Race bait and switch

Ick. I have the feeling I've been Stosseled (Stossellized? Stossellated?)

You know, that nausea that results from having a know-it-all tell it like it is, because you're too chicken to face it...only to realize, after the orgiastic busting of threadbare myths, burning of straw men, and irate swishing of mustaches, that it was never questioned.

Last Friday's 20/20, in its new incarnation as a single-issue muckracking newsmag, was an overly hyped examination of the taboos preventing honest dialogue about race and sex. The treatment turned out to be rather toothless, yet still pretty offensive.

What offended me was a complex of unchallenged assumptions structuring, and effectively obstructing, the examination:

1. there are groupings of people called "races," which exist at the same ontological level as genes;
2. there is basically one factor to which everything can be (and should be--there's always slippage from one to the other) boiled down or bottom-lined; and
   
3. there is a direct, unambiguous cause-effect relationship accounting for everything.

The most supposedly explosive topic was accounting for the over-representation of blacks in many sports. Sportswriter John Entine was enrolled to broach the genetic or physiological argument: blacks have an advantageous physique for running/jumping. (Take note that no one went anywhere near hockey, where leg strength is also crucial. Maybe because under-representation in hockey might make a genetic argument untenable.)

Well-intentioned liberal contrarians were then brought on-screen to insist that necessity was the mother of competitive advantage: the black American underclass, and maybe even impoverished East African marathoners, have few viable options but sports, whereas whites have so many they can afford to be embarassed on hardcourt, track, gridiron, etc. (Was the phrase "institutional racism" ever uttered? Certainly not; we can't be too offensive in our finger-pointing.)

Even the nice Iowan teacher who built her career taking elementary schoolers to the brink of racism and back - valiantly nipping prejudice in the bud by making kids experience both sides of it - was enlisted to suggest stereotypes and their deleterious effects on self-image are what guarantees some people finish last. (Get it? "Race"? Running? It's polysemic. Don't get distracted.)

The elephant in the room is not that there might be a significant physiological component to success in certain prestigious/lucrative physical activities. The shock! What no one seems willing to address is how, the closer you look into race, the less certain you can be that anything is really there.

Race is a fact, but a social fact: an ensemble of mental categories, social relations, and cultural practices that varies across cultures and historical eras. That it remains so important for people as a way of bringing order to their world does not make it biologically grounded. Phenotypic traits (how certain genes get expressed while others get suppressed) just don't match up to psycho-cultural traits in any direct or statistically significant way, conventional wisdom and J. Phillippe Rushton be damned. Populations of people are not bounded, no matter how subtle your criteria. Seizing on one or a handful of heritable traits - fast-twitch muscle fiber, for example - will never provide enough grounds for us to group humans into discrete races, nor will any set of behaviors or widespread prejudices.

So fixating on one key variable for explaining complex phenomena, especially a factor as brittle as race, means you'll be constantly fighting a rear-guard action against a horde of pesky qualifications and exceptions summoned up by contact with the real world. A holistic, context-sensitive approach would factor all of the aforementioned variables together, the sum of their interactions generating results quite distinct from them individually and not reducible to them. It's the interplay of the factors, not the simple presence of one or all.

Rather than seek any single point representing The True Cause of "Black" Dominance in Sports, think of a set of overlapping circles, each gradually lighter at its edges. One is a cluster of anatomical traits (which do not even partly co-map to any "African American" population), another America's social hierarchies, a third our systems of values and customs, a fourth the globally interconnected marketplace of goods and ideas, and so on, each considered in its historical contingency. Those individuals who fall in the zone of greatest overlap of factors have the greatest probability (nothing automatic about it) of succeeding in sports. Probabilities of success decrease as the overlaps decrease--that is, fewer beneficial traits are interacting. No single factor is a necessary or even sufficient cause to which we can ascribe any individual's fortunes. (Entine made this same probabilistic point, to his credit, by noting that physical gifts have no bearing if they are not harnessed by hard work.) Unless you think humans act strictly according to some genetic or cultural programming. If you do, I can guarantee they will continue to surprise you.

The bottom line, you ask? How about two:

1. Putting up with a little complexity can produce a whole lot of insight, especially where an excessive reductionism obscures so much.
2. As long as it's easier and more profitable to avoid overturning a pernicious social arrangement like racism, ain't a damn thing gonna change.

Therefore be warned:
If you're gonna traffic in truisms and monocausal crypto-theories, be prepared for your reductionist ass to get skewered by uppity academics like me. We won't be confined to diploma factories, catering to your children and our society's out-of-whack priorities. We're retaking explanatory dominion over the real world, swinging the mighty pen, piling high the bloated carcasses of pundit after pundit.

Word to yer mom, Stossel.