Are races racist?

From the L.A. Times:

Is talking about slave eugenics a fireable offense? It depends.

By Dan Turner 

When Jimmy "The Greek" Snyder opined about slavery, eugenics and black American athletes, it ended his career as a sports commentator on CBS. When American Olympic sprinter Michael Johnson made similar comments to a British newspaper, it left some wondering whether he'd face the same fate -- Johnson, too, works as a sports commentator, for the BBC. 

The answer is, probably not. That's because Johnson, unlike Snyder, is African American and thus can say things about African Americans that whites can't ...

And so forth and so on.

Americans aren't very censorious about sex anymore, so what we get titillated and censorious about now is talking about race. But, that keeps us from actually thinking much about race. Nobody has much investigated the Snyder-Johnson hypothesis.

How much evidence is there for genetic selection of blacks in the New World? Let's look at the simplest relevant database for evaluating the Snyder-Johnson theory: Wikipedia's list of the 83 men who have run 100m in faster than 10 seconds. Of those 83, 81 are of at least partial black African descent, and most top New World sprinters are very African looking (i.e., not very admixed with other races -- e.g, Carl Lewis. So is Michael Johnson, for that matter, although he wasn't a 100m man.) All that's pretty good evidence that black African genes help. 

Out of those 81, I count 14 runners born and raised in Africa. That 14 includes 12 running for African countries and two who grew up in West Africa but run as adults for Norway or Qatar.

My basic assumption is that in most complex situations nature and nurture are of roughly similar importance. North America and the West Indies have better nurture than Africa, so it's hardly surprising that a majority of black nine second men are from the Diaspora rather than from Africa. (Of course, in the short run, drugs matter: Jamaica's rise relative to the U.S. from 2004 to 2008 stemmed largely from America finally cracking down on drugs -- e.g., Marion Jones going to prison -- but Jamaica not. But, in the long run, this tends to work out.)

The West African figures aren't as impressive as the 38 from the U.S., 11 from Jamaica, and five from Trinidad. Yet, excluding American and West Indian blacks, Nigeria leads the world with eight men under 10 seconds. In other words, Nigeria has four times as many sub 10 second men as the entire 6 billion people who aren't black African by ancestry.

So, from this data I can't reject my null hypothesis that blacks in the English-speaking New World are pretty much the same genetically as their distant cousins in West Africa, but just benefit from an environment more conducive to super-fast sprinting. But I can't confirm it either: the data fall right about where either notion is plausible but not persuasive.

Einstein said that explanations should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. The 100m dash data is congruent with a model with two, possibly three major factors:

- Nature -- On average, blacks tend to be faster runners for , especially men of West African descent in the sprints, the shorter the better.

- Nurture -- On average, the environment (defined broadly to include health, wealth, coaching, shoes, organization, drug test evasion sophistication, etc.) is better for sprinters in North America and the West Indies than in Africa.

What I can't tell is whether we need a third factor, which is differences in nature (genes) between West Africans and their distant cousins in the northern part of the New World. Because I don't see an obvious mechanism for selecting for faster sprinters, and because it's not obvious we need to find one, I'm not enthusiastic about this hypothesized third factor. But I can't totally reject it either.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer