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Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid to Talk About It, by Jon Entine. New York, NY: Public Affairs, 2000. ix + 387 pp. $25.
Why do black athletes dominate sports? "The decisive variable is in our genes-the inherent differences between populations shaped over many thousands of years of evolution" (p. 4).
And why are we afraid to talk about it? Don't look now, but there's a conspiracy of postmodern professors bringing down a veil of silence on the question.
The main message of this book is presumably unintentional-that there is considerable value in the scientific study of human biology, the nature of which is widely underappreciated. The world of bogus conclusions about innate group-level differences based on uncontrolled experiments and loaded data samples has a long and distinguished ancestry, from Galton through Hooton's statistical crime comparisons, to David Buss's mate attractiveness comparison, The Bell Curve, and now, Taboo.
But there is something of an embarrassment for the book's title and central thesis, in that some of us have indeed been willing to engage the question. So the problem may not be that "we're afraid to talk about it," but simply that we're talking about it wrong, in the author's not-very-humble opinion.
One of the book's principal foils is sports sociologist Harry Edwards, who has certainly never been afraid to talk about it. Edwards emphasizes that there is a profound connection between talking about blacks as innately gifted athletes and talking about blacks as innately ungifted scholars. Taboo dismisses this connection as physiologically untenable, for there is no reason why you couldn't be both fast and smart.
The subtler point is elusive, however, and should be apparent to anyone who was conscious in 1995, when The Bell Curve was inescapable. And that is: if consistency of group performance and the achievements of the elite comprise an evidentiary standard for the innateness of athletic prowess, as Taboo argues, then it must also constitute an evidentiary standard for the innateness of intellectual prowess, as The Bell Curve argued.
The playing field is now level, both books tell us, and (to mix their metaphors) the cream has risen to the top.
But do we even know what the playing field is? Why does one kid...