Jon Entine specializes in sports and race, business ethics, socially responsible investing, and green brand marketing

Totem and Taboo: The Myth of Race in Sports

John Hoberman

In April 1989 the author of Taboo produced an NBC-TV documentary titled Black Athletes—Fact and Fiction. The purpose of this program was to examine the question of whether the dominance of black athletes in high-profile sports such as basketball and Olympic running events could be traced to genetic advantages that translated into superior performances. At the conclusion of the show, NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw solemnly announced that the preceding interviews and demonstrations had, indeed, confirmed the biological superiority of the black athlete. In other words, something over an hour of network television put together by a lay enthusiast had managed to resolve one of the great nature-nurture conundrums of modern science.

More than a decade later, Taboo is Jon Entine's lengthier attempt to demonstrate that "the scientific evidence for black athletic superiority is overwhelming" (341). The thesis of the book, he says, is "that [racial] populations have evolved functional biomechanical and physiological differences" (83) that can and do determine the outcome of elite athletic competitions. The fact that this argument can only give aid and comfort to "the [potentially harmful] stereotype that blacks are more naturally athletic than whites" (264) has compelled the author to announce that the book has some other, more politically correct purposes, as well. Taboo is "out to do some damage" to the "virulent stereotypes" that still lurk in our interracial sports world (8).

Precisely how the documenting of "functional biomechanical and physiological differences" might dissolve racial-athletic stereotypes is never made clear. The achievement of his television program, he says, was to have "stimulated a dialogue about the underlying issue: the destructive categorization of people based simply on their ethnicity or the color of their skin" (7)óa formula that harmonizes well with the 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race the author criticizes later in the book (213). Yet it is hardly surprising that not all of the members of NBC's large audience that evening either intuited the shape of the intended dialogue or discerned the producer's humane motives.

As one black professional man asked me at the 1990 meeting of the American Psychological Association: "What can we do to keep that kind of programming off the air?"

Whether an exploration of this topic belongs on television is, in fact, an interesting question. Having watched Black AthletesóFact and Fiction several times, both in and out of the classroom, my own view is that it is a textbook example of how the presentation of racial biology to a mass audience can go wrong due to the absence of scientific rigor. Racial anthropology has, after all, been a magnet for amateur speculation over the past two centuries, in part because it is a kind of fantasyland, and it is only natural that an endless stream of books, treatises, and pamphlets on this subject has continued in various electronic forms.

Presenting this material over 340 pages is, however, a more promising strategy, and Entine has worked hard to put together a convincing scientific argument wrapped inside capsule treatments of just about every topic that is relevant to a discussion of race and sport. Here we find chapters on Kenyan runners, black boxers, the Jesse Owens story, the history of racial science and eugenics, the age of Jewish-American prowess in basketball, the East German doping program, and more. While little of this book qualifies as original research, many readers will find it a useful survey that aims at serving a wide readership. Its principal contribution is to have assembled more evidence in favor of the genetic hypothesis than any other previous publication. Whether the book serves scientific inquiry as well as it claims to do is a separate matter that will be examined below.

The author further justifies the publication of this book by claiming that "this is the right time to look at this issue" (8) for two reasons. First, as noted above, it is intended to promote racial understanding by drawing blacks and whites into discussions of an emotionally difficult topic, even as the roadmap to such mutual understanding via the race-biology bramble-bush is never made clear. Second, this is a timely book because science is now in the process of "unlocking the mystery of genes"(8).

Neither of these arguments is as self-evident as the author takes them to be. For while I would agree that peer-reviewed science is preferable to an oral tradition based on folkloric beliefs about racial differences, which can be both wrong and harmful, even this sensible rule may be vulnerable to the law of unintended consequences. For much will depend on what is reported in the scientific literature as well as on how black readers perceive the motivations behind investigations into racial biology. In addition, the therapeutic effect of dialogue anticipated by the author seems to be premised on his conviction that racial athletic aptitude is an almost unbearably painful subject. This is why he refers to "the hotter-than-hot nature of the debate" (78), to "this explosive subject" (271), to "the political bombshells" it might detonate, and to "the provocative and potentially incendiary question" (272) he has tackled in these pages.

In fact, both whites and blacks have had most of a century to adjust to (and even find gratification in) the idea that people of African origin enjoy "natural" advantages. Today, very large numbers of both groups already assume that "black dominance" has a genetic foundation. So the idea that Taboo contains an "explosive" message is less compelling than the author assumes. Much of the anticipated explosion has already dissipated, having been converted into a bio-racial folklore about athletic ability that is widely accepted in American society. As I have argued elsewhere, we would do well to pay more attention to the social and cultural effects of this folklore quite apart from its scientific dimension.

The claim that Taboo has appeared at the right time in relation to the Human Genome Project also strikes me as mistaken. On the contrary, it is clear that our understanding of human genetics will have to make major advances before it will be possible to verify the author's claims about the genetic basis of athletic superiority in a scientifically satisfying way.

Before proceeding to an examination of the author's scientific arguments, I would like to make clear certain of my own positions. First, it should be obvious to any attentive observer that the performance records in quantifiable running events, and especially the sprinting and long-distance events, clearly demonstrate the superior performance levels of athletes of West and East African origin, respectively. In particular, the achievements of male Kenyan runners during the 1990s have been nothing short of phenomenal, and Taboo documents this in a convincing way. Second, I do not believe that proposing a genetic basis for such athletic superiority is racism unless scientific curiosity is combined with a racist agenda. As I stated in Darwin's Athletes: How Sport Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race (Houghton Mifflin, 1997, 240): "It is possible that there is a population of West African origin that is endowed with an unusual proportion of fast-twitch muscle fibers, and it is somewhat more likely that there are East Africans whose resistance to fatigue, for both genetic and cultural reasons, exceeds that of other racial groups."

The scientific argument presented in Taboo includes both evolutionary and physiological theses. The "multiregionalist" theory of human origins [one of the two major theories, along with the "Out of Africa" hypothesis, discussed by the author] holds "that all of modern humanity originated from a single ancestor, but millions rather than hundreds of thousands of years ago. Some members of the community of early humans then broke off and migrated to other regions" (82). However, as Entine points out, significant physiological differences could have evolved as recently as thousands of years ago as a result of "differing selective pressures" (82) that might result in extra foot speed or endurance. The principal corollaries of this scenario, according to the author, are the genetic dichotomy between Africans and non-Africans (18, 92, 108, 113, 115) and the greater genetic variability of Africans (92, 116), both of which supposedly point to African athletic superiority.

It is hardly necessary to point out that any all theories of human origins remain highly speculative. Paleoanthropologists revise their phylogenetic trees nearly every year as new finds come in from the field, so how and when human populations branched off into different racial groups remains an open question. As the author points out, "there is certainly ample wiggle room for ambiguity" (88) when it comes to multiregionalism, and his readers can only agree with one of the few calls for intellectual caution that appear in this book. But after calling for caution, Entine leaps in with both feet anyway.

The author's presentation of the physiological evidence for black athletic superiority (Chapter 19) is the most interesting section of the book. His strategy is to combine into a single model every claim about racial differences for which any support can be found in the published literature or private commentary. If the author can point to a single publication or an interview that supports a favored idea, then it passes muster. This lack of interest in assessing the reliability of his sources is the major deficiency of the book.

The first of several claims about racial physiology is that black babiesóAfrican as well as African-Americanóare physically precocious. Eight published articles, dating from 1953 to 1992, are cited to support this argument, since the author suspects that "precocious infants will end up as athletically skilled adults" (251). Either of these claims is conceivably true. That the author does not distinguish between genetic differences and congenital differences at birth arising from different prenatal environments is one more indication of his advocacy approach to scientific evidence and his lack of interest in environmental factors bearing on human development.

The second claim is that blacks of West African origin have more fast-twitch muscle fibers than whites (253-254). This conclusion is based on a 1986 publication that compared about a dozen sedentary West Africans with an equal number of French Canadiansóan inadequate sample on which to base such a generalization. Nor does the author explain to his readers the complexity and potential unreliability of muscle-fiber typing procedures. While information on this subject appears in Darwin's Athletes (284-285), the author has chosen not to cite it.

The work of the Swedish physiologist Bengt Saltin on Kenyan and Swedish distance runners is probably the only scientifically credible research on the physiology of elite athletes involving racial comparisons. Saltin found suggestive differences in the cross-sectional area (but not type) of muscle fibers and in physiological variables related to fatigue, both of which might help to explain superior Kenyan performances.

Readers of Entine's summary of this work (259-260) will find a less ambivalent and intellectually modest Saltin than the one found in his published papers. Readers may also wish to compare the reviewer's treatment of this work in Darwin's Athletes (206-207).

Finally, Entine finds "intriguing data in support of the stereotype that blacks are more relaxed than whites" (265-266), which might translate into an athletic advantage. These "data" consist of stop-action photographs of black and white athletes as described by a scientist in a 1988 issue of Life magazine. Once again, readers may want to examine the history of this stereotype in Darwin's Athletes (199-201).

In summary, the author's treatment of scientific evidence is speculative, selective, and inconclusive. When the scientists he interviews refuse to speak as categorically as he wishes, he implies they are too faint-hearted to speak their minds (251, 269-270, 271). The author's generally careless approach to genetics is evident in his reference to "significant black-white differences in the prevalence of genetically based hypertension" (288). In fact, one of the mysteries of hypertension is that rural West Africans have much lower rates of hypertension than African Americans, a finding that implicates social factors such as stress rather than genes (Richard S. Cooper, Charles N. Rotimi, and Ryk Ward, "The Puzzle of Hypertension in African-Americans," Scientific American, February 1999, 56-63).

In the last analysis, the problem with Taboo as a work of science reporting originates in the author's journalistic standards, which are based on a determination to offer "intriguing data" and to be politically incorrect within certain limits. In this regard, his description of Martin Kane's 1971 Sports Illustrated article on this subject, "An Assessment of ëBlack Is Best'," as being "in the best tradition of journalism, mixing anecdotes with available science," strikes me as unfathomable (see Darwin's Athletes, 193-195). I would have thought that the point of a book written 30 years after Kane would be to exceed the scientific standards at Sports Illustrated, not to imitate them.