The Nation's Pulse/Off the Mark
Gilder, George
Off the Mark by George Gilder /n early September, in nearly every city and town in America, football coaches perform a rough sort on their charges. Without any notion that they are performing a...
...Without any notion that they are performing a sinister act that will beget a cascading series of effects angrily denounced as racist in the U.S...
...In the Canadian league, where quarterback is more a running position, blacks do better at quarterback than in the U.S., where itis a throwing position...
...blacks dominate the dashes everywhere they compete, including countries such as France, Britain, and Canada, which have few blacks for whites to avoid...
...History's top ten 100-meter times are all by blacks, including a black Briton and a black Cuban...
...Today, sports are inherently a worthier field to cover, more valuable morally and aesthetically than most contemporary art, music, films, and drama chiefly because these other fields have been befouled by leftist politics and nihilism...
...Indispensable at several key positions, they get to play right away...
...Conclusively refuting the idea that white Americans resent black athletes is the ever-increasing popularity of professional basketball and football during the very period that blacks have moved to dominance...
...As Thomas Sowell has pointed out, the latest civil rights law will be bad for blacks, since it deters businesses from moving to black areas, which become a litigation trap...
...Sprint speed, for example, explains relatively low black representation at quarterback in football...
...Simpson to Arsenio Hall, blacks who excel whites in important fields win the most sincere votes of all: the unimpeachable vote of the marketplace...
...athletics still offer an inspiring display of American racial amity—a continual enactment of the American dream...
...The best way for sports reporters both to defend their beat and to fight racism is by spurning the phony sanctimony and cynicism of the front of the paper—by merely telling the dramatic stories of athletic achievement by multiracial teams performing before enthusiastic multiracial crowds...
...Sprinters are not "stacked" on the bench for years awaiting their chance to play quarterback...
...Now the media seem determined to make athletics, too, an arena of racial bitterness and litigation...
...It is obvious that whites in America desperately want blacks to succeed...
...golf is racist because it is dominated by whites...
...In track and field, sprinters have less motive to master the intricacies of pole vaulting or javelin throwing...
...the NCAA is racist because it insists that blacks unqualified for higher education be excluded from college teams...
...College teams are racist because they "exploit" black athletes and fail to educate them...
...The latest example is USA Today's four-part series on Race and Sports, which ran from December 16 to 19...
...Track and field shows the same black dominance in events based on sprint speed and the same merely proportionate representation elsewhere that is ascribed to racism when found on football and baseball teams...
...Ever alert to bizarre evidence of racism, USA Today claimed that declining white performances at 800 meters were attributable to "white flight" in the face of the rising dominance of blacks in the event...
...Despite Hill's complaints of racism, the coach's decision to shift a big 9.6 sprinter to fullback had no more to do with racism than Hill's later success as a fullback in the NFL, where Dowling failed...
...The "leadership stereotyping" blamed by USA Today has nothing to do with it...
...For two decades now, some 95 percent of the world's dashmen listed in the Track and Field News Top 100 rankings have been black...
...Basketball is racist The American Spectator March 1992 45 because it is dominated by blacks...
...This pattern prevails in other sports: in baseball, superior sprint speed explains higher black batting averages and stolen base records and only proportionate representation in positions where throwing or agility are the key...
...But similar declines have occurred in several other track events with few American blacks...
...without sprint speed, a white quarterback sits...
...With no alternative role, the non-sprinter will struggle harder to master the array of skills at quarterback than the sprinter will...
...whites are also racist because they succeed against blacks at quarterback...
...Like previous series in Sports Illustrated and the New York Times, the reporters begin and end by doggedly denying the totally obvious black genetic advantage in sprint speed...
...media, the coaches line up their recruits for a 40-yard dash...
...In their analysis, whites are racist because they lose to blacks in the 100...
...Nonetheless, U.S...
...Among them are black dominance of most of the more glamorous running roles in football, and U.S...
...This ritual has many consequences...
...T he ingenuity of the American media in discovering and promoting racism knows no bounds...
...of "Doonesbury" fame) was picked for quarterback over Calvin Hill, who weighed 220 pounds and could run 100 yards in 9.6 seconds...
...Despite constant charges of racism, whites still flock to watch black athletes perform...
...If there are any black boys in the group, they usually win the race...
...If an athlete with sprint speed fails to win the quarterback slot, he can play an array of other prestigious positions...
...Recognize this fact of life and nearly all the claims of racism in sports collapse...
...But George Gilder's books include Wealth and Poverty, Visible Man, Sexual Suicide, Men and Marriage, and The Spirit of Enterprise...
...But the law will be wonderful for lawyers, who can sue virtually any company in the country with more than fourteen employees, if one of them is black or female and disgruntled...
...And in almost every town, the result is the same...
...From Michael Jordan to Bill Cosby, from Magic Johnson to Eddie Murphy, from Whitney Houston to Toni Morrison, from O.J...
...Americans even supported affirmative action until it became obvious that its chief beneficiaries were not, deserving blacks but litigious whiners, black and white, male and female, and their obnoxious lawyers...
...USA Today tried to find racism even in track and field, a sport ruled entirely by objective standards of performance...
...11...
...On Yale's unbeaten football team in the mid-1960s, the slow Brian Dowling (B.D...
...Another result is the regular investigative report on racism in American athletics conducted by reporters professionally blind to the obvious facts of black superiority in running speed...
...global dominance in sports requiring leg speed...
...People gifted with sprint speed have less motive to undergo the arduous and specialized training required to pitch or play catcher...
...Because sprint speed is so valuable and cannot be much enhanced by training, coaches cherish their sprinters...
...whites continue to invest in mostly black teams...
...Ignoring this crucial factor and artfully probing the paranoia of blacks taught from childhood to see racism everywhere, the reporters can build up a shocking and sensational case for widespread discrimination in sports...
...If the reporters want to know the reasons for the decline, perhaps they might begin by considering that the American media covers track and field chiefly as an extension of the drugs and steroids beat...
...USA Today tried to deny the sprint speed difference by citing the occasional white sprint star and by arguing that racist white American athletes avoid the dashes out of aversion to blacks...
Vol. 25 • March 1992 • No. 3
