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Aug 3, 2007

So Black Runners Are Naturally Faster? Wrong


by Liberty and Power


Matthew Syed argues against a widely held view.

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Common Sense - 8/3/2007

West Africans on the dash? Yes. East Africans on the maraton? Yes. Should "blacks" be grouped as a singular category? No.

Otto M. Kerner - 8/3/2007

This article is embarrassingly bad. The author agrees to stipulate that West African people tend to have greater sprinting ability and then asks "So why make the further claim that “blacks” are naturally better at sprinting and distance running?" I agree completely that it is sloppy to say that "blacks" tend to have a certain trait without defining what one means by "blacks". This bit of sloppiness is not surprising, since West African people and their descendants (e.g. African Americans) are by far the most prominent black African people in the Western world. When people here start talking about black people, they are rarely thinking of pygmies. It's still sloppy. However, "argument X is sometimes stated in a sloppy way" is not any kind of argument against the merits of argument X.

"But why lump together all the diverse populations that happen to share similar skin pigmentation" is such a textbook example of a straw man argument. I daresay that no serious person treats "all people with dark skin" as a relevant genetic category. So, the answer to "why?" is that they don't. Nobody claims that, for instance, the aborigines of Sri Lanka have superior running ability just because they have very dark skin.

I don't think that Syed is using the term "black people" in the normal way (although this might be a U.S. vs. UK issues). I, personally, never use "black" to describe people other than Africans (and their descendants in the diaspora), and I'm hesitant to use it to describe Twa people or Bushmen. I never call other dark-skinned people "black people", which seems quite reasonable since nobody's skin is actually black. The foregoing is, however, a semantic argument, so reasonable people can disagree.

At least the article contained this amusing bit of comic relief: "The problem for the 'racial scientist' is his yearning to generalise." Yeah, no doubt, the problem with all of those people in that they are always generalising.