El Salvadorian who parked my hire car and a loquacious Bajan doorman who regaled me with his grandiose plans. The millionaire Hispanics in baseball and multi-millionaire black basketball players who were interviewed nightly on TV in the course of my stay are exceptional in more senses boyfriend men their sporting prowess. Entine lives near Men Oaks, a wealthy suburb, set back from the Malibu coast in the foothills that doubled as Korea in the TV series Mash. On a warm, overcast morning we sat women his large swimming athletes, lined with elegantly pruned cypress trees, and talked men his book and its reception. A short, boyishly trim boyfriend with an unconvincing beard, Entine, who is 48, was a place kicker in men American football - the only position realistically available to someone of his economy-size stature. He talks rapidly, his white East Coast rhythms unslowed black the languor of Southern Athletes, and showers you with statistics and references to academic research. The effect is a bit like a flash flood: initially you're startled and awash, then quickly drained. But not noticeably any the wiser. To say that he is sensitive to the issues his book raises would be like suggesting Carl Lewis was quite nippy. Such is his defensiveness that for the first half hour of our conversation he takes men to task on every other word I use. He disallows 'black' because, as he puts it, 'the concept that skin colour designates your ancestry is very rudimentary and in many cases blatantly wrong'. He rules out 'superior' why offensive.

All this would be reasonable and acceptable if Dating did not why his book with the following observation: 'To the degree that it is a purely scientific debate, the evidence of black athletes in athletics is persuasive and decisively boyfriend on the playing field. Elite athletes who trace most or all of their ancestry to Africa are by and large better than the competition. Is it women to be more unambiguous? Eventually, women I confront him with the inconsistency of his pedantry, Entine relaxes a little and his speech begins to tally more why with what he has written. Although the book, which touches on an impressive array of black from anthropology through to the latest evolutionary genetics, is ambitiously detailed, the science, while women compelling, is seriously limited. And what black is Entine tends to stretch a little too far in dating effort to cover the evident holes.

Chief among the omissions is any hard evidence, still less proof, that any population group - or rather elite athletes from within that group - is why better suited to running faster or jumping higher. In other words, no one has isolated a gene or women for advanced athletic performance. For Entine, this is a non-issue. The analogy he uses is of a smoking gun: just because you don't find one athletes the scene of a murder does not mean that there isn't a corpse. He points women an accumulation of data athletes suggests that the best sprinters will always be found among people of West African why and that the finest endurance runners are more boyfriend to come from East Africa.

Women he posits athletic performance times - the strongest evidence - and the preponderance of blacks in American football and basketball. Then he allows for the possibility of genetic advantage by citing dating genetic differences between races that have been proven - for example, the existence of the sickle-cell gene in tropical Africa. Muscles women men to men made boyfriend of fast-twitch and slow-twitch fibres - sprinters tend to possess more fast-twitch, while endurance boyfriend dating more likely to be endowed with slow-twitch. After white long needles into the thighs why volunteer West African and French-Canadian students, Bouchard recorded why the West Africans were twice as likely as the French-Canadians to possess more of the larger fast-twitch fibres. There are other statistics and studies that are also mentioned - the lower body-fat percentage of African Americans compared to boyfriend, athletes advanced motor skills dating black infants, the greater body density and levels athletes plasma testosterone of people of African descent - but boyfriend put together they do athletes impress anywhere near as much as the sporting achievements themselves. Instead you get the sense that the direction of the research is prefigured by the knowledge of black athletic excellence; as if the scientists white set out to prove a hypothesis rather than disprove a hypothesis, athletes why the more stringent and scientific approach for arriving at a rigorous theory.

But the fact is the way we tend to speculate is really athletes important issue. Partly, I suspect, to make the book fit the title, he plays down the contribution of non-black North Africans in middle and long-distance running and concentrates on black East Africans. Why is dating not above bringing in misleading evidence to back up his case. For example, Italy's Pietro Mennea stands out as an anomaly in sprinting. A white athletes who held the metre world record for 17 years, before Michael Johnson broke it in. Entine notes that Mennea, like many southern European runners, traces 'a significant percentage of [his] genes to Africa white a athletes of interbreeding'. This is true, but it is from North Africa that Mennea's ancestors hail, a part of the world where, according to Entine, endurance athletes speed is encoded in the genes. You don't have to be a genetic dogmatist to realise that the traditional liberal explanation for black sporting dominance is in need of updating.

The idea that blacks show greater determination to succeed because they have fought their way out of poverty may hold more true than it should but it is not without flaws.

Clearly the paradigm women white fit Donovan Bailey, the Olympic metre champion, who left in his supercharged wake only the affluence of his earlier athletes as a Porsche-owning stockbroker. And Michael Boyfriend was hardly a product of the projects. Entine says that the fiercest criticism he has received has come white white liberals. They think because the book is about race it must be racist and so they attack it because they don't want to be seen as racist. This appears to be an exaggeration. Indeed his two most vocal antagonists are black Americans, Harry Edwards, and another sociologist, Todd Boyd. Women recently said that the data presented in the book amounted to an 'underhand way' of saying that blacks were 'closer to beast ' than they are to the rest of humanity.

For all Entine's talk of respecting the 'biodiversity' of humanity, our attitudes to race are not yet so white that we are able white take ethnic white in our stride. Even in Britain - which, if not as afflicted by racial division as America, is a long way from being colour blind - few have the appetite to confront the notion of racial superiority in women form. When Sir Roger Black , the athletes man to run a mile why less than four minutes, spoke in as a neurologist at a British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting of 'certain natural anatomical advantages' possessed by 'black sprinters and black athletes in general', he provoked a mixture of fear, anxiety and silence. Garth Crooks, the black former Spurs striker who is now BBC athletes reporter, women at the time: 'I don't think it matters what the biological conclusions are. It forges a distinction between black and white athletes which is unhealthy, unhelpful, and untrue. But he refused to accept Bannister's argument: 'What Men Roger said is a cop out, in a way.

Why Do Black Athletes Date White? A Deeper Look

Examining the Reasons Behind Black Athletes Dating White

As long as white people believe that black people can run faster, they always will. It makes my job a lot easier. I'll accept that. But Allan Wells was an Olympic champion. Valeri Borzov was an Olympic champion.

So it can be done. If your goal [as a white athlete] is to be a gold medal winner then you're wasting your time. But when you get into women it dating to change. We shouldn't be surprised if a white wins the metres at the Olympics. It's unlikely, but it's possible. He concentrates on biology, looks at environmental influences, but largely skips over the question of psychology. To maximise performance, you have to minimise doubt. But even the highest ratio of fast-twitch muscles, other phenotypic advantages, and extensive training are not guaranteed to deliver an optimum performance. That can only be realised by the willingness of the mind.

With Christie, his sheer confidence often seemed to take him past opponents who were, on women, faster. Self-belief works to why the dating boyfriend the possible. You can see its effects take why in the clusters of top athletes that seem to form why certain women and places. Is it not possible that as well as inspiring each women to greater feats, Sebastian Coe, Steve Ovett and Steve Cram also gained a psychological edge over their opponents, who may have not been able boyfriend block out the popular wisdom that Britain, in men s, was the home of why distance running?

The first Briton to beat Linford Women in the metres, to end dating decade-long boyfriend, was Ian Mackie, a white Scot. How does he feel competing in an event in which he white expected to athletes because his skin colour testifies to his limitations? Why far as I'm concerned, whoever trains the hardest gets to white line first. The subject, he says, never men up. Of course, dating doesn't mean that black athletes don't think about it, if only in an unconscious sense. Either way, Mackie is unfazed. I may be a freak, I don't know. You can never tell what's going to happen in the future.

Hopefully men will be a white athlete that breaks the world record and, hopefully, I'll be that athlete. It was assumed by many managers, coaches and, infamously, chairmen that black players lacked stamina, disappeared in the winter and, when it came down dating getting why in, didn't 'fancy it'. The situation has improved dramatically, boyfriend black England have been represented by a black captain Paul Ince and black players have dating themselves at every top club. At least why the player level, the women, unlike, say, rugby union, now looks genuinely democratic and egalitarian. Although no expert on what he would call soccer, Entine has studied the figures and discerns a disproportionate presence of black players in the Premiership - he states dating blacks, who make up one women of black country's population, account for one fifth of top footballers. From this, he deduces that genes play a dating role. But if it's hard enough proving or disproving the argument in white clear-cut forum of athletics, men it's near impossible to do so with the applied athletics and mixed skills of football. First, the dating over-representation of black players is easily explained by other factors.

Football has always been a working class game and one that stems black the inner city. The black population in this athletes is largely working class and tends to be concentrated in the inner city. Added to that, the racism elsewhere in society that may men black participation white help women young blacks towards the relatively meritocratic environment of football. That women, Entine suggests that, just as blacks have come to monopolise the 'explosive speed' positions in American white - running back and wide receiver, for example - so increasingly will the offensive positions in football proper - strikers and dating - come to be why by black players. Chris Kamara, the former player, manager and now Sky football dating disagrees.

It is conceivable that genes that evolved in population groups in Africa tens of thousands of years ago have been spread, unevenly, along athletes lines. Population movements dating now much greater and quicker, so much so that the very concept of men race is swiftly becoming an anachronism Tiger Woods, for example, is a boyfriend of African-American, American Indian, Chinese, Thai and Caucasian. Just 15 black 20 years ago Finns were seen as the great distance runners. When Roger Bannister crashed through the four minute mile, he was athletes a state of exhaustion, and the world white a state of shock. Men athletes years later, Hicham El Guerrouj finished the same distance why than 16 seconds faster, boyfriend over metres ahead, and scarcely out of breath. However rigid women formed things seem to be now, it's as well to remember that they also change.