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 sports, race, and IQ...

• 'Blacks' do not have a genetic advantage in sports.

• 'Blacks' do not have a genetic intellectual disadvantage.

• Human races do not exist.

• The IQ literature is a series of frauds.

BOOK SUMMARY

Some academics and others peddle pseudo-science in order to allege that blacks are good at sports and bad at thinking. Resurrecting Racism answers them with proper science. The first half of the book shows that blacks do not have superior sports ability and that biologists, using the latest genetic data, have concluded that human races do not exist, contrary to what racists would like to believe. The second half of the book (beginning in chapter 6) traces the history of IQ testing, documenting that the IQ literature was built by committing outright fraud. IQ 'research' has been used to allege that blacks have inferior 'intelligence,' but those who developed the IQ literature turned the purpose of the original tests upside down, twisted their statistics, made up their math, and invented nonexistent researchers, publishing fake studies under phony names. These 'researchers' were also the major propagandists of the eugenics movement, which movement is responsible for creating the German Nazis. This is also documented in the second half of Resurrecting Racism, as is the fact that today's IQ 'researchers' continue this fraudulent and dangerous tradition.

Resurrecting Racism: The modern attack on black people using phony science.  © 2004 Francisco Gil-White

Table of Contents: http://www.hirhome.com/rr/rrcontents.htm

Chapter 1

The claim that “black athletes dominate sports” misuses the sports data.
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http://www.hirhome.com/rr/rrchap1.htm

In his recent book, Taboo: Why black athletes dominate sports and why we’re afraid to talk about it, Jon Entine attempts to convince the reader that ‘blacks’ are a separate ‘race.’ This alleged black race, according to Entine, is superior at ‘sports,’ and consequently they tend to win at the same.

Entine works hard to create an appearance of scholarship: he would like you to think that he is the spokesperson for mainstream science. For example, he bombards the reader with charts, graphs, and study after study which, according to him, reveal a “yawning performance gap between blacks and everybody else” in athletics. The difference, he says, is significantly biological, and again comes an avalanche of citations. It is not politically correct, he continues, but race is a reality and most biologists agree, and he practically drowns you in a deluge of ‘authoritative’ quotes. And yet, somewhat awkwardly, most of the people whom Entine quotes and/or cites were writing way back in the first half of the twentieth century, when Western governments, across the board, were writing racist policies into law under the influence of a pseudo-biological and pseudo-psychological movement called 'eugenics' that was especially strong in the United States, and then even more so in Nazi Germany. Also somewhat awkwardly, those of Entine's citations or quotations that do not fall in the above category are overwhelmingly to scientists with zero training in population biology. But he doesn’t make a special point of this.

Supposing that Entine succeeds, he will have convinced you that, according to biological science:

1) humans supposedly can be divided into biological races;

2) those races are supposedly precisely the same ones you already think you see; and

3) your intuitive notions about these races are supposedly pretty accurate, even though they are not politically correct. Specifically, your notion that the black ‘race’ is better at sports is on solid scientific ground and, while we’re at it, adds Entine, the black ‘race’ does worse on IQ tests.

Funny that he should add that.

Of course, only if the first belief is true can the second and third even be considered. In other words, if there are no human biological races, then they can’t have particular traits—any traits, whether this be a level of intelligence or something else—because races, as such, do not exist. Consequently, Entine devotes a good part of Taboo to asserting that biologists supposedly agree with him, and also to ‘showing’ why it is supposedly biologically sound to divide the human species into races. What is true, however, is that as a result of the latest genetic data, population biologists are now convinced that there is no cut of the human species that will yield any races. You read correctly.

Despite this, Entine’s pretense has been generally successful for two reasons. First, because few readers have the background in biology to know that he is misrepresenting the truth. And, second, because there has been little public exposure of this well-funded pseudo-scientific hoax.

How I shall analyze Taboo
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In this volume, I present Entine’s arguments and explain, in plain language, why he is wrong. The demonstration is not hard to follow. In addition, I will show that Jon Entine’s claims of having represented the findings of modern biology are simply false.

I will begin by analyzing the supposed subject of Entine’s book, namely, his claim that the black ‘race’ is better at sports. I will not challenge his data concerning athletics. Rather, I will show that even if one accepts all of Entine’s ‘facts,’ one finds that these contradict rather than support his argument that “blacks dominate sports.”

With that out of the way, I will confront Entine’s mythology about supposed human races with the data collected by biologists—the same data that he pretends to represent but in fact studiously ignores.

Following that, I will explain why IQ testing is not proper science, and the role that the racist eugenics movement played in promoting IQ testing as if it were, with a special focus on how this fraud has been used against blacks. This, by the way, is the same eugenics movement that Jon Entine, as I will show, defends, even as he recognizes the role that the eugenics movement played in producing the German Nazis.

In closing, I will examine who is behind the production of Jon Entine's Taboo, how powerful they are, and what their ultimate purposes may be.

Now, before I begin, one important clarification, just so that nobody becomes confused: Differences in athletic performance must result, in part, from biological differences, and some of these differences may be clustered in particular populations and regions. There is nothing controversial in this. But that hardly means that the American layperson’s concepts of ‘black,’ ‘white,’ and ‘yellow’ are the categories that capture such differences; they aren’t. And neither does it mean that you can cut up the human species into biological races; you can’t.

Why does Entine mix apples and oranges?
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Jon Entine’s initial concern is with an alleged “yawning [sports] performance gap between blacks and everybody else,” and he pleads with his readers to give the facts a fair hearing. I followed this recommendation. However, what I found is that even if all of Entine’s purported facts were true, they would not reveal a “yawning performance gap between blacks and everybody else.” This is because the category ‘black’ that Entine keeps talking about is not, in fact, the category from which his data are drawn. Entine claims he is talking about apples but his data deal with oranges.

Let’s have a look.

In his book and also in an article he wrote for Skeptic Magazine, Entine marshals different kinds of evidence for what he claims is the biologically based athletic superiority of what he calls ‘blacks.’ For example, he writes,

“Athletes who trace their ancestry to western African coastal states…are the quickest and best leapers in the world.” 

This is in contrast to runners from other parts of the world:

“No white, Asian, or East African runners have broken 10 seconds in the 100m.”[1]

A quick reading of this makes it seem like impressive evidence for Entine’s case that so-called blacks have an athletic advantage. But reading more slowly one notices that a contradiction is present in the words: “East African.” Notice:

“No…East African runners have broken the 10 seconds in the 100m.”

They haven’t? Well, if East Africans, also supposedly black, are slow-pokes like the rest of us, then Entine is not really talking about a ‘black’ advantage, but an advantage that belongs exclusively to people in “western African coastal states” (his words).

Put another way, if West Africans have a unique advantage in speed and jumping, this cannot be used to argue for a black advantage, because ‘West African’ and ‘black’ are not synonyms. Entine seems not to have noticed this—but it’s obvious. And he rushes to make the same mistake a second time. “East Africans,” he tells us next, uniquely “dominate distance running”—in other words, to the exclusion of West Africans—and this again supposedly demonstrates that blacks have an advantage in sports. But ‘East African’ and ‘black’ aren’t synonyms either. So even assuming that East Africans really do have an advantage in distance running, and even assuming this advantage is biological, this can only be an East African advantage, not a black one.

Entine is making an argument about apples (so-called blacks) with data about oranges (one or another region of Africa—that is, isolated subsets of those whom Entine calls ‘black’). And given that he argues for a biological ‘black’ advantage, it is curious that he is not in the least bothered by the fact that different subsets of ‘blacks’ are not even consistently good at the same sports.

It is perhaps worth pausing here to fully digest the meaning of this: Entine’s own claims amount to telling us that black athletes, in fact, do not dominate sports. He has refuted himself.

And how. So far I have offered Entine two gifts: his definition of who is ‘black,’ and also his interpretation of the facts of athletic performance in Africa. This is granting him quite a lot. And yet, as we just saw, he ties these generous gifts around the legs of his argument and performs an immediate pratfall. One could therefore argue that we have done enough. That is, if the thing Entine is supposedly going to explain is not even true, namely, that “black athletes dominate sports,” why then bother with his ‘explanation’ of a non-fact? To go further and demonstrate that nothing in Entine’s book makes sense might seem like beating the proverbial dead horse overmuch. But it will hardly be an excess if we can kick some valuable lessons out of the corpse. For example, a clarification of Entine’s motives, and a better understanding of what biological science has to say about ‘race.’

This is our motivation to proceed.

Entine’s ‘facts’ are not what he claims
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Entine’s claims about West African and East African superiority in two different sports domains are based on data which he conveniently summarizes on a map showing the performances of athletes in different parts of the continent. The map is reproduced from Kenyan Running, a book by John Bale and Joe Sang.[2]