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Jon
Entine
"On
the plantation, a strong black man was mated with a strong
black woman. [Blacks] were simply bred for physical qualities."
--Calvin Hill, a former professional football player, Yale
graduate and father of NBA star Grant Hill.
No
white sprinter has ever cracked the 10-second mark in the
100-meter dash. Dozens of black sprinters have, and eight
top black sprinters have broken the 10-second barrier a
total of 136 times.
Although
Asia accounts for 55
percent of the world population, there are no sprinters
of note from the continent that brought forth the Confucian
and Taoist traditions of discipline.
Blacks
account for 13 percent of the U.S. population.
Black
boxer Joe Louis fought Primo Carnera in a 1936 bout portrayed
as a battle of American democracy against Italian fascism.
Yet even the fawning white journalists called Louis a "brown
cobra" and a "magnificent
animal" who "came out of the African jungle to strike down"
Carnera.
In
a 1858 debate, Abraham Lincoln said, "There is a physical
difference that will forever prohibit the two races living
together on terms of social and political equality."
Sportscaster
Brent Musberger called John Carlos and Tommie Smith, Black
Power protesters at the 1968 Olympics, a "pair of dark-skinned
storm troopers."
Entine
says genetics, not religion, may explain the longstanding
hostility between Catholics and Protestants in Northern
Ireland.
Charles
Darwin's cousin, Sir Francis Galton, gave birth to eugenics
in 1883 when he suggested that social progress could be
attained only by purging "undesirable genes," which meant
restricting the mentally ill and nonwhite from procreating.
Entine
grew up in an affluent suburb of Philadelphia. His father
was a dentist. After college, Entine became a TV producer
for
Tom Brokaw and Sam Donaldson.
Eugenics
spread to Germany, where another Darwinist, Ernst Haeckel,
said in 1899 that the lives of lower races should be assigned
a "totally different value."
Entine
says the "not in our genes" ideology has been taken to extremes.
In 1998, the American Kennel Club revised its 19th edition
of The Complete Dog Book amid charges that it perpetuated
"pernicious stereotypes" about dog breeds.
"The
belief that dog breeds do not have stereotypical personalities
is as intuitively ridiculous as claiming that there are
no meaningful differences between human populations," Entine
says.
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Jon Entine
Powell's,
1005 W Burnside St., 228-4651, 7:30 pm March 16. Free
World
Running Records (chart)
If you believe his critics, he is one of this country's most
dangerous thinkers, a man whose theories on race are so lethal
they've been
compared to deadly weapons. And he's moving to Portland.
No, he's not John Rocker, the bone-headed Atlanta Brave
who hurls racial stereotypes like fastballs. He's Jon Entine,
a mild-mannered Jewish liberal who has written a book called
Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're
Afraid to Talk About It.
Published in January, Taboo is causing a ruckus
because Entine, who is white, concludes that race does
matter. He says that people of African ancestry enjoy a
biological edge in certain sports, which helps explain why
the 200 fastest times recorded in the 100-meter dash all
belong to blacks and why blacks account for almost nine
of every 10 NBA players and why seven of every 10 players
in the NFL are dark-skinned.
Taboo has its critics.
"[Entine's theory] is a milder version of eugenics," says
Larry Proctor, a professor of anatomy at Washington State
University, who is black. "And it's damaging to blacks who
buy into the idea that they have a physical edge. It's like
saying, 'Let's take the chains off the legs and put them
on the mind.'"
Proctor's reaction shows that discussions of race and sports
in this country come with an explosive subtext. Too often,
the topic of black physicality has implied that blacks are
closer to beasts.
Portland Trail Blazers guard Bonzi Wells says of Taboo's
theme, "It's a real touchy area."
USA Today's David DuPree, who was in Portland for
the Trail Blazers-Lakers game Feb. 29, agrees, saying he
might be able to get away with writing about the subject,
but his paper would be "real touchy" about the reaction.
That's why white-dominated Hollywood can make White
Men Can't Jump, but white men can't utter the corollary:
Black guys are built
differently.
And that's why Entine may be stupid, brave or both for
writing what The Washington Post says "could well
be the most intellectually demanding sports book ever written."
To any TV viewer, it's apparent that black athletes dominate
basketball, football and Olympic running events. What's
not so obvious, until you've pored through the pages of
Taboo, is the astonishing degree of their dominance.
Consider running, which is the most democratic of sports,
requiring virtually no equipment, teams or club membership.
All it takes is a surface and a runner. Every record at
every standard distance is owned by a runner of African
descent, from the 100-meter dash to the marathon.
In sprinting, Entine notes, all of the 32 male finalists
in the last four Olympic 100-meter races were of West African
descent. The statistical likelihood of that happening based
on population alone is 0.000000000000000000-0000000000000001
percent.
In marathons, Kenya, a country the size of Texas, rules
the world. At Boston, the world's premier marathon, Kenyans
have not lost the men's race since 1990. In all, as Entine
writes, Kenyans have won 38 Olympic running medals since
1964. Based on population alone, the odds that Kenya could
amass such a haul are one in 1.6 billion.
Running isn't the only sport dominated by blacks. Check
the NBA stats. Not one white has finished among the top
scorers or rebounders in recent years. Over in the NFL,
you can count the number of whites at the speediest positions--cornerback,
wide receiver and running back--on two hands.
Even in baseball, where only one in six major leaguers
is black, the stars are disproportionately black. Since
baseball was integrated in 1947, a majority of National
League MVPs have been black.
Conventional wisdom attributes this success to environmental
disadvantage, not biological edge. For blacks, the reasoning
goes, athletics is practically the only way out of the ghetto,
so they have extraordinary motivation to succeed.
To suggest otherwise is dangerous.
Remember Jimmy "The Greek" Snyder? A football commentator
for CBS, Snyder mused in January 1988 that slaveowners had
bred black slaves to produce the best physical specimens.
Black athletes, he went on to say, could "jump higher and
run faster" because of their "high thighs and big size."
Snyder's comments, caught on tape at a bar on Martin Luther
King Day, generated outrage. A Washington Post columnist
compared Snyder to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. The
Boston Globe ran a cartoon showing a hooded Klansman consoling
Snyder. The president of the Hollywood chapter of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People called
for Snyder's scalp, and CBS obliged a few days later.
So why do black athletes dominate sports? How could the
environmental-disadvantage theory explain the success of
Michael Jordan, who comes from a middle-class background,
or Grant Hill, whose parents graduated from Yale and Wellesley?
Those questions once nagged New York Knicks fan and NBC
anchorman Tom Brokaw. In 1989, Brokaw and Entine, who then
worked as his producer, made a one-hour TV documentary on
the subject. Although critically acclaimed, the show drew
hundreds of complaints and angered some of Brokaw's black
friends. Brokaw turned his back on the controversy and went
on to write a bestselling book about old white men who'd
fought in World War II.
But Entine, now 47, remained curious.
A former football place-kicker at Trinity College in Hartford,
Conn., then a marathon runner and self-described "jock sniffer,"
he relished the chance to write something substantive about
sports. "It was a dream story," he says, over a recent breakfast
of waffles and ham. "It touches on so many aspects of our
lives--science, sociology, anthropology."
Entine knew it was a dicey subject, but that attracted
him. "I was intrigued by how we feared the debate," he says.
In his book, Entine connects black athletes' increasing
dominance in certain sports to legitimate scientific findings
showing that some physical differences exist between black
and white people. The book plows new ground and goes far
beyond Snyder's tipsy sound bites. No one before Entine
has combined the arcane science with sports-performance
insights in a book.
"He puts together a lot of information about sports physiology
that hasn't been in one pile before," says Ralph Holloway,
an anthropology professor at Columbia University, who's
using Taboo in one of his classes. "You'd have to
go to very specialized journals to get it."
So what did the latest findings in genetics, physiology
and anthropology tell Entine?
He says that athletes who trace their ancestry to West
Africa (which includes most African Americans) are exceptionally
fast and can jump high. In short, that's because of greater
muscle mass with a higher percentage of power-enhancing
fast-twitch fibers, a higher center of gravity and more
anaerobic enzymes.
Another population, the East African descendants who dominate
distance running, has larger lung capacities, more endurance-enhancing
slow-twitch muscle fibers, a typically slighter body profile
and the ability to process oxygen more efficiently. Whites,
according to the scientists Entine quotes, fall physically
between East and West Africans.
Entine is careful to stress that he's talking about trends
among groups of very elite athletes. He's not saying white
guys should give up playing pick-up ball because they can't
jump. He is saying that among the small population of elite
athletes, there are differences that could give a fraction-of-a-second
advantage to people of African ancestry, which makes the
difference, at the elite level, between an Olympic medal
and fourth place.
Michigan State University anthropologist Robert Malina
agrees. "Differences among athletes of elite caliber are
so small that if you have an advantage that might be genetically
based, it might be very, very significant," he says.
Entine isn't discounting the hard work of black athletes,
nor is he suggesting that most black athletes are superior
to most whites. Rather, he's saying that the pool of potentially
great athletes in certain sports is deeper and wider for
blacks.
In the end, Entine says, the individual's work ethic, competitive
spirit and training remain the key to success. "That's why
plenty of guys with Scottie Pippen's talent are [stuck]
in the CBA [Continental Basketball Association]," he says.
Still, Taboo has rekindled an academic rumble that
pits what might be called, in extreme terms, the culturalists
against the biologists, the neo-creationists against the
social Darwinists, the Mau Maus against the racists.
On one side are those who say race is an oppressive social
construct created to explain trivial differences between
people of dissimilar skin pigment. These well-meaning people
worry, as one scribe wrote, what will happen to the brotherhood
of man when some brothers can run faster than others.
On the other side are those who say forget about the genetic
similarities between races--it's a red herring. It's not
the amount of genes that count--heck, we share 74 percent
of ours with roundworms--but which genes. It's time, these
scholars say, to stop denying science and start truly celebrating
diversity.
This is more than a tweedy academic argument: Entine has
poked a raw nerve. Some critics flat-out disagree with his
findings. They argue that Taboo doesn't prove that
black athletes owe their success to genes rather than individual
drive.
"His evidence is not conclusive," says Richard Lapchick,
founder of Northeastern University's Center for the Study
of Sport in Society.
Most, though, have a different complaint: They fear the
book will give ammunition to racists.
Taboo has been called dangerous and insidious and
been compared to deadly weapons. "I see this like guns or
uranium," says Jeffrey Sammons, a history professor at New
York University. "Some information has a more dangerous
content than others. Only bad things can come from research
into racially based differences in sports performance."
Sociologist Harry Edwards, the man who engineered the Black
Power protest at the 1968 Olympics, once explained why the
topic of black physicality is so incendiary.
"By asserting that blacks are physically superior," Edwards
said, "whites at best reinforce some old stereotypes long
held about Afro-Americans--to wit, that they are little
removed from the apes in their evolutionary development....
It opens the door for at least an informal acceptance of
the idea that whites are intellectually superior to blacks."
Some say that Taboo, despite its author's intentions,
could be used to prop that door open.
"Jon's thesis doesn't threaten white racism. Jon's thesis
affirms white racism," says C. Keith Harrison, assistant
professor of kinesiology at the University of Michigan and
director of the Paul Robeson Research Center for Academic
and Athletic Prowess.
"The book itself is not dangerous, but reactions to it
can be," agrees Lapchick, who is white. "Generally, the
conclusion that there is black physical superiority puts
blacks into a physical box and whites into an intellectual
box."
David Shields, who writes for The New York Times Magazine
and is the author of Black Planet: Facing Race During
an NBA Season, says, "It's such a loaded, controversial
topic because the subtext is black people are only physical
beings."
The comments of Entine's critics reveal one of the strange
things about the reaction to Entine's book: It's not being
criticized for what it says, but for how a bigot might distort
its findings.
While it seems an intellectually flimsy critique of Taboo,
it's also understandable. For many black athletes, the mere
mention of their athletic superiority carries a stigma.
Former NBA star Isiah Thomas used to complain that black
players never get credit for their hard work. "When whites
perform well, it's due to [their] thinking and work habit,"
said Thomas. "It's not the case for blacks. All we do is
run and jump. We never practice or give a thought to how
we play. It's like I came dribbling out of my mother's womb."
Aggressive as a terrier, Entine takes the criticism personally.
He calls Keith Harrison "a third-rate academic" (although
he asked Harrison to review his book). He also says that
"sociologists and anthropologists are the bottom-feeders
of academia."
Entine doesn't think his book is bad for race relations;
in fact, he thinks it will be productive. The NAACP's magazine,
Emerge, gave his book a positive review, he notes,
as have several prominent black scholars.
"Hopefully, Taboo will contribute to finally putting
to rest the torturous stereotype of the 'dumb black jock,'"
says black professor Earl Smith from Wake Forest University
in the foreword he wrote for the book.
Entine also goes to great lengths to distance himself from
The Bell Curve, the infamous 1994 bestseller that linked
ethnicity and IQ, and he insists that race and intelligence
are not related, according to his research.
Taboo exposes the history of eugenics as well--how
it went from a utopian ideal, supported by Emma Goldman
and Margaret Sanger, to a hideous reality carried out by
the Nazis. Entine's depiction of racism in the U.S. is just
as ugly: As late as 1942, when black GIs were fighting Hitler,
30 states in America banned marriages between blacks and
whites to keep the white race from degenerating.
But Entine's pride and joy is that Taboo stands
as a monument to open debate and the exchange of ideas unfettered
by political correctness. He revels in the chance to take
a few swings at the academics who claim there are no real
biological differences between races. Their ostrichlike
views might even be harmful, he says.
"Religion, violence, depression--all have genetic components,"
he explains. "If we think that improving the social environment
will change everything, then we'll leave some people behind."
Entine does bluster at times, and he clearly has a bit
of huckster in him. He's an author who knows how to package
a story for a mass audience. But he is not a racist. Entine
does more to inform whites of their prejudices than he's
credited for, and by wrapping his stories of segregation,
genetics and evolution theory in a sports book with a sexy
title, he'll probably reach a wider audience than an ivory-tower
scholar ever would.
Entine and his supporters argue there's no harm in reporting
on human diversity. If the discussion is about genetic vulnerability
to a disease, it's no problem. Why should it be when the
subject is sports?
"Why do we so readily accept the idea that evolution has
turned out Jews with a genetic predisposition to Tay-Sachs
disease and that blacks are more susceptible to sickle-cell
anemia," Entine asks, "yet find it racist to suggest that
West Africans may have evolved into the world's best sprinters?"
Human diversity should be a cause for celebration. "It's
time to say it's wonderful," says Columbia University's
Holloway. "Our strongest weapon against extinction is our
variability."
The professor has a point. What's more enlightened: to
acknowledge our differences without stereotypes, without
saying one group is better or more intelligent, or to deny
those differences for fear of encouraging the John Rockers
of the world?
"In the end, for all our differences," Entine says, "we
are far, far more similar. That's Taboo's only real
message."
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