ESPN's Jemele Hill dares to rush in where more timorous observers fear to tread. In a column at ESPN's Page 2 she wonders about something that everyone knows, but few are willing to talk about - the dearth of white running backs in major college and pro football.
Hill considers both the possibility that the disparity between white and black at some positions is due to a kind of discrimination as well as the possibility that it's due to genetic advantage, but, though she doesn't seem persuaded of the former possibility, she seems shy about drawing the full conclusions from her speculations about the latter explanation.
The idea that white football players are excluded from playing running back (or corner back) because of discrimination is silly. If whites had the talent to play these positions they'd be in them. It seems obvious to anyone who has ever been involved in sports that the ratio of whites to blacks at positions requiring speed is due to a difference in physical endowment that is racially linked. Blacks of West African ancestry are simply better suited, by virtue of their genetic gifts, for sports that require running and jumping.
Hill's article quotes a researcher who draws the right conclusion but then moonwalks away from it by asserting that genetic endowment is not a matter of race but a matter of one's ancestral environment. For example, people who come from high altitude regions, this researcher opines, are better suited for sports involving endurance. This, however, is flummery. It's like arguing that the lack of melanin in whites is not due to their race but due to having descended from people living in northern Europe. Regardless of how a race of people came to have the genetic characteristics they do it's simply nonsense to think those traits are not linked to their race.
Indeed, we've become so fearful of talking about race in this country that we are loath, like the people called out to gaze upon the emperor's new clothes, to note obvious truths even when no one doubts them. This seems absurd, perhaps, but there's a reason for it, maybe even a good reason.
Hill doesn't push her speculations this far, but it seems likely that we shrink from talking about the physical advantages that blacks have in sports like football and basketball because there's a very distasteful inference lying just down the road. If the success of blacks in certain sports is due to physical superiority then the inability of whites to compete with them is due to physical (i.e. genetic) inferiority. If we're intrepid enough to follow this inquiry further we find ourselves forced by consistency to acknowledge that the paucity of blacks in other areas of endeavor, like the technical fields and sciences, suggests a general inability to compete intellectually that must also be genetic. If the physical inferiority of whites is genetic then there's no reason to think that intellectual inferiority is not also genetic.
This is such an unwelcome conclusion, fraught as it is with so many unpleasant sociological implications and so vulnerable to abuse, that most people think it's safer to just not bring the matter up, which is why so few people ever remark out loud on the complete absence of white running backs in the NFL.
Hill's article makes a couple of bows to political correctitude but is overall an interesting read. It's certainly unusual that someone would be willing to take on this topic. I wonder what the reaction to her article would be had it not been written by an African-American woman.
RLC