Special SKEPTIC Issue on Race & Sports
Summer 2000
vol 8 no.1

Introduction to Special Skeptic Symposium on Race & Sports, by Frank Miele

Breaking the Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports And Why We’re No Longer So Afraid to Talk by About It, by Jon Entine

Totem and Taboo: The Myth of Race in Sports, by John Hoberman

The Final Taboo: Race Differences in Ability, by Vincent Sarich

Blood, Sweat, and Fears: Why Some Black Athletes Dominate Some Sports and What It Really Means, by Michael Shermer

Check out the details of the special SKEPTIC Society/CalTech symposium on TABOO on Sunday, September 17

Introduction to Special Skeptic Symposium on Race & Sports

Frank Miele

Jon Entine’s Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports And Why We Are Afraid to Talk About It

Race is to America what the Goddess Discord was to Homeric legends—invite her to the banquet and she brings trouble with her, ignore her and she visits trouble on you. From Thomas Jefferson’s words, “all men are created equal” to “separate but equal,” and from “equality of opportunity” to “equality of outcome,” the subject of race refuses to vanish from our national life. As anthropologist and participant in this forum, Vincent Sarich, notes: “When we discuss issues such as race, it pushes buttons and the cerebral cortex just shuts down.”

For most of the last 50 years the province of sociology and anthropology, the concept of race has now reemerged as a broader scientific issue. President Clinton acknowledged as much in his latest State of the Union Address, when, in commenting on the Human Genome Project, he observed that the world’s races share more than 99 percent of their genes.

But what does that statement really mean? Does it mean that human differences are minuscule and therefore meaningless? Or was it a blatantly political sop, yet another invocation of the taboo against discussing human diversity—cultural and biological?

Jon Entine, investigative journalist, Emmy-award winning producer for NBC and ABC News, and recipient of the prestigious National Press Club Award, examines this question in his book, Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We Are Afraid to Talk About It. Simply stated, it is the most explosive book on race and ability since Herrnstein and Murray’s The Bell Curve, for which Skeptic also hosted debate (Vol. 3, #3).

Taboo is based on the 1989 NBC documentary, narrated by Tom Brokaw, Black Athletes: Fact and Fiction, which Entine wrote and produced, which netted more than 250 reviews and articles around the world and was named best international sports film of the year. Yet it faced relentless criticism from those who believed that even mentioning the possibility that evolution may have left a biological imprint on human populations was a subject too dangerous for Americans to ponder.

Now Entine has revisited the subject, this time incorporating a wide range of social, cultural, and scientific perspectives to understand why this issue so transfixes and repels so many otherwise thoughtful people.

This special Skeptic symposium on Race and Sports begins with Jon Entine’s summary of the thesis of Taboo, followed by his account of the struggle to break the self-censorship imposed by the publishing industry against discussing the reality of race. Next professor John Hoberman of the University of Texas takes a skeptical look at the concept of race and the link between “racial differences” and athletic performance; he also considers the degree to which such statistical associations can take on a life of their own and harm our society.

U.C. Berkeley anthropologist Vincent Sarich then argues that race is a meaningful biological concept, not a mere social construction, and that racial differences in abilities and behaviors have been important over the course of human evolution. If anything, Sarich contends, Entine himself is somewhat wary of breaking the final taboo.

Michael Shermer closes out the discussion by integrating his knowledge of how science works (especially within such emotionally-charged fields as race differences) with his first-hand experiences as an elite athlete in ultra-marathon cycling. He examines several cognitive biases clouding observations and theorizing on both sides of this issue, and asks why it is that Americans are so obsessed with black-white differences, and what any of these differences really mean for our society and ourselves.

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