Next Saturday afternoon, in less time than it has taken me to type this sentence,
the fastest man at the Olympics will take the 100m gold medal. That man may
be the pre-Olympic favourite, the American Maurice Greene. It may be Trinidad's
Ato Boldon. It may even be Britain's Dwaine Chambers, who has run into impressive
form in the last few weeks. But whoever it is, of one thing we can be certain:
he will be black. Indeed, you've probably got more chance of winning the lottery
next Saturday than a white man has of even making it to the final. The last
time that a white athlete participated in an Olympic 100m final, Jimmy Carter
was still in the White House. And the last time a white athlete held the 100m
world record, Khrushchev was ensconced in the Kremlin. Over the past decade,
the 10 second mark in the 100m has been broken 200 times - but not once by
a white athlete. Nor is it just at the 100m that whites are so noticeably
absent. Every men's world record at every commonly-run track distance from
100m to the marathon now belongs to a runner of African descent.
Nor is there any respite for white sportsmen away from the Olympics. In 1950,
the American Basketball Association was almost entirely white. Today it is
80 per cent black; among the stars the figure rises to 95 per cent. Sixty
per cent of American footballers are black. France won the football World
Cup and Euro 2000 with a team in which more than a third of the players were
black. In boxing, the two world heavyweight champions - Lennox Lewis and Evander
Holyfield - are black; there is not a single serious white contender for their
crowns.
What lies behind such black domination of sport? The traditional liberal answer
points the finger at social factors. Blacks, so the argument runs, have been
driven into sport because racism has excluded them from most areas of employment.
Racism also makes blacks hungrier than whites for success, and so they more
often end up on the winners' rostrum. In the postwar world, largely as a consequence
of the experience of the Holocaust, there has been a great reluctance to see
human differences, indeed to view any aspect of human behaviour, in biological
terms. Humans, we have come to believe, can be explained purely in terms of
culture.
Increasingly, this antipathy to biology is wearing away. More and more, biologists,
anthropologists and athletes themselves are looking to nature not nurture
for an explanation of black domination. 'Blacks are made better', argues Carl
Lewis, the African American athlete who won four golds at the 1984 Olympics.
The American journalist Jon Entine dismisses the environmentalist theory of
black athletic prowess as 'political correctness'. Entine's book, Taboo:
Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid to Talk About It
was published in America earlier this year to great controversy. The liberal
consensus, Entine argues, has served only to disguise the truth about the
black domination of sport - which is that blacks are built to run and jump.
It's an argument that's winning a hearing on this side of the Atlantic too.
Last week, the BBC transmitted The Faster Race, produced by its Black
Britain team, which argued the case for a natural black athleticism. Channel
4 begins shortly a three-part series, The Difference, which explores
genetic differences between races, including in sport. It's time we put away
our fears of talking about racial differences, the series argues, and faced
up to the facts of genetic diversity.
The view that black sportsmen and women have a natural superiority rests on
the evidence of physiological research, largely into two groups of athletes:
East African long distance runners and West African sprinters. East Africa,
and in particular Kenya, is the powerhouse of middle and long distance running.
The top 60 times in the 3000m steeple chase are all held by Kenyan athletes,
who also hold more than half the top times at 5000 and 10,000 metres. Kenyan
men have won the world cross-country championship every year since 1986. At
the Boston marathon, often considered the world's premier event, Kenyan men
have not lost since 1990. Most remarkably, the vast majority of top Kenyan
runners come from one area in the country - the Kalenjin region along the
western rim of the Great Rift Valley, adjacent to Lake Victoria. Kalenjin
runners have won more than seventy per cent of Kenya's Olympic medals in world
running and all but one Kenyan-held world records.
A number of lines of research suggest that the secret of such spectacular
success lies in superior biology. All muscle contains two kinds of fibres
- fast-twitch and slow-twitch. The former is good at producing explosive bursts
of energy, the latter at sustaining muscle effort over long periods. Physiologists
have shown that the muscles of Kenyan athletes have a higher proportion of
slow-twitch fibres than those of white or West African athletes. Kenyans also
enjoy a slighter body profile, have relatively longer legs and larger lung
capacities, and possess more energy-producing enzymes in their muscles which
are better able to utilise oxygen.
Athletes of West African descent - which include most African American, Caribbean
and black British athletes - have, on the other hand, a physique which is
suited to explosive events, requiring sprinting and jumping. Such athletes
possess what biologists call a mesomorphic physique with bigger, more visible
muscles including a larger chest. Their muscles contain a higher proportion
of fast-twitch fibres than do whites or East Africans. Athletes of West African
descent also possess less body fat, a higher centre of gravity, narrower hips,
and higher levels of testosterone in their blood.
For Entine such physiological and biomechanical differences demonstrate the
natural superiority of black athletes. For Entine's critics, on the other
hand, the very search for such differences demonstrates a racist outlook.
'I don't think it matters what the biological conclusions are', argues former
footballer Garth Crooks. 'It forges a distinction between black and white
athletes which is unhealthy, unhelpful and untrue.' According to the prestigious
science journal Nature, 'The danger that interracial comparisons will
be inhibited by considerations of political correctness is less serious than
that interracial studies will be wrongly used.' 'There are some things better
left unsaid', concluded the New York Times.
Such critics are responding to a long history of racism in which black athletic
superiority has often been seen as evidence of intellectual backwardness.
'The Negro excels in the events he does because he is closer to the primitive
than the white man', claimed Dean Cromwell, the head coach to the US team
at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. 'It was not long ago that his ability to sprint
and jump was a life-and-death matter to him in the jungle.' Today, too, scientific
racists, such as the controversial Canadian psychologist Philippe J. Rushton,
argue that there is a trade-off between brain and brawn, and that black athletic
superiority has been purchased at the price of lower intelligence. In The
Faster Race Rushton explained (with a perfectly straight face) that Asian
and white infants are born with bigger heads than black infants. Hence Asian
and white women have a bigger pelvic girdle than do black women. A smaller
pelvis, Rushton claimed, is better suited to running. Asians and whites are
brainier, blacks more athletic.
Such claims may seem to us deeply offensive. But this is no reason to close
our eyes to scientific arguments about racial differences in sporting ability.
The cause of antiracism is not strengthened by ignoring science or censoring
data. Racial science is a pseudo-science, which ignores the truth about human
differences; antiracists should not try to ape it. Moreover, the debate about
differences in sporting abilities is part of a wider debate about the meaning
of new knowledge about genetic diversity. Channel 4's The Difference
links racial variation in physical attributes to racial variation in intelligence.
The final programme in the series is largely given over to Charles Murray,
co-author of The Bell Curve, to argue that black populations are naturally
less intelligent that whites and Asians. Liberals who refuse to engage in
the debate about natural difference are simply leaving the terrain open to
the likes of Rushton and Murray.
The real problem with the 'blacks are born to run' thesis is not that it is
politically incorrect and hence should be ignored but that it is factually
incorrect and should be challenged. The most basic difficulty is the confusion
of racial and population differences. Different population groups are clearly
physically distinct. The Masai in Kenya tend to be taller and longer limbed
than the stocky, short-limbed Inuit in the Arctic, because the body-forms
of both have been shaped by natural selection to suit their particular environments.
But the fact that there are physical differences between human groups does
not mean that such differences can be reduced to racial distinctions, nor
that such differences need have a meaningful consequence in human endeavour,
whether that be sport or IQ tests.
It is certainly possible to divide humanity into a number of races, as we
conventionally do, according to skin colour and body form. But it is also
possible to do it many other ways - using, for instance, blood group, lactose-tolerance,
sickle cell, or any other genetic trait, as the basis for our new 'races'.
Genetically, each would be as valid a criterion as skin colour. The distribution
of one physical or genetic characteristic - say skin colour - is not necessarily
the same as that of another - such as blood group. The current division of
the world into black, white, Asian and Oriental races is, in other words,
as rooted in social convention as in genetics.
Entine rejects such criticisms as mere 'semantics'. But his own argument shows
why it is not so. According to Entine, East Africans are naturally superior
at endurance sports, West Africans at sprinting and jumping, and 'whites fall
somewhere in the middle'. But if East and West Africans are at either end
of a genetic spectrum of athletic abilities why consider them to be part of
a single race, and one that is distinct from whites? Only because conventionally
we use skin colour as the criterion of racial difference.
To understand why genetic notions of population difference are at odds with
social ideas of race, consider the Australian athlete Cathy Freeman. Freeman,
an Aborigine, is the hottest Australian athlete, and a good tip for the 400m
Olympic gold. Because of their skin colour, Aborigines are often bracketed
with sub-Saharan Africans as a 'black' race. Racial scientists have often
argued that Australian Aborigines and black African are the two most primitive
races in the world. Since Freeman's rise to prominence, there has been much
speculation that Aborigines, like black Africans, are natural athletes. Genetically,
however, there is no population in the world more distinct from those of sub-Saharan
Africa than Australian Aborigines. Freeman is genetically closer to white
athletes such as Britain's Katherine Merry than to black athletes such as
America's Marion Jones. Here, as in much else, appearances can be deceptive.
Not only are genetic notions of population differences distinct from political
concepts of race, but the physiology of human differences is not easy to interpret
in sporting terms. Entine suggests that West Africans have relatively slender
calves compared to whites, and that this helps their sprinting ability. It
is difficult to see how, because muscle-power increases with cross-sectional
area; smaller calves should make it harder, not easier, to excel in explosive
sprinting events. Indeed 'slender calves' is the main biological reason given
for the lack of African-Americans in ice hockey. Yet the same attribute is
seen as enhancing their performance on the track.
It is true that athletes of West African descent living in North America,
Western Europe and the Caribbean dominate many sports. But contemporary West
Africans don't. This is the opposite of what one should expect if athletic
ability was predominantly genetic. In America, considerable intermixing between
black and white populations has meant that the African American population
embodies, on average, some 30 per cent of genes from populations of European
descent. Hence African Americans should be poorer athletes than West Africans.
The reverse is true.
What all this suggests is that the relationship between sports, culture and
genetics is much more complex than either liberal antiracists or 'race realists'
like Entine and Murray will allow. Athletic talent is at least in part inherited,
and there are undoubted genetic differences between populations. Nor should
we dismiss the possibility that West Africans and Kenyans have a genetic advantage
when it comes to sprinting or long distance running. It has not been proved
beyond reasonable doubt, and there is clearly much more to sport than natural
ability, but in principle there is no reason to assume that certain populations
have physical characteristics more suited to particular athletic activities.
But are blacks naturally better athletes than whites? Not necessarily. We
should be highly suspicious of any and all attempts to confuse the genetics
of populations and the politics of race.