There are many examples available to illustrate how the misinterpretation of sports and race misleads people and unjustly validates in their minds an invalid concept. However, we will look at just one example that should make it clear just how wrong it is to believe that sports prove the existence of biological races and reveal inherent abilities of people based on race.
Track and field is a sport I once competed in and have followed closely since I was thirteen years old. As the sports editor for a newspaper several years ago, I interviewed numerous Olympic track and field gold medalists. I have photographed and written about the sport at every level, from school races on grass fields in the Caribbean, all the way up to the Olympic Games. For me, track and field is special, the most beautiful sport of all. It's performance art that shows off the human form in all its glory. Unfortunately, it's also a deep well of irrational race belief. Its results often are misinterpreted as evidence of inherited race-based talents and glaring justification for believing in biological races.
Ask anyone which racial group is the best at running and you are sure to hear that it is the black race, of course. It's a no-brainer. Just look who collects all the medals at the Olympics in track and field, right? Not so fast. Don't forget how superficial traits such as skin color can mislead us about the realities of our biological diversity. Sure, people with darker skin seem to win races more often than people with lighter skin. But what does this really mean?
First of all, we need to consider who is actually winning which events. In recent decades, runners from East Africa have had remarkable success in long-distance events. Kenyans and Ethiopians routinely sweep the top spots in major competitions. In the sprints, North American, European, and Caribbean athletes with at least some recent African ancestry have dominated. So, if all these winning groups are members of the black race doesn't it follow, then, that the black race is superior at running and has a race-based genetic advantage? No, and here's why: The “black race” everyone speaks of is a culturally created category that is absurdly vast and makes no sense in biological or genetic terms. Because race rules are determined by societies rather than nature, millions of people can watch athletes such as Daley Thompson, Dan O'Brien, and Bryan Clay win gold medals in the Olympic decathlon and then walk away believing they have seen further proof of innate black athletic superiority, ignoring or never knowing that all three men had a non-black parent. We cannot look at an athlete and then know for certain his or her ancestry and make sweeping assumptions about race-based abilities. Superficial features such as hair, skin color, and facial dimensions easily mislead us.
It is also worth noting that the widespread belief of black racial superiority in sports is not only wrong logically but also unfair to black athletes. To claim that Michael Jordan's greatness was linked primarily to him being black is to overlook or deny the intense work ethic, dedication, and focus he poured into his career. Many of Jordan's peers commented on how his capacity for work and his obsession to win were far above everyone else's.1 Biological race did not create Michael Jordan. He was born with individual talent, perhaps, but it seems clear that Jordan's success was owed mostly to his drive.
When he was nine or ten years old, Magic Johnson would practice basketball for an hour or two before his school bus picked him up on school mornings. If he was just a gifted black man born to play the game of basketball, then why did he have to work so hard for so many years in order to succeed? All those Kenyans you see winning marathons and track races don't just show up and win by default after showing their passports. They don't coast to victory on golden DNA. No, they ran more miles in childhood—much of it over mountainous terrain and at high altitudes—than most serious runners ever do in adulthood. As adults, the best Kenyan runners log training loads that give average runners nightmares. Writing off Kenyan success to their membership in something called “the black race” is not only inaccurate, it also robs them of respect due for the investment of all their years of toil.
None of this is to suggest that there may not be some genetic advantages beyond those of the individual that benefit East African runners. However, we have to be clear about what those group-genetic advantages are—if indeed they do exist. This may surprise many sports fans, but not only is it unjustified to say black people are great runners, it is not even justified to claim that Kenyans and Ethiopians make great runners! The fact is, virtually all of the elite runners in those two nations come from very small populations within the respective countries. I recall a telling moment during a trip to the Great Rift Valley, the small region within Kenya where most of the running stars come from. My driver, a Kikiyu man from Nairobi, commented on how amazed he was by the running abilities of the Kelenjin, a small tribe that has produced most of Kenya's Olympic champions. Here was a dark-skinned Kenyan who was as in awe as much as I was of Kenyan runners and seemed to feel every bit as genetically distant from them as I, a light-skinned American, did.
WHY CAN'T AFRICANS SPRINT?
Here's a fact that seems to escape the notice of most sports fans: there has never been a black African Olympic champion in the 100 meters, 200 meters or 400 meters. Isn't that interesting? According to the standard race-sports mythos, Africa is the source of the genes that fuel the fastest race of people on Earth. So why haven't Africans won anything in the Olympics shorter than 800 meters? It doesn't make sense. If black genes, African genes, are somehow the key to world-beating speed, then shouldn't the continent with the most African genes by far be the greatest source of sprinters and produce far more than the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the Caribbean?
It seems clear that culture and possibly some smaller-group genetic advantages are behind whatever racial breakdown of sports we may see. If black men in America have the most success in basketball, it's most likely because so many black boys in America dream about making it to the NBA, believe they can do it, and then put in thousands of long, hard hours on the court trying to get there. This surely is the same reason we see mostly white men in professional ice hockey: the vast majority of kids dreaming about it and playing obsessively are white kids.
It is also important to be aware that it is foolhardy to look at something so fleeting as today's sports results and try to draw sweeping conclusions from them. So what if darker-skinned athletes have been winning most of the top-distance races over the last few decades? That's just not enough to conclude that the results are proof of some racial superiority at work. Just imagine if oil was discovered in the Great Rift Valley and the Kelenjin tribe was suddenly awash in cash. The Kelenjin children might decide they don't want to put in those ten-mile runs to school every day and prefer to have the family driver take them to school in the Range Rover™. They also might put down the porridge and begin feasting on American-style junk food while watching television and playing video games. Several years of that, and we might not see as many Kenyan champions coming up as we are used to. And what if the United States plummeted into a full-scale depression? What if little white kids all across America had to run to school and back home every day? What if they had to make do on a diet of fruits and vegetables? A few decades down the road they might be winning all the gold medals.
Imaginary scenarios aside, I would not be surprised if at some point during this century a few Native American populations, perhaps high in the Andes, begin producing distance-running champions. It's certainly possible. It would take a perfect storm of opportunity, a spark of success, good coaching, desire, and then snowballing confidence—just like what we saw in East Africa in the latter decades of the last century. Of course, if such a shift in running success happened, sports fans would no doubt declare: “Native Americans are the superior running race. It's obvious, just look who always wins in the Olympics!”
I focused on track and field as a single example of why it doesn't make sense to believe in biological races as a determining factor in sports success but I could have done the same with any sport that race believers see as confirmati
on for their delusion. Do “Asians” dominate table tennis and badminton because of a biological race advantage? No. Do white Southerners rule NASCAR racing because their biological race gives them a head start? No. Do Canadians dominate curling in the Winter Olympics because of some racial superiority or because nobody else cares about curling? Nothing we see in sports confirms the notion that popular race categories biologically lift some athletes to victory while holding others down. Virtually everything we see in sports can be explained by the immense power of culture and environment in our lives, with their ability to activate or leave inactivated genes. In addition to that, we must always consider the unique and complex path every individual athlete travels.
GO DEEPER…
Harrison, Guy P. Race and Reality: What Everyone Should Know about Our Biological Diversity. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2010.
Hoberman, John. Darwin's Athletes: How Sport Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race. New York: Mariner Books, 1997.
Conspiracy theories result from a pattern-perception mechanism gone awry—they are cognitive versions of the Virgin Mary Grilled Cheese.
—Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, The Invisible Gorilla
Claims described as conspiracy theories can be a real challenge for skeptics because they tend to be built upon collections of minor and reasonable events, none of which is necessarily impossible or unlikely. It's the conclusion, the big evil plot, which overreaches and often requires a skeptical takedown. I usually give conspiracy theorists more time to make their cases because, unlike most of the other popular beliefs addressed in this book, many conspiracy theories don't require a violation of the laws physics or pseudoscientific delusions. There is no denying that people really do get together in secret to plan and execute weird and terrible things. For this reason, “conspiracy theories” really shouldn't be thought of as one distinct claim in the way Atlantis or ghosts are, for example. While someone may one day prove that ghosts are real, that can never happen with “conspiracy theories” because it's such a vague and loosely applied description. There is no doubt that while many are false, at least some are always going to turn out to be true. After all, there really was a conspiracy of Confederate loyalists behind the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. The Tuskegee experiment, in which medical researchers conspired to allow men with syphilis to suffer for decades, actually happened. There may not have been a conspiracy to cover up a crashed spaceship at Roswell, but there was a secret cover-up to hide the truth about the Cold War activities of Project Mogul. I don't think extraterrestrials are kept at Area 51, but I have no doubt that the US Air Force and CIA do keep many secrets there. The Watergate conspiracy was real. There really was a 9/11 conspiracy. The overwhelming evidence points to al Qaeda and not an inside job by the Bush administration, of course, but it was still a conspiracy. Many conspiracy stories are true—just not all of them, as some people seem inclined to believe. Fortunately, there is an easy way to sort through them and avoid falling for every crackpot claim that comes along. Remember, that same brain that tempts us to fall for every story and connect every random dot we encounter is also capable of saving us from falling into irrational beliefs. We just have to use it.
Whenever someone asks me if I believe in conspiracies I am obligated to answer: “Of course I do. Conspiracies are real; they happen all the time.” I quickly add, however, that I would never accept any major conspiracy claim that is not backed up with sufficient evidence. It's easy to point to unanswered questions, coincidences, and possible connections between different events or people. But none of that is proof. As a rule, it's wise to be very skeptical about any conspiracy theory that makes extraordinary claims but fails to produce extraordinary evidence.
The thing that has long intrigued me about unproven conspiracy theories is how they are able to snare bright minds. I know very intelligent and highly educated people who are convinced that one tiny secret club or another is running the world, for example. One told me about vast underground “cities” from which the world is governed. Another told me that every major US politician—including the president, all governors, and all of Congress—are either homosexuals or pedophiles and controlled by sinister people as a result. I've lost count of how many people have told me that the Moon landings were faked, and sometimes I suspect that I'm the last American who thinks Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Discussions with the more passionate conspiracy believers can be fascinating. Their brains seem to work overtime at putting together the pieces of their imaginary puzzle. It's not that they are dumb or lazy. To the contrary, they work very hard to make sense of it all and then defend their conclusions at all costs. What I find to be a consistent problem is that smart conspiracy-theory believers behave just like most people do when clinging to any irrational belief: Their emotional investment is too great to give a fair hearing to contradictory ideas and evidence. And if anything does manage to creep under their defensive wall, the confirmation bias promptly dispatches it. This gets at the key difference between a hardcore conspiracy believer and a good skeptic. Maybe not all, but most devout conspiracy believers seem to find it very difficult, if not impossible, to change their minds no matter how strong the explanations and evidence are against their position. On the other hand, any sensible skeptic would jump on board with any conspiracy theory the moment someone provides proof for it. One mind-set is concerned with clinging to a specific belief above anything else while the other mind-set is concerned with the true story, whatever it may turn out to be.
Skeptics are often accused of having closed minds when it comes to conspiracy theories. That is nonsense. A mind that is unwilling to hear new ideas or change direction when the evidence demands it is the sort of mind I would never want to have. Thoughtful skeptics can and will believe in conspiracy theories—after they are shown proof. I, for example, don't believe that there was a vast and complex conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy. It seems reasonable to me that Oswald did it and then the Warren Commission made mistakes in its report, which opened the door for lingering questions. However, I wasn't on the grassy knoll with binoculars that day, and it is possible that there was more to the JFK shooting than a lone assassin. My mind is open on the matter. If it ever turns out that there really was more to it, then I will accept it. Until then, however, I'm sticking with the Oswald explanation because that's where the best current evidence points.
It's no different with the 9/11 conspiracy theory. I've looked over the claims and remain unconvinced that the US government intentionally blew up the World Trade Center buildings with controlled detonations, killing thousands of its own citizens, in order to further some world domination or economic agenda. I suppose it could be true. But for now, it seems pretty clear that the only reasonable conclusion one can come to is that there was a 9/11 conspiracy but it involved Islamic terrorists, not George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. After all, Islamic terrorists had been saying for many years, loud and clear to anyone who would listen, that they were going to attack America. And it wasn't just talk. They had already detonated a truck bomb in the World Trade Center in 1993, killing six people. They blew up two US embassies in Africa in 1998 and attacked a US warship in 2000. There was an obvious series of events leading to 9/11, and the evidence links it to al Qaeda. I have interviewed one of the world's leading al Qaeda experts, Peter Bergen, twice and he certainly is convinced that Osama bin Laden and his followers were responsible for 9/11. It also seems reasonable to me—and more importantly to most engineering experts—that intense fires in the buildings weakened (not necessarily melted) the steel girders sufficiently to cause floors to pancake and the towers to collapse. But millions disagree. According to a 2006 Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll, more than one-third of Americans believe that the US government “assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to stop them.”1
I recommend keeping the following points in mind when thinking about conspiracy theories:
Keep an open mind. Be careful about d
ismissing conspiracy theories in blanket fashion. Discounting one or two versions of a popular conspiracy theory does not necessarily mean there was not a conspiracy. For example, just because Lee Harvey Oswald probably didn't get help from the Cubans, the communists, the mafia, the military industrial complex, aliens, or Lyndon Johnson doesn't mean he couldn't possibly have been aided by somebody else. Don't make the mistake of closing your mind to possible realities just because one popular version of a conspiracy seems thoroughly unlikely to be true.
Sometimes big and important things happen for reasons that are unsatisfying or unknowable to us. When we are faced with these events it can be tempting to fill in the blanks prematurely in order to satisfy our curiosity or provide more meaning. But making up answers is a weak response that is unworthy of sensible and honest people. Resist the urge. Sometimes we have to be grown-ups and accept uncomfortable realities or the irritation of not knowing.
50 Popular Beliefs That People Think Are True Page 19