How they present BLACKS as stupid people.

An attempt is being made once again to sell Americans an old idea that has had terrible consequences: the allegation that black people are supposedly inferior to whites.

The salespeople involved in this campaign deny that they are propagandists for racism. They are just trying to popularize the findings of science, they claim. Modern science has discovered, they allege, that many commonly held beliefs about race in general and the black ‘race’ in particular are accurate. They say that the only reason some people reject their supposed findings is political correctness.

If this reminds you of something, you are probably thinking of recent attempts to make antisemitism seem academically respectable. As historian Deborah Lipstadt has made clear, modern professional antisemites publish journals and books which mimic the style of argument and referencing used in academia. 
 With the pretense that they are making scholarly corrections of accepted views concerning the German Nazi treatment of Jews, these people publish lies and incoherencies to the effect that the Shoah (the WWII Holocaust) supposedly never happened or was nowhere near as bad as people think. Such lies are easily exposed by anybody who checks the references, as Lipstadt has demonstrated. The problem is that laypeople (those without academic degrees in the subject) don’t usually check references, which is why this strategy is effective in sowing doubt among laypeople. The biggest impact is on those who were already inclined to dislike Jews but who kept their antisemitism in check because they felt that the Jews had been victimized enough.

The phenomenon of pseudo-scholarly anti-black racism should be examined as carefully as its twin, Holocaust denial. Professional anti-black racists resort to fake-science tactics similar to those of antisemites, likewise parading themselves as innocent seekers of knowledge. Whereas Holocaust deniers do their work by peddling false History, modern anti-black racists peddle false biology and psychology. Just as the proper antidote to pseudo-historical antisemitism is accurate History, the proper antidote to modern, pseudo-biological anti-black racism is genuine biological and psychological science.

I am trained as a biological anthropologist, covering the areas of population biology and evolutionary theory—the very disciplines relevant to the claims of the ‘scientific’ racists. But I am also trained as a cultural anthropologist, that is to say, as an ethnographer, and I do my field work in western Mongolia (province of Hovd), studying the manner in which neighboring ethnic populations perceive and think about each other. Because my anthropological work has been heavily psychological, I have made a special focus of the issue of categorization: that is, I have sought to understand how and why people construct categories of ‘race’ which they incorrectly believe to be biologically real.[1a] As an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, I have taught a course devoted to examining how racists convince ordinary people of their claims by exploiting certain cognitive susceptibilities that make humans relatively easy targets for racist appeals. The combination of my background and my interests, then, gives me a few advantages when it comes to evaluating the claims of today’s self-proclaimed ‘race scientists,’ something that I will do in Resurrecting Racism.    

These modern ‘race scientists,’ as they call themselves, do not always present their ideas as clearly as they might, so I will make a special effort to render their arguments transparent. Then I will ask some questions of these arguments. Are they logical? Are they even coherent? Are they supported or in fact disproved by the data they themselves invoke?

No special requirement must be fulfilled to understand my book. It was written for the layperson, and no previous knowledge of evolutionary biology, psychology, anthropology, or genetics is necessary. Everything that is necessary from these disciplines will be explained in such a way that it is fun to read and easy to understand. Without sacrificing scholarly rigor (you will find in my footnotes the source material for all of my claims), I have nevertheless tried hard to keep my style friendly, conversational, and simple, and also to structure my story so that it produces an interesting voyage of discovery. But I cannot take credit for the main thrill, which has to do with the content of what I report: just as geographers now know that the world is not flat, biologists now know that the ideas about race commonly held by laypeople are wrong because the human species is too uniform to be divided into races. In other words, human races do not exist. There is therefore now another excellent reason for us not to be racists: it would be unscientific.

After explaining why there are no human races, I will examine the claim made by many psychologists that IQ tests supposedly prove that the black ‘race’ is less intelligent than the white and I will demonstrate again that this claim is a fraud. I say ‘again’ because showing that there is neither a black nor a white race already requires that IQ tests cannot show the ‘black race’ to be less intelligent than the ‘white’—since there is no black race, and there is no white race. My second demonstration that IQ tests do not support the arguments of racists is as follows: I will show that IQ tests do not even measure inborn ‘intelligence,’ as IQ-testing psychologists claim.

Jon Entine's Taboo
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Because one purpose of my book is to show that there is a well-organized attack against blacks, pushed by the US Establishment, I have structured my book as a refutation of a work by journalist Jon Entine, which the US Establishment has promoted with great energy: Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We Are Afraid to Talk About It.[2]

The ostensible purpose of Taboo is to show that black people supposedly have a biological advantage that makes them better in sports. I will argue, however, that Jon Entine has a broader purpose: to convince us that genetics has confirmed the validity of the common prejudice that black people are supposedly intellectually inferior. In other words, Entine is relying on the traditional prejudice in American society—inherited from the days when blacks were subjected to outright slavery—that portrays blacks as good beasts of burden: dull and strong. In my view, Entine is telling us that blacks are supposedly naturally good at sports so that we will think ‘naturally strong’ and effortlessly complete the second half of the traditional prejudice: that blacks are supposedly naturally dull. I will show, however, that Jon Entine completely ignores the findings of science and supports racists who also have zero concern for science.

Allow me to give you a taste.

Right at the outset, on page 8 of Taboo, Entine announces that he is supposedly trying to heal the racial divide:

“Although discussing racial differences is likely to provoke strong reactions, on balance and in proper context strong emotions are healthy. Issues of race left unexamined can do a lot of damage… It may not be easy to address some of the questions Taboo poses, but considering the path racial understanding has taken over the past quarter century, it is a risk worth taking.”[3]

But are good intentions compatible with outright lies? On the same page, Entine presents his topic with the following choice of words:

“For the first time in history science promises a glimpse of how the world’s different populations—popularly called races—have evolved.”[4]

When Entine, claiming to have science on his side, tells you that the things “popularly called races” can be said to “have evolved,” what he is communicating to the lay reader—the target of his book—is that human races exist and are genuine biological categories. In other words, according to Entine, science has confirmed what the prejudices of most laypeople already tell them is supposedly true.

So Entine starts off as if he had already provided the demonstration for a hotly disputed claim, and his prose appears designed to defeat skepticism by relying on the supposed authority of science: “science promises.” What is true, however, is that population biologists have concluded the opposite of what Entine states: human races, it turns out, do not exist!

Ever so casually, therefore, Entine has slipped us a falsehood about biological science. So can Entine really be trying to heal the racial divide, as he claims, if he misreprsents the findings of modern biology in order to give racists the premise they need?

Entine also says that his supposed well-intentioned effort to combat racism has come under violent attack from an Establishment that tries to intimidate anyone from expressing ‘politically incorrect’ views on race. This is a claim that he blares first and loudest in the subtitle of his book, which asserts that, supposedly, “We’re Afraid to Talk About It.” He reproduces the same stance in an article that he wrote defending Taboo, where he says:

“[I was]…stunned by the consistently negative response [my book] engendered from publishers, many of whom refused to even read it—on ‘principle.’ Again and again, I heard: ‘This is a racist subject. By even suggesting that blacks may have a genetic edge in sports, you are opening up the Pandora’s box of intellectual inferiority.’”[5]

Once again Entine is misrepresenting the facts. There was in fact zero resistance to his book from the intellectual Establishment (as we shall see). And if there had been such resistance, this would have been perfectly reasonable, not an aberration, as Entine pretends. Why? Because, traditionally, public praise for the physique of so-called black people—what Entine’s book loudly purveys—has been associated with the fraudulent claim that they are intellectually inferior.

I turn to this next.

What do white racists mean when they ‘praise’ black people for their physique?
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People are naturally compassionate, so racism against blacks requires a propaganda effort designed to dull, erase, and reverse the tendency of white people to empathize with their fellow men. So what these racist propagandists do is portray black people as less than human: ruled by emotion, bad at thinking, and strong. In other words, black people are represented as beasts of burden, which was traditionally convenient in a slave-owning society because the white racists needed to convince every new generation of whites that keeping their fellow human beings in chains was morally acceptable.

These days, however, thanks to what compassionate political movements have achieved in transforming American society for the better, the traditional prejudices cannot always be expressed nakedly. So racists now find it necessary in certain venues to deliver their prejudices hypocritically, in the form of praise. To see how this works, we shall take a look at the 1951 testimony of one Henry Edward Garrett in a lawsuit called Davis v. County School Board.

But before we examine this testimony, allow me to construct the necessary historical context.

At the time of this lawsuit, the United States was still blighted by the injustices of segregation. The plaintiffs in this case were trying to defeat the system of segregation, but they themselves were defeated at the state level, so they appealed the case to the US Supreme Court. There, Davis v. County School Board was combined with four other desegregation cases in Brown v. Board of Education, which resulted in the landmark Supreme Court ruling that segregation in education was unconstitutional because it involved “a denial of the equal protection of the laws.”[5a]

In April 1951 students at Moton High in Farmville, Virginia, went on strike. Moton High, now a national landmark museum, was then a segregated black school. It was supposedly ‘separate but equal.’ However, while the nearby white-only high school was modern and well-equipped,

“Moton had no gymnasium, cafeteria, infirmary or teachers restrooms, and the overflow of students was housed in an old school bus and three buildings covered in tar paper. Local parents had repeatedly sought improvements from the local school board without success.”[6]

Realizing that their effort to seek redress through ordinary channels was getting them nowhere, the students took direct action:

“Barbara Johns was on her way to school on April 23, 1951 and we’ll never know exactly what she was thinking. One thing is for certain though; on that day she was full of courage and keenly aware that life was not fair for her and her fellow students…

Barbara lured the Principal from the school and rang the clock-bell in his office to summon her school mates. The student strike that followed would change the nature of race relations in America forever.

(…)

After conversations with the NAACP, the students and supporters …decided [t]otal integration should be their goal. After many law suits at the local and state levels… [Davis v. County School Board] joined four other cases from around the nation in the Supreme Court of the United States. The five law suits became the civil rights landmark case titled Brown vs. Board of Education.”[7]

This is enough context.

In 1952, Henry Edward Garrett was a witness in Davis v. County School Board, testifying in favor of segregation. Against segregation was Robert Carter, one of the plaintiff’s attorneys, who, while cross-examining Garrett, asked a question that went to the heart of the plaintiffs’ case: Didn’t the very existence of segregated schools constitute an insult to black children, harming their sense of worth? Garrett answered that, no, quite the contrary, segregation could be a fine thing for black children:

GARRETT: I think, in the high schools of Virginia, if the Negro child had equal facilities, his own teachers, his own friends, and a good feeling, he would be more likely to develop pride in himself as a Negro, which I think we would all like to see him do—to develop his own potentialities, his sense of duty, his sense of art, his sense of histrionics… They would develop their sense of dramatic art, and music, which they seem to have a talent for…[8]

Garrett’s testimony is a lesson in the etiquette of racist discourse. In the sensitive venue of a legal proceeding, he did not explicitly allege that black children were mentally inferior, although he implied it by saying their talents lay in “dramatic art and music,” “histrionics” (which can mean either ‘exaggerated emotional behavior calculated for effect’ or ‘a dramatic performance’), and “duty.” According to Garrett, duty was a one of the “potentialities” to be developed among black people.

Was Garrett really praising black people?

To get a better sense for that, consider that Garrett was one of several people interviewed for a 1963 U.S. News & World Report feature entitled, “Intermarriage and the Race Problem.” In his interview, entitled, “Racial Mixing Could be Catastrophic,” Garrett said:

“[The Negro] has less of what I call ‘abstract intelligence’ than the white man.  He functions at a lower level… he is not so able to think in terms of symbols—words, numbers, formulas, diagrams.”[9]

In 1966, Newsweek reported that Garrett had authored a booklet entitled, “How classroom desegregation will work.” According to Newsweek, the booklet was sent to half a million US school teachers. Newsweek quoted Garrett as writing:

“Those black Africans are fine muscular animals when they’re not diseased. . . . and I think they’re fine when they’re not frustrated. But when they’re frustrated they revert to primitive savages”[10]

This makes it obvious that, in the courtroom, Garrett was not praising black people; he was merely expressing those aspects of his prejudice that would sound less impolite in the courtroom, and leaving the rest implied.

Now, who was Henry Edward Garrett? Was he an arch-racist on the fringe?

Well, yes and no. Henry Edward Garrett was certainly an arch-racist, but he was not on the fringe. Garrett was a leading psychology Professor at Columbia University. Moreover, as he testified in 1952, in Davis v. County School Board:

GARRETT: “I am past President of the American Psychological Association, a national organization; past President of the Eastern Psychological Association; New York State Association; Psychometric Society; I was Vice Chairman of the National Research Council of the Division of Anthropology and Psychology, National Research Council; during World War II, I was a member of the Advisory Committee on Military Personnel, advisor to what was an Advisory Committee to the Adjutant General’s Office; and for five years, I was an expert consultant to the Secretary of War…”[11]

As I shall document in this book, during World War II, Prof. Henry Edward Garrett—a man who believed black people were at best “fine muscular animals” who were “not so able to think in terms of symbols”—was one of the principal designers of the IQ tests used to determine which soldiers were given the toughest, most life-threatening assignments during a war, and who would get to be officers. This already suggests a connection between racist ideology, public policy, and IQ testing, doesn’t it?

Henry Edward Garrett's testimony shows that in sensitive venues racists have traditionally ‘praised’ blacks in ways designed to imply the prejudice against them. Thus, we are entitled to suspect that when Jon Entine writes an entire book to defend his supposed admiration for the supposed physical advantages of blacks, this might be another way of saying that they are “fine muscular animals” who can’t think. The suspicion is reinforced when you find that Jon Entine, despite repeatedly protesting that he is not trying to suggest that black people are intellectually inferior, yet he devotes almost 10% of Taboo to defending IQ testing and praising psychology professor Arthur Jensen and other such ‘researchers,’ who have claimed that black people are intellectually inferior due to bad genes.

In this book I will show in detail that ‘intelligence testing’ is a scientific fraud that has relied on the mishandling of tests, the use of phony statistics, and the invention of faked data. Moreover, I will show you that this fraud was created by the very people who were the main leaders and propagandists of the eugenics movement that also spawned German Nazism. The information showing this has been publicly available for decades (it is not exactly a secret), so a horrified reaction to Entine’s book is entirely appropriate.

The problem, however, is that—contrary to what Entine loudly would have you believe—there was no such reaction.

Controversy? What controversy?
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If the Establishment had indeed tried to squash Entine’s book, as he claims, we would expect Taboo to have been negatively reviewed, or not to have been reviewed at all, in mainstream publications. But in fact the opposite happened. The book was widely reviewed. The non-scientists who reviewed Taboo wrote that Entine had been “forthright enough to present hard evidence,”[18] and had “done a brilliant job”[19] of giving us a “balanced, comprehensive presentation of a mountain of relevant data,”[20] which amounts to a “sophisticated argument that…cannot be dismissed.”[21] They warned that, although “There will be those who will refuse to listen,…his work will be difficult to refute, given the overwhelming nature of…the scientific evidence.”[22] They agreed that “Taboo convincingly argues that race does make a difference….”[23]

These are strong endorsements. And they are not from fringe publications openly associated with racism. They are from mainstream sources such as Kirkus Reviews, The Christian Science Monitor, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. Since most people find it difficult to believe that The New York Times would endorse a racist book, they will tend to believe that Taboo is a credible account of the latest scientific findings about ‘race.’

Gary Kamiya, executive editor of the well-known internet publication Salon.com, also wrote a glowing review of Taboo. (It goes on for several pages, reading like a sort of infomercial for Entine’s book.) Without a hint of irony, Kamiya said of Entine’s ‘facts’ that, “taken together, they are—to a layman—pretty convincing.”[24] Well yes, perhaps to a layman, the kind of person who also found it convincing that the Earth was flat until scientists showed otherwise; in other words, Taboo is convincing to the kind of person who does not have the tools to evaluate whether Entine is accurately presenting the findings of mainstream population biology.

Speaking as a layman, then, Kamiya tells his readers that he liked the book, as if he were reviewing a children’s story. But Entine’s Taboo is not a work of literature. His claims are allegedly based on scientific fact. The question is: Is he right?  Has he faithfully represented the findings of mainstream science? How can non-biologists writing for Salon.com settle this for other non-biologists reading Salon.com?

But the same problem is to be found at The New York Times. As I will show in Resurrecting Racism, publications like the Times usually have science books reviewed by experts in the relevant field. Yet in the case of Entine’s book, the experts—people such as the much praised geographer, physiologist and evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond,[25] or the renowned population biologist Luca Cavalli-Sforza[26]—were not asked to write reviews. That’s interesting because they both disagree with Entine. In fact, as we shall see, the data gleaned from direct studies of the human gene pool contradict Entine’s claims, so the failure of these highly influential media venues to get experts to review Entine’s book is most disturbing. People who have read Taboo can be numbered in perhaps the hundreds of thousands, but the potentially millions of people who read or heard about the favorable newspaper and TV reviews got the impression that the book made valid claims, and therefore that what they had come to consider prejudiced thinking was supposedly really good science.

Is the Establishment reviving eugenics?
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This is serious business. The claim that racism is sound genetic science openly dominated social policy in the United States during the first half of the 20th century. Under the name ‘eugenics,’ it was endorsed by much of the US government and by pillars of the US Establishment and was exported abroad. For example, in the 1930s the Rockefeller Foundation financed eugenics ‘research’ in Germany, providing a pseudoscientific basis for the Nazis, a topic that will also be covered in this book.

Eugenics—the open application of a mixture of racial prejudice, class prejudice, and pseudo-scientific quackery to social policy—was publicly discredited by Hitler’s massive race murders during World War II. And the traditionally racist, and then also eugenic, allegation of black inferiority took a beating during the Civil Rights Movement, which showed black people acting with great moral courage against injustice, and more shrewdly organizing the working classes—of all colors—for moral enlightenment and common resistance than anybody had done before in the US.  Martin Luther King was a giant fighting for all Americans, putting to shame the Founding Fathers, slave owners all.

Despite the moral advances of the twentieth century, a basic idea of eugenics—that social inequality is a natural reflection of supposed genetic inferiority—has lived on, and not just as an idea. It is deeply ingrained in our culture and provides silent political justification for social policy. This is perhaps the main reason why there is no great outcry in the more comfortable classes against the massive increase in the US prison population, and the massive overrepresentation of black people among those who are sent to jail for non-violent drug use or sales.

In the past, eugenic ideas were openly pushed by the Establishment. It is therefore chilling that the most powerful Establishment media refrained from having population biologists review Taboo, turning instead to laymen who praised it. We must ask the question: Is the Establishment trying to revive eugenics?

Resurrecting Racism will answer this question.

Before it does, however, Resurrecting Racism will show that the claims of Jon Entine and the ‘race scientists’ are false. Not false because they offend the beliefs of some sociologists, or the values of the ‘politically correct,’ or whatever; but false because these claims are illogical, incoherent, and flat-out contradict the findings of modern genetics—which discipline, ironically, is the worst enemy of so-called ‘race science.’

The best antidote to racist pseudoscience, I will aim to show, is science.

 The claim that “black athletes dominate sports” misuses the sports data.

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]  

Entine has drawn three circles on Bale and Sang’s map:

When I look at the Western part of the map I notice that the advantage in speed and jumping belongs not to the West Africa region as a whole, as Entine claims in explicit defiance of his own map, but to much smaller groups, sprinkled at great distances on, yes, the western coast of Africa.

Entine draws a big circle to surround all of these widely separated small groups to create the impression that the entire Western coast of Africa runs and jumps fast, but this is bizarre.

What Entine has circled is a region in the same way that a constellation is a drawing. The ancients arbitrarily chose certain stars because, by connecting the dots, culturally familiar pictures could be ‘discovered’ in the heavens (for this reason, of course, different societies have drawn different pictures using the same sky). Entine’s West African ‘region’ is of the same order of reality. He has drawn a circle including small areas of high performance on the west coast of Africa, even though these are separated by large areas of very low performance. Why? Because he wants to create the impression that high performance in speed and jumping are a ‘West African’ trait.

The same holds for his supposed East African region. The Kenyans are the distance-running superstars producing world-class athletes at 9.79 times the world per-capita norm, but their immediate neighbors to the south, who may wish they could run long distances fast enough to eat the Kenyan dust, cannot, at only 0.22, even see it.

And Entine did not show his readers some other maps that also appear in the Bale & Sang volume, and which the authors used to show that fast runners are geographically much less than a Kenyan phenomenon. For example, Entine did not reprint the following map (Bale & Sang 1996, p.141) which shows that almost all the good Kenyan athletes come from just one area of the country: the Rift Valley.

And even that is not quite true. When you look at the distribution of good runners inside the Rift Valley, it turns out that just a few ethnies account for the overwhelming majority of that country’s medals, as shown in yet another map that Bale & Sang provide (p.148), and which Entine likewise does not reprint:

Bale & Sang explain (p.148)

“By 1993, Maasai runners had won nine medals in major athletic championships. Members of a neighboring ethnic group, however, the Gusii (Kisii), had won 78 medals; another Rift Valley group, the Kalenjin, had won 317. These latter figures amounted respectively to 15.4 per cent and 62.6 per cent of the 506 medals won by Kenyan athletes in major competitions up to 1993.”

In other words, members of just two ethnies from the Kenyan region known as the Rift Valley account for almost 80% of all Kenyan medals! The deeper you look, the smaller Entine’s ‘East African region’ gets…

I see not a regional pattern of advantage here, much less a racial pattern, but rather a scattering of different performances (some better, some worse) in different small populations.

This does not bother Entine in the least. In fact, he explicitly focuses on the Kalenjin as if the uniqueness of this particular ethnie supported his case. Although some have argued that the surprising endurance of the Kalenjin results from their macho circumcision rituals, Entine, who insists the advantage is biological, dismisses this. And notice how:

“Of course, many East Africans undergo this [circumcision] rite, yet only the Kalenjin turn out world-class runners in such disproportionate numbers.”[3]

A gem: once again Entine has explicitly refuted himself.

If, in order to argue for a biological advantage in sports, Entine points out that other East African cultures with similar circumcision rituals do not produce world class athletes like the Kalenjin, then what argument is he defending? This one: that, if there is a biological advantage, it belongs to the Kalenjin, not to ‘East Africans,’ and much less to ‘blacks.’ But Entine must not have taken notice of his own argument. Because, you see, the rest of his book argues that blacks supposedly have a biological advantage in sports. So perhaps the argument I quote above slipped out of his mouth when he wasn't minding it.

Or perhaps Entine is not so much being absent-minded as bold. He picks up a basket full of oranges, selects the choicest one, holds it high for all to see, and lectures at length about...apples. Then, as if daring you to deny that he is holding an apple in his hand, he bites into the unpeeled orange. He is explicitly and joyously incoherent.
Let me press the point home.
Suppose that instead of the Kalenjin we focused on the Mbuti: a Central African people often called ‘Pygmies’ because of their small size, which for an adult male is about four feet. I expect Mbuti will do very poorly in all track-and-field events (especially jumping). It would be ludicrous to argue, from Mbuti performance, that this is evidence for the athletic inferiority of ‘Central Africans.’ It would be even more ludicrous to argue that Mbuti performance demonstrates the athletic inferiority of ‘blacks.’ And yet the logic of such arguments is indistinguishable from Entine’s own. Why then does Entine choose to argue the superiority as against the inferiority of ‘blacks’ in sports?
Reviewers qualified to evaluate Entine’s claims, such as Kenan Malik, did not fail to notice anything so obvious as Entine’s apples-and-oranges confusions:

“…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 ability, why consider them to be part of a single race, and one that is distinct from whites? Only because, conventionally, we use skin color as the criterion of racial difference…

…are blacks naturally better athletes than whites? Not necessarily. After all, how many African Pygmies have you ever seen climbing on to the winners' rostrum?”[4]

With regard to ‘sports,’ Entine’s arguments are also apples and oranges. Though he says “black athletes dominate sports” (the quote is from the subtitle of his book), the facts he presents support the superiority of certain groups of people, not ‘blacks,’ in some sports, not in ‘sports.’ One could reply to Entine: “What about the fact that East Asians have always overwhelmingly dominated ping pong?” Using such data, might Entine have written a book about the stubborn denial in which we wallow concerning the biological advantage of the ‘yellow’ race in sports?

Sure, different population groups may have different traits, and these may affect how well they do at various sports. And these traits may well be caused by genetic differences. But as we have seen, the differences that Entine points out in order to ‘prove’ his case prove instead that he has no case. Some of the people he calls ‘blacks’ can only win races if they are long-distance; others win only the races that are short-distance. And others will never win any race at all.

It is certainly embarrassing to be wrong. It is doubly embarrassing when your own facts prove you wrong. But isn’t it triply embarrassing when, rather than confess the mistake, one is incoherently pushing the disconfirming facts in support of the theory? And isn’t it quadruply embarrassing when the argument that shows the theory to be wrong is included—and with some insistence!—in the book that defends the theory? Finally, not to be uncharitable but the question must be asked: isn’t it quintuply embarrassing when all of this should be transparently obvious?
Then how can we explain Entine’s performance? Is he a fool?  Or is he hoping to fool us? Let’s keep that question in mind while we examine Entine’s arguments about ‘race.’

CHAMAKHE MAURIENI IS A MOROCCAN BORN FREELANCE WRITER,ENTERPRENEUR,AND AUTHOR.ADD HIM ON FACEBOOK:www.facebook.com/chamakhe.maurieni
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