Before Joe Paterno gets dunked in the same tub of recycled hot water where Fisher DeBerry nearly drowned last week, let’s get one thing straight:
They’re right. Both of them. Black athletes run faster.
Not all black athletes, of course. Distinctions are never more important than when discussing race, which is why generalizations like the paragraph above is bound to cause headaches. But the most recent, most credible research on the subject arrived at the very same conclusion, over and over. And that was five years ago.
Too often in the past, saying blacks were superior athletes was little more than a backhanded compliment, intended to smear them in the same breath as inferior human beings. Like many of us, author Jon Entine hoped that notion was history by the time he wrote “Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We’re Afraid to Talk About It.”
While few would argue with what the Air Force Academy coach said, even fewer are comfortable talking about why it’s true.
Entine is not, perhaps because he is careful about drawing distinctions, even among black athletes. He says descendants of East Africans — Kenyans, for example — are predisposed to lean body types better suited for distance running. Descendants of West Africans, on the other hand, have more muscular body types favoring speed.
DeBerry didn’t bother with such distinctions when he explained a 48-10 pounding of his football squad by TCU this way: “The other team had a lot more Afro-American players than we did and they ran a lot faster than we did.”
And earlier this week, asked about the offensive explosion in college football, Paterno stuck his toe into the same pool.
“You gotta be careful how you say things sometimes, DeBerry got in trouble,” Paterno began hesitantly. But then the Penn State coach added, “The black athlete has made a big difference. They’ve changed the whole tempo of the game.”
The subject is still so raw that the right-thinking people at the Air Force Academy made a wrong-headed decision and forced a tearful apology from DeBerry the day after his original comments. All that proved is that people of every color can be made to atone in a hurry.
Entine believed when he finished “Taboo” five years ago that any discussion about race in the open “beats backroom scuttlebutt.” But every time it spills back into the headlines, he’s not so sure.
“The problem arose because of the historical context in which the discussions have been carried on … that because blacks are better athletes, they somehow have less between the ears,” Entine said. “But DeBerry wasn’t saying that, and frankly, I don’t see how anybody with any common sense would question what he did say.”
