The Anatomy of Scientific
Racism: Racialist Responses
to Black Athletic Achievement
Patrick B. Miller
DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY
NORTHEASTERN I LLINOIS U NIVERSITY
Writing in the late 1940s, a highly regarded critic for the New York Times
exclaimed that the modern dance revolution had opened the way for black
Americans to find themselves as “creative artists.” The widespread embrace of
new choreographic styles had enabled them, John Martin asserted, to “release in
communicative essence the uninhibited qualities of the racial heritage, no matter
what the immediate subject of any specific dance might be.” Based on his many
years as a reviewer, Martin’s survey text, which was republished in 1963, then
again in 1970, ranged over a large number of themes. But what stood out, from
first version to last, was his chapter on “The Negro Dance,” with its persistent
references to the “intrinsic” and the “innate.” One feature of the Negro dancer,
Martin insisted, “is his uniquely racial rhythm. . . . Far more than just a beat, it
includes a characteristic phrase, manifested throughout the entire body and
originating sometimes so far from its eventual point of outlet as to have won the
description of ‘lazy’ . . . . Closely allied to this pervasive rhythm is the wide
dynamic range of his movement itself, with, at one extreme, vigor and an
apparently inexhaustible energy (though, be it noted, a minimum of tension),
and at the other extreme, a rich command of relaxation.“’
Martin went on to declare that for all their contributions to jazz and modern
dance, African Americans had been “wise” not to take up academic ballet, “. . .
for its wholly European outlook, history and technical theory are alien to [them]
culturally, temperamentally and anatomically.” Employing the same tone and
terms, the critic then elaborated his conception of the attributes that distinguished
one population group from another:
. . . In practice there is a racial constant, so to speak, in the proportions of
the limbs and torso and the conformation of the feet, all of which affect
body placement; in addition, the deliberately maintained erectness of the
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European dancer’s spine is in marked contrast to the fluidity of the Negro
dancer’s, and the latter’s natural concentration of movement in the pelvic
region is similarly at odds with European usage.2
Instructive in many ways, Martin’s assertion adhered to a taxonomy that has
long been exceedingly specific in marking the contrast between “fluidity” and
“deliberately maintained erectness,” or in juxtaposing speed and stamina. Such
typologies have matched one trait or another to particular individuals—what we
have come to admire as the kinetic poise of Katherine Dunham, for instance, or
the grace and power of Jesse Owens, the footwork of Muhammad Ali—and
from those notes moved to broad generalizations about race and ethnicity: the
attributes of the black dancer, the African American sprinter or boxer.3 At the
same time, formulations such as Martin’s have been far less discriminating in
their mingling of biological specifications and analytical constructs: cultural,
temperamental, anatomical. Unself-consciously—but no less emphatically—these
contentions have stacked
judgments of value upon
matters of “scientific”
measurement without
bothering to address the
long legacy of segregation
and racial prejudice that
largely contributed to the
development of distinctive
social customs and expressive cultural practices.
Likewise, such racialist
pronouncements have
discounted the hard work
and discipline, as well as
the creativity, that distinguishes artistic innovations irrespective of the
color of the artist.
Indeed, by underscoring “a minimum of
tension” or “a rich command of relaxation” among
black performers, many
white intellectuals like
Martin surveyed an enor- Katherine Dunham in “L’Ag’Ya,” her dramatic story of love
and magic and the fighting dance of Martinique, from John
mous distance between Martini Book of the Dance. Though Martin praised
what has been studied, Dunham’s innovative use of ethnological material, he also
which those imagemakers repeatedly juxtaposed the “innate equipment” of black
dancers to the styles cultivated in traditional dance.
exalted for a particular
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conciseness, cleverness, and formality, and what they believed to inhere and thus
could disparage as free or flowing or loose. At one level, references to the “pelvic
region” derive from an expansive European and American literature, which has
reduced racial and cultural difference to matters of sexuality.4 At another level,
the insistent contrast between mind and body within the Western tradition renders
black physicality as a kind of compensation for the absence of cerebral qualities
and the traits of a purportedly advanced, or advancing, culture.5
As both a text on culture and as a cultural text, John Martin's Book of the
Dance offers an especially graphic and forceful evocation of the racialized body—
abstracted from artistic innovation and social interaction over time. Yet the
considerations of a solitary reviewer, prominent as he once might have been,
occupy but a small place in the long history of racialist thinking. Beginning in
the early nineteenth century, the distinctions that eventually found their way
into Martin’s appraisals were becoming central elements of what was considered
pioneering scholarship in anthropology as well as the “scientific” study of history,
helping to define Western notions of civilization. Critically, an observation
concerning the “natural concentration of movement” of African Americans, when
contrasted to the ideal of “European usage,” was meant to reinforce a longstanding
hierarchy of values and standards, with the cultural achievements of the Continent
at its head. Long before Martin measured the “uniquely racial rhythm” of jazz
dancers against the accomplishments of ballerinas, to differentiate in the manner
of mainstream commentary was to denigrate.6
When African American artists and, more specifically to the point of this
essay, black athletes pursued excellence within the boundaries of Western aesthetic
and agonistic traditions—those creative impulses and that competitive spirit that
have stood as the hallmarks of “civilization” and “progress,” conventionally
represented—they encountered something more than the customary biases and
myriad discriminatory acts. They also confronted a formidable impediment of
another sort: a discourse of difference, which, when inscribed as a set of “racial
constants,” effectively discounted the efforts of black Americans or denied the
cultural significance of their achievements.
Ultimately, this particular dimension of the politics of culture has engaged a
vast scholarship that ranges far beyond the history of race relations in the United
States. Within one frame of analysis, the origins and development of the discourse
of difference has been examined specifically with regard to the Nazi eugenic
theories that marked Jews and gypsies, as well as homosexuals, for extermination.
It has also been assessed with consideration of the linkages between gender and
“race” in the construction of hierarchies of privilege and subordination over time.
And as scholars of postcolonial ideology and experience have demonstrated, the
ranking of “racial” traits—especially as it has elaborated the age-old dichotomy
between mind and body—continues to serve as a means of suppressing the claims
of people of color around the world. What remains is the crucial relationship
between the pseudoscience of racial difference and the pernicious social policies
it both inspires and informs.’
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***
The liberals still left in America remain attracted to a version of the idea of
“progress” far different from the one implied by John Martin. Thus, from another
vantage point, the years between the day when Martin’s comments were set in
print and our own era may seem a long span, characterized by numerous uplifting
chapters in the story of American race relations. Within the interval, we first
witnessed the maturation of the Civil Rights movement and what was perceived
at the time as its stunning effects on politics and policy, Since then, we have
observed the coming of age of multiculturalism with its celebration of distinctive
voices and visions along with a particular emphasis on the critical ties between
representation and authority, the power of the image and the word. Various social
surveys and opinion polls have suggested some success in the alteration of
mainstream sensibilities regarding the meanings of “difference.” By some accounts,
first-year college students, for instance, no longer appear to be as ignorant of
ethnic relations or as bigoted as they once were.8 At the same time, scholars have
issued challenges along many fronts to both the epistemology and the empirical
claims of bio-determinism. These have emerged not just in the form of
poststructuralist critiques of the essentialism that suffuses the observations of
dance critics and intelligence testers alike or the recent interrogation of the notion
of “whiteness” as a hitherto unmarked category within the huge grid of
discriminations that has long characterized Western culture. Such revisionism
also comes from a growing number of geneticists who have called into question
the very concept of “race.”9
Beyond notable examples of cultural syncretism—ranging from Creole
cuisine, the preaching styles of evangelical Protestantism, and the “hybrid” music
of Angelino garage bands and Tejano concert performers—one can point to an
expanding literature on multiethnicity and the increasing incidence of racial/
ethnic intermarriage. 10 From there, both the circumstances and culture of pluralism
can be discerned from recent census figures. These reveal that thousands upon
thousands of Americans have become very uncomfortable with the traditional
ethnic boxes conceived by government officials.11 A rapidly expanding number
of associational initiatives—the creation of multiracial campus organizations, for
example—further suggest that many people take pride in a mixed heritage, seeking
new meanings for kinship and community and new reckonings with identity and
ancestry. Taken together, such phenomena thoroughly challenge any assertions
that a fixed racial identity can be matched to certain social accomplishments,
whether intellectual, artistic, or athletic.12
All that said, however, those who endeavor to expose and thus dispose of the
cultural hierarchies predicated on the tired old versions of ethnicity and race
have lately become involved in earnest and extensive debates over Charles Murray
and Richard Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve, an elaborate ranking of so-called racial
and ethnic groups in terms of IQ—with African Americans at the bottom of the
list.13 More recently still, an expanding portion of the political spectrum—
including some of the most notable black conservatives in America—has felt
compelled to address the assertions contained in Dinesh D’Souza’s The End of
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Pearl Primus with her New York company in a concert version of an African dance, from John
Martini Book of the Dance. According to Martin, “the Negro artist, like the artist of any other
race, works necessarily and rightly in terms of his own background, experience, and tradition. He
makes no fetish of it, but on the other hand, like any other artist, he recognizes that there are
some roles and categories that do not suit him. Race—exactly like sex, age, height, weight, vocal
range, tempermenr—carries with it its own index of appropriateness.”
Racism. Far beyond its draconian policy proposals, such as the repeal of the 1964
Civil Rights Act, that book has not only reiterated long discredited notions of
racial hierarchy. In unmistakable terms, it has also defended the institution of
slavery—after the fashion of Southern polemicists of the antebellum era—for its
so-called civilizing and Christianizing effects on the majority of blacks in
America.14
As appalling as these texts are, they do not stand as the only emblems of
reactionary racial commentary today, Progressive writers and educators must still
regularly engage the persistent stereotypes concerning the “natural” physical
abilities of blacks, which are said to explain the “dominance” of African Americans
in sports such as basketball and football. Indeed, where Murray/Herrnstein and
D’Souza have made great use of insinuation and indirection when discussing
racial difference, other authors, such as J. Phillipe Rushton and Jon Entine, have
been aggressive in their assertions about genetic determinism and racial ranking.15
To account for achievement in biologically essentialist terms effectively discounts
the meaning of the game, the season, the career in terms of the traits identified
with “character”: discipline, courage, sacrifice. And therein lies the significance
of inquiries into racial science when they have been applied to athletics.16
Ultimately, the questions of who can run faster or jump higher are simplistic
ones, but they are pernicious as well as foolish if conceived as measures of innate
racial difference. In light of this ongoing cultural dynamic, John Martin’s
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observations need to be read as something more than artifacts from a distant
time. Those assertions not only help us understand the anatomy of racialist
thinking in historical terms. Their similarity to far more recent comments offers
a telling reminder of the persistence of “academic” racism in contemporary
American society.
Since “race matters,” as the title of one of Cornel West’s recent books avows,
we need to discuss why it should. It matters in our scrutiny of the contexts and
remedies for present social conditions, in our concern that the long history of
racial oppression be reckoned with as we debate social policy. We must also
examine when it should not. It should not matter in judgments of individual
abilities and accomplishments. With regard to the historical construction of racial
categories, moreover, we ought to consider that even if many social commentators
argue that the most significant debate today concerns the ways test scores or the
reification of diverse cultural stances can be used to fold, bend, spindle, and
mutilate existing public policy, the body continues to loom large in many people’s
thinking about difference. Indeed, the highlights on TV sports reports often
provide the most obvious, vivid markers of distinctions associated with race and
ethnicity. In basketball, the trope of the white point guard, court-savvy and the
model of discipline and control, has stood in striking contrast to prevailing images
of black male athletes, able and all too willing to shatter backboards with their
slam dunks. And if that juxtaposition appears too stark and simple—in light of
the widespread recognition of Michael Jordan’s mastery, not just of the mechanics
of his game, but also of modern media relations17—there are many other forums,
including the lecture hall, where racialized thinking remains fixed on the body. “I
don’t know whether or not most white men can jump,” the historian of science,
Stephen Jay Gould, has written recently. “And I don’t much care, although I
suppose that the subject bears some interest and marginal legitimacy in an alternate
framing that avoids such biologically meaningless categories as white and black.
Yet I can never give a speech on the subject of human diversity,” Gould continues,
“without attracting some variant of this inquiry in the subsequent question period.
I hear the ‘sports version,’ I suppose, as an acceptable surrogate for what really
troubles people of good will (and bad, although for other reasons).”18
The “sports version” of human diversity, still placing population groups up
and down a vertical axis of accomplishment, suggests another significant topic.
Often without discussion of the economic and educational practices that most
starkly mark “racial” distinctions in America, without examination of the concepts
of whiteness and blackness in cultural terms, and without recognition of mixed
heritage, most racialist formulations have clearly had as their objective the
demonstration of African American inferiority, for example, on intelligence tests.
But it has also been in response to black achievement that certain judgments about
“culture” or ideologies of success have been manipulated. And frequently it has
been in reaction to the triumphs by African Americans that explanations to qualify
excellence—no less innovative than cynical—have been fashioned out of the notion
of “natural ability.”19
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Black accomplishments in the performing arts, for instance, provoked the
construction of a model of development that privileged a European ideal or
normative style, then attempted to account for the ways non-Europeans have
merely approximated or somehow departed from the “classical” or “rational”
cultural forms so long extolled in treatise and textbook. Martin’s analysis of black
dancers exemplifies this pattern. With regard to black success—some would say
superiority—in sport, when African Americans began to register an increasing
number of victories on the playing fields during the first decades of the twentieth
century, mainstream commentators effectively abandoned the athletic creed
linking physical prowess, manly character, and the best features of American
civilization. Though many African Americans had subscribed to the ideal that
achievement in sport constituted a proof of equality, a mechanism of assimilation,
and a platform for social mobility, they were betrayed in their beliefs and strivings.
For in response to black athletic accomplishment, numerous influential educators
and journalists employed a sharply contrasting set of terms stressing anatomical
and physiological “advantages” or legacies from a primitive African past.20
To a significant extent, many academicians from the mid-nineteenth century
down to our own time thus turned away from the discourse of culture when
interpreting the physical talents of blacks—and other “Others.” As they became
engrossed in the “scientific” analysis of racial difference, various anthropologists
and anthropometrists reached for the calipers and tape measure in search of a
gastrocnemius muscle with a certain diameter or of an elongated heel bone in
order to explain the success of certain sprinters or jumpers. Critically, within the
dominant discourse, an individual’s performance was bound to attributes ascribed
to the group of his or her origin. Such a racialized view of excellence defined the
physical accomplishments of Europeans in terms of diligence and forethought,
the application of the mind—in John Martin’s coinage, “history and technical
theory”—to the movements of the body. In dramatic contrast, it framed the
achievements of people of color with words such as “natural” and “innate.”
Ultimately, then, racialized responses to the athletic as well as the artistic
accomplishments of blacks have served both to shape and reinforce prevailing
stereotypes. In so doing, they have also served to “rationalize” exclusionary social
practices and discriminatory public policies.
***
The construction of racial typologies did not begin during the Enlightenment,
when Johann Friedrich Blumenbach—among others—asserted that genotype and
phenotype clearly distinguished the Caucasoid from Negroid and Mongoloid
types. Neither did it originate in the Victorian anthropological categories: savagery,
barbarism, civilization. It derived, rather, from a long tradition within Western
thought that can be traced to Aristotle’s justification of slavery. Pictorial
representations of Africans dating back to Greek antiquity, as well as the patterns
of thought that shaped Shakespeare’s characterization of Caliban and Othello,
for instance, stood as the foundations of modern European racism. Such images
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coding of culture.21 Yet it is with the mid-nineteenth-century writings of JosephArthur, Comte de Gobineau, that many scholars commence their explorations
of the racist ideologies that alluded to measurable distinctions and pretended to
scientific objectivity. In The Inequality of Human Races (1853-55), Gobineau asked:
“Is there an inequality in physical strength?” His answer, according to the
intellectual historian Elazar Barkan, “mixed aristocratic pessimism, romanticism,
theology together with biology, all of which became part of a shared European
value system based on racial differentiation.”22
The American savages, like the Hindus, are certainly our inferiors in this
respect, as are also the Australians. The Negroes, too, have less muscle
power; and all these people are infinitely less able to bear fatigue. We
must distinguish, however, between purely muscular strength, which needs
to spend itself for a single instant victory, and the power of keeping up a
prolonged resistance. The latter is far more typical than the former, of
which we may find examples even in notoriously feeble races. If we take
the blow of the fist as the sole criterion of strength, we shall find, among
very backward negro races, among the New Zealanders (who are usually
of weak constitution), among Lascars and Malays, certain individuals
who can deliver such a blow as any Englishman. But if we take the people
as a whole, and judge them by the amount of labor that they can go through
without flinching, we shall give the palm to those belonging to the white
race . . .23
Gobineau’s observations ranged widely in subject and extended to three
volumes in print. Although convoluted in their shifts from individual display to
the characteristics defining a group (thus exposing powerful exceptions to
exceedingly flimsy generalizations), his judgments are nevertheless significant
for several reasons. Principally, this was an anthropology devoted to the ranking
of peoples. It was, moreover, an enormously influential formulation of racial
difference not despite but because of inconsistencies in the criteria it used to render
innate and immutable distinctions between population groups. What Gobineau
effectively promulgated was a bipartite notion of culture: the Western tradition
involved social developments and creativity; the accomplishments of non-Western
peoples were pinned to natural selection and genetics. If, for those who succeeded
him as taxonimists of culture, Shakespeare and Beethoven illustrated European
Civilization, Darwin and Galton explained all the rest. Ultimately, within such a
framework, for the African, or the African American, there would be no way of
winning, not even on the playing fields.24
From a different vantage point, such assertions about European superiority,
as strained as they were, also constituted arguments for white supremacy. Thus,
in what amounts to much more than irony, the ideology of empire incorporated
the so-called “feeble races” into elaborate systems of hard labor: the institution of
slavery in the United States and colonial workforces elsewhere around the world.
Stamina, therefore—as a kind of brutish endurance, the ability “to bear fatigue”—
would ultimately be conceived as a trait characterizing subject peoples who would
work on the plantations and in the mines that fed, clothed, and enriched
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imperialism. Yet at the same time, persistence, the exaltation of hard work and
steady accumulation, also stood as a key feature of nineteenth-century
interpretations of the rise of modern civilization; bourgeois values and the doctrine
of possessive individualism extolled toil over time above the heroic acts
conventionally associated with generals and kings. To render this cruel paradox
in somewhat different terms: the supposed hardihood characterizing people of
color around the world was used to justify the exploitation of their labor.
Simultaneously, the cultivation of hardihood, as suggested by exhortations to the
strenuous life from Theodore Roosevelt in the United States and his counterparts
across the North Atlantic, was intended to (re)invigorate various imperial elites.
Neither the ideologues like Gobineau nor the imperialists they informed ever
addressed the illogic of these patterns of thought, which only begins to suggest
the contingency, the opportunism, indeed from their inception, the very softsidedness of such putatively “scientific” formulations.25
At the turn of the century, standard reference books continued to reflect the
passion among scientists to advance broad generalizations about racial difference
on the basis of assorted observations and measurements. Under the subject heading
“Negro,” the canonical Enyclopaedia Britannica of 1895 distinguished between
cranial capacities (an average European 45 ounces; Negro 35; highest gorilla, 20)
and underscored a differential development of the cranial sutures wherein the
“premature ossification of the skull” was said to account for the intellectual
limitations of blacks.26 Significantly, later versions of these notations would
accentuate the so-called primitive features of the Negro physiognomy in order to
explain the relative failure of African Americans—in the aggregate—on
intelligence tests. Such references would also inform the doctrine of racial eugenics
as it was elaborated on both sides of the Atlantic.27
By 1900, however, another dimension of scientific racism could be discerned.
Rather than simply reinforcing prevailing notions of Negro inferiority, experts
felt compelled to account for the extraordinary achievements of some black
athletes. In the face of an increasing number of victories by African Americans,
the mainstream culture began to “qualify” the meanings of excellence in sport,
either by changing the criteria or the “meanings” of the criteria that determined
athletic excellence.28 In its discussion of “The Negro,” the Enyclopaedia Britannica
had also described “the abnormal length of the arm, which in the erect position
sometimes reaches the knee-pan, and which on an average exceeds that of the
Caucasian by about two inches.” It also drew attention to “the low instep, divergent
and somewhat prehensile great toe, and heel projection backwards (‘lark heel’).”
Increasingly, these specifications would be advanced as reasons for black success
in sports. Thus, in 1901 the champion sprint cyclist Marshall “Major” Taylor
was X-rayed, as well as measured up and down, by a number of French medical
anthropologists in an effort to reveal the source of his triumphs in the velodrome.
In similar terms, comment on the speed of black Olympic runner John Taylor
and on the prepossessing strength of heavyweight champion boxer Jack Johnson
a few years later included “scientific” speculation.29 Throughout the twentieth
century, it would often be the accomplishments of people of color, represented in
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the realm of sport, that vexed and intimidated those who endeavored to defend a
longstanding racial hierarchy. The response would not be subtle. Indeed, the
Western discourse of racial difference carefully juxtaposed black athletic
achievement—assessed in terms of compensation—with the supposed intellectual
disabilities or cultural shortcomings of African Americans.
Critically, the initial forays into the anthropometry of athletic difference
were expounded against the backdrop of increasing segregation in the United
States, which involved—beyond the enforcement of Jim Crow in housing,
transportation, and education— the exclusion of the vast majority of African
American ballplayers, jockeys, and boxers from mainstream sporting competitions.
The cyclist “Major” Taylor, for instance, competed in Europe and Australia because
of the enormous hostility he encountered at home. Then, once again, hypocrisy
was piled upon paradox when spokesmen for the dominant culture began to cast
the “alarming” vitality of African Americans and immigrant newcomers to the
United States in gripping contrast to the alleged degeneration of Anglo-America.
Thus, such works as Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race and Lothrop
Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy reflected nearly
hysterical feelings about the links between demography and democracy. Vaguely
informed by statistical data, such discussions about the relative birthrates among
the Mayflower descendants, the sons and daughters of the shtetl, and former
slaves who were moving from southern farms to northern cities revealed a deep
fear about the claims black Americans and “hyphenated” Americans might well
make against hallowed ideals such as equality and opportunity.30
For their part, black leaders like W. E. B. Du Bois—alongside the guiding
lights of the new immigrant groups—did indeed seek full participation in the
social, economic, and political mainstream, although they demanded fairness
not merely as a measure of their numbers but on the basis of their contributions
to American culture. And according to the “muscular assimilationists” among
them, there was no better argument for inclusion than success in the “national”
pastimes. “Major” Taylor and Jack Johnson were not the first African Americans
to make their mark in sports, and it was clear to racial reformers that they would
not be the last to tread “the hard road to glory.” Well before the appearance of Joe
Louis and Jesse Owens in the 1930s, and a decade later, of Jackie Robinson—
among a large host of other competitors—black leaders saw in athletics a platform
for social change.31
Resistance to such assertions was formidable, however. There were those
who would maintain Jim Crow guarded the portals of the stadium just as they
stood at the schoolhouse door. Others reinforced racial hierarchy by constructing
elaborate frameworks to distinguish between the laurels won by whites and blacks
in sport. During the interwar period, anatomy and physiology were frequently
invoked to explain the athletic success of African Americans and thus used to
circumscribe any declarations that prowess in contests of speed, strength, and
stamina bespoke fitness for other realms of endeavor. Simply stated in the idiom
of sports, to deny the translation between athletics and other accomplishments
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(more profound and longstanding), numerous mainstream commentators began
to “move the goal posts.”
By the 1930s generalizations from individual performances to group
characteristics had come to dominate numerous renderings of the
accomplishments of black prizefighters such as the heavyweight champion, Joe
Louis.32 Likewise, to account for the medals won by the sprinters Eddie Tolan
and Ralph Metcalfe during the 1932 Olympics and of Jesse Owens, Metcalfe
again, and numerous other African American champions at the Berlin Games of
1936, white commentators sought explanations from the realm of biology, insisting
that the sources of black success derived from innate advantages. Early in the
decade, E. Albert Kinley—whose claim to expertise was that he was an X-ray
specialist—repeated the canard about the elongated heel bone, then predicted
more world records for African Americans in those events that depended on a
certain kind of anatomical leverage. Working from a similar premise, Eleanor
Metheny, a well-known physical educator, conducted a number of studies on
body proportions. Though somewhat guarded in her conclusions, she asserted,
nevertheless, that kinesiological differences—in the movements generated by
individuals with longer legs and narrower hips, for instance—could account for
black dominance in sport. Significantly, and ultimately ironically, Metheny would
declare that a different, somehow deficient chest construction, as well as lower
breathing capacity among blacks, handicapped them in endurance events such as
distance running. As the historian David Wiggins has demonstrated in his critical
survey of the literature on the subject, “great speed but little stamina” became the
watchword for many white commentators on black athletics. In formulations
repeated both in scholarly journals and the popular press, the science of sport
further insinuated itself into the broader history of racism in America.33
If experiments like those conducted by Metheny were as flawed in their
conception as in their conclusions, other speculations on African American success
in sport were far more odious in their implications. Thus the prominent
sportswriter Grantland Rice reckoned with the triumphs of Joe Louis, not as a
measure of racial progress but in terms of “prehistoric” conflict:
For he is part of years long lost,
back on an age-old beat
Where strength and speed meant life and love
—and death ran with defeat.
For those who slugged the dinosaur,
or lived on mammoth’s meat,
There was a day when brawn and might were all they cared to know;
There was a day when fang and claw made up the ancient show—
And so today we slip our cash to Bomber Joe . . . .34
Other writers appeared just as intent on defending myths of Anglo-Saxon
or Aryan superiority. “It was not long ago,” wrote the track-and-field coach Dean
Cromwell, in 1941, “that his [the black athlete’s] ability to sprint and jump was a
life-and-death matter to him in the jungle. His muscles are pliable, and his easygoing disposition is a valuable aid to the mental and physical relaxation that a
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“Comparison of White and Negro
competitors in the same event
[400 meters], with the
photographs enlarged so both
have the sitting height (actually
head-to-buttock distance),” J. M.
Tanner, The Physique of the
Olympic Athlete. This study of 137
track and field athletes at the
Rome Olympics did not formally
assert a correlation between
physique and performance, but it
dwelled on racial differences in
limb structure, proportion, and
size.
runner and jumper must have.” The attempt thus to “historicize” racial difference
in sport revealed a significant strand of popular thought. To invoke an African
past, the primitive other, a state of being predicated solely on physical prowess,
was literally to denigrate what flowed from it. By extension, it was also to exalt
its presumed obverse, civilization, and the attributes of the dominant order.35
For its part, Cromwell’s interpretation was a curious notion of nature and
culture at odds. It imagined that when blacks in Africa had been off running and
hunting, the ancestors of white athletes were composing symphonies and building
cathedrals, which placed their descendants at a substantial disadvantage at the
modern-day Olympics, which was supposed to showcase the strenuous elements
within the European cultural tradition. Similarly, if in the psychological terms
invoked by Coach Cromwell, the black athlete’s “easy-going disposition” lay at or
near the center of his success, then again by contrast, white competitors may
have been thwarted from starting block to finish line by their particular worries
about the fate of Western civilization. Such apprehensions, concerning the
maintenance of traditional forms of racial privilege and subordination, were
certainly on Cromwell’s mind when he sought, in this instance, to break the
longstanding links between excellence in sport and the traits associated with it:
strength of character, discipline, and hard work.
So when African American athletes outsprinted white runners, it was
presented in the roundest terms that they were merely reenacting some primordial
escape from a lion or tiger. And to be sure, such luridly imagined observations as
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Cromwell’s never stood alone or without amplification. In the ensuing years,
black athleticism fell prey to the Harvard anthropologist Carleton S. Coon, who
began his commentary on the inherited advantages of African Americans in sport
with a depiction of their slender calves and loose jointedness. But what started
with anatomy ended with a striking analogy, as was so often the case with racial
scientists. The biological features that suited African Americans for certain sports,
Coon declared, were characteristic of “living things (cheetahs, for instance) known
for their speed and leaping ability.”36 Somewhat later still, two chroniclers of the
history of college football continued to rely on gross stereotype, though they had
relocated their analogies from the African “jungle” to the American palladium.
“Because of their tap-dancer sense of rhythm and distinctive leg conformation,
blacks excel as sprinters,” John McCallum and Charles Pearson averred. “It follows
naturally that on the football field they stand out as broken field runners.”37 The
links between these comments and the discriminations advanced by the dance
critic, John Martin, are unmistakable.
After mid-century, as Wiggins has shown, racial science often focused on
the triumph of black athletes in the track-and-field events of the Olympic Games.
The stopwatch and the tape measure seemed to offer a certain validation to the
claims of the hereditarians that significant and fixed anatomical and physiological
differences accounted for the medals won by black Americans in the sprints and
jumps. But then, rather suddenly, racial commentators were confronted by the
stellar efforts and world records of African distance runners. On the heels of
successive gold medal performances in the marathon, steeplechase, and 10,000meter race by competitors from Ethiopia and Kenya during the 1960s, the notion
of fast twitch and slow twitch muscle fibers—which had for a time been used to
distinguish between the speed of blacks versus the stamina of whites—was
displaced as a frame of analysis by various assertions that strove to mark differences
between East African and West African physiques, supposedly long and lithe
versus compact and muscular. 38 From the vantage not so much of a later era but
of a different ideological stance, such a shift in explanations suggests that the
persistence of scientific racism lay not so much in the consistency of the science
but in the constancy of its racism.
At odds with such racially essentialist notions, an increasing emphasis on
cultural interpretations of African American success in sports characterized the
social science of sport as well as mainstream journalism during the 1960s. This
was a noteworthy development because its stress on black struggle and triumph
within the boundaries marked by the athletic establishment reflected the growing
influence of the Civil Bights movement and its integrationist appeal.39 Still, the
(il)logic of athletic taxonomy remained largely in place. Indeed, it received its
most thorough exposition in 1971 when Sports Illustrated published Martin Kane’s
“An Assessment of ‘Black is Best.”’ Kane’s survey of expert commentary on racial
difference and athletic achievement was intended to be impressive in its range.
But, in fact, the findings of assorted anatomists and the observations of a number
of successful athletes overwhelmed other perspectives. The article ignored
historical and sociological considerations of discrimination on the playing fields
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and beyond. Conversely, it failed to discuss the notion that athletics offered a
platform for social mobility or a move from margins to mainstream for many of
those who were acutely aware of their outsider or “minority” status. Despite a
slight qualification here and there, Kane’s main point was ultimately that “physical
differences in the races might well have enhanced the athletic potential of the
Negro in certain events.”
This is not so much a matter of height and weight as of body proportions.
Researchers have found that the black American, on the average, tends to
have a shorter trunk, a more slender pelvis, longer arms (especially
forearms) and longer legs (especially from the knees down) than his white
counterpart. His bones are denser, and therefore heavier, than those of
whites. He has more muscle in the upper arms and legs, less in the calves.
There is reason to believe that his fat distribution is patterned differently
from that of the white man—leaner extremities but not much difference
in the trunk. And there is a trifle of evidence—this aspect has been studied
so little that it is still in the highly speculative state—that the black man’s
adrenal glands, a vital factor in many sports, are larger than the white
man’s.40
Kane’s piece appeared during the years when the Civil Rights appeal seemed
to be gaining ascendancy in mainstream culture, drawing some racial moderates
toward liberals and leftists. Those same years, however, also witnessed the
increasing intensity of resistance to an ideology symbolized by the level playing
field.41 Simply stated, the most prominent sports magazine in the United States
had encapsulated a century of racialist thinking about human performance, then
went on to speculate about what the next generation of biological research might
disclose. The article further revealed the procrustean nature of racial science,
hastily stretching old assumptions and assertions so as to explain recent
phenomena, such as the considerable stamina as well as the great speed displayed
by a new cohort of black athletes. Though it celebrated the anthropometry of
athletics over and above observations of long and arduous practice sessions. There
was more to the Sports Illustrated article than a laboratory view of the sporting
scene. For implicit in the enterprise of assessing “Black is Best” was an attempt
to isolate black achievements to the arena, where natural physical abilities
supposedly accounted for their triumphs. Later formulations of the athleticized
black body would similarly create a cultural ghetto of the gridiron, diamond,
track oval, and boxing ring: social spaces tightly bounded and set apart from the
world beyond athletic competition, where more numerous and more substantial
opportunities for success could be found.
***
Allusions to “life and death matters in the jungle” and analogies to cheetahs
and tap-dancers rested comfortably within the prevailing rhetoric of racial
denigration for many years. Though sometimes communicated in a more subtle
manner or in more scientific language, as Martin Kane’s article attests, references
to innate athletic differences between population groups persisted well beyond
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the era of the desegregation of sport. But such ways of thinking have also provoked
a variety of reactions, often passionate and profound, from black Americans.
From Du Bois at the turn of the century to educators and athletes such as Harry
Edwards and Arthur Ashe in our own time, African American commentators
have objected to the use of stereotypes and the misuse of science to distinguish
the accomplishments of black and white athletes. Urgently and consistently, many
intellectuals and activists within the Civil Bights movement have asserted that
the claims made by excellent black athletes against the mainstream rhetoric of
equality and opportunity have stood for the larger aspirations of Afro-America.
They have also drawn upon the findings of numerous physical scientists and
social scientists, who have disproved the allegations of bio-determinism and
dismissed the idea of legacies from a primitive past.
During the early years of the century, Du Bois enlisted a new generation of
anthropologists led by Franz Boas to refute the tenets of scientific racism. The
environmentalism embraced by an increasing number of social scientists in the
ensuing years seemed to remove black athletic accomplishment from the shaky
anthropometrical foundations first advanced by ideologues like Gobineau and to
place excellence in sport, for instance, within the sturdier frames of analysis,
which address social circumstance and cultural innovation.42 At the same time,
biological scientists also challenged the generalizations based on anthropometry.
Few, if any, offered findings more emphatic or timely than the African American
scholar W. Montague Cobb. Drawing on his experiments in physiology and
anatomy, particularly his biopsies of the muscle tissue of Jesse Owens during the
mid 1930s, Cobb assailed the proposition that specific biological determinants
could account for black athletic success. With reference to the prevailing
classification systems, the Howard University professor declared without
equivocation that the “Negroid type of calf, foot, and heel bone” could not be
found in the Olympic champion; if anything, Cobb asserted, the diameter of
Owens’s gastrocnemius conformed more to “the caucasoid type rather than the
negroid.”43
In professional as well as popular journals, Cobb extended his analysis in
important ways. He was neither the first scientist nor the last to underscore the
salience of physical variations within population groups as well as between them.
Yet critically, his discussion of that notion occurred within the context of sporting
accomplishment and thus engaged, at an early date, the athletic typologies then
in place. What is more, Cobb indicated his clear sense that racial mixing subverted
any assertion concerning fixed and isolated genetic determinants of muscular or
mental prowess. Howard Drew had been a co-record holder in the 100 yard dash
and the first black sprinter to be acclaimed “the world’s fastest human,” Cobb
noted in 1936. But Drew was also light skinned and “usually taken for a white
man by those not in the know.” Edward Gourdin, the Harvard sprinter and former
world-record holder in the broad jump, was similarly light skinned. “There is
not one single physical feature, including skin color, which all our Negro
champions have in common which would identify them as Negroes,” Cobb
asserted. A mixed heritage, he concluded, obviously removed such stellar athletes
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from consideration when rigid racial dichotomies were being cast, thus exposing
as arbitrary and contrived the very principles of racial taxonomy.44
Cobb’s scientific investigations stood among a host of scholarly articles and
books that debunked bio-determinist assertions regarding athletic performance.
As compelling as those conclusions were and remain, they have ultimately not
been sufficient to counter prevailing speculation on black success in sport. Neither,
for the most part, have been the arguments of the sociologist Harry Edwards,
whose stinging responses to the Kane article, in addition to his other writings
and position statements, have both inspired and informed numerous critics of
racism in sport and society. Nor have the appeals of such popular figures as Arthur
Ashe, Jr., whose three-volume text, The Hard Road to Glory, documented a history
of white hostility to black effort and accomplishment in the realm of athletics.
These commentaries might well have sent the innatists to the sidelines for good.
Sadly, however, the muscular assimilationists have been largely unsuccessful in
altering the terms of discourse from the natural to the cultural and social.45
That the tide of resistance to the efforts of the integrationists was so massive
might begin to explain why other African American commentators have come to
subscribe to essentialist considerations of physical hardihood and athletic prowess.
The attempt to strategically appropriate the notion of racial difference-to turn
According to the historian David Wiggins, “W. Montague Cobb, the well-known professor of
anatomy at Howard University, was so intrigued by the debate over black athletic success in track
and field that he took anthropometric measurements of Jesse Owens to determine if racially
linked physical characteristics accounted for differences in sport performance. Cobb, shown here
taking measurements of Owens, ultimately concluded that proper training and motivations to
succeed were the most important factors in determining athletic success.” Courtesy of the Chicago
Defender.
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it on its head, as it were—may have been born of frustration with the inefficacy
of egalitarian initiatives. It was clearly sustained by considerations of cultural
nationalism and Black Power during the late 1960s and 1970s. But today such
racialism is not only manifest in African-centered assertions regarding distinctive
patterns of cultural development; it also makes its appeal through the notions of
melanin theory, no less weird or pernicious than the pronouncements of coach
Cromwell or the journalist Kane. It is significant, however, that many of its
principal adherents are social psychologists, for the “strange career” of black
biological essentialism begs scrutiny mainly as a response to a long history of
oppression. The various tenets of Afrocentrism certainly speak to racial pride,
yet they also stand as an evocation of anger and alienation in the face of the
qualified successes and many failures of meliorist reform. Nevertheless, it is
important not to confuse such a sociological phenomenon with a solidly grounded
school of critical analysis; while Afrocentrism may be good therapy, as one
prominent scholar has noted, it is not good history.46
Like cultural nationalism, black racial essentialism serves many purposes,
though its separatist assertions and implications do much more than reinforce
the notion of a fixed social identity and a consolidated political stance. They also
divide persistent racial reformers from those who have attenuated their
commitment to the Civil Rights crusade. The distinctions between integrationist
appeals and essentialist formulations have not always been sharply drawn, however,
just as the hazards of perpetuating athletic taxonomies have not always been
apparent to some black athletes and African American commentators. The case
of Edwin Bancroft Henderson may be instructive in this regard. For more than
fifty years, one of the leading chroniclers of black sport, and perhaps the foremost
promoter of the ideal of “muscular assimilationism,” Henderson devoted his career
to Civil Bights activism. Yet in what seems a striking departure from his campaign
to establish a level playing field of athletic competition, he embraced, at least in
some measure, the prevailing discourse of difference. Specifically, in a 1936 article
appearing in Opportunity, the journal of the National Urban League, he alleged
that it might have been the rigors of the Middle Passage that had winnowed the
slave population, allowing only the fittest to survive. It was from this group,
Henderson suggested, that the great athletes descended.
When one recalls that it is estimated that only one Negro slave in five
was able to live through the rigors of the “Middle Passage,” and that the
horrible conditions of slavery took a toll of many slaves who could not
make biological adjustments in a hostile environment, one finds the
Darwinian theory of survival of the fit operating among Negroes as
rigorously as any selective process ever operated among human beings.
There is just a likelihood that some very vital elements persist in the
histological tissues of the glands or muscles of Negro athletes.47
Thirty-five years later, the Yale graduate and NFL star Calvin Hill echoed
Henderson’s peculiar notion. Black athletes were “the offspring of those who
[were] physically and mentally tough enough to survive,” Hill asserted. “We were
simply bred for physical qualities.” This explanation resonated for a number of
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African American commentators and athletes who had embraced certain elements
of the Black Power movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s.48 Recast in a
more positive way, such thinking drew attention to an African past and pride in
physical accomplishment, which would eventually be manifest in many
achievements by black athletes in the modern ordeal of sport. The most solid
reaction to notions of white supremacy at the time, the construction of an idealized
black superhero in sports nevertheless has played into a cultural taxonomy that
still ranks athletes as performers (with the line between the symbolic and
substantive importance of their accomplishments still firmly drawn). Paradoxically,
such assertions of a “strategic essentialism” have served to tighten the boundaries
around the athletic ghetto. In an article titled “Delusions of Grandeur,” published
in Sports Illustrated in 1991, the cultural commentator, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,
pointed out that when the foremost black cultural heroes are the celebrities of
the football field and basketball arena, and when they are held in esteem mainly
for their innate abilities, the effect is to diminish the significance of other African
American leaders and the years of dedication that lie behind their
accomplishments. More passionately—also more polemically—John Hoberman
has said the same thing in Darwin's Athletes: How Sport Has Damaged Black America
and Preserved the Myth of Race.49
For a relatively small but vociferous sect of African Americans, the tenets of
innatism have extended far beyond arguments about social Darwinism or cultural
nationalism. Upon occasion, race pride now takes the form of celebrating the
inherently superior qualities of African “sun people” and mocking the maladies
suffered by European “ice people.” In the melanin theories advanced by black
social scientists such as Frances Cress-Welsing, what accounts for variations in
the pigmentation of the skin also explains a large number of attributes conducive
to physical prowess, intellectual acumen, and artistic innovation. Arguing an
essential linkage between skin melanin and neuromelanin—which is supposedly
endowed with extraordinary properties—one theorist alleged that “melanin centers
in the brain are responsible for coordinating and controlling body movements
and controlling brain power,” while several others assert, simply, that “Blacks
have more melanin in their muscle cells as compared to whites. This coupled to
its biophysical characteristics as a semi-conductor and its ability to trap free radical
energy is the explanation for ‘why Blacks run faster’ and ‘Black athletic
superiority.’”50
Many of those who have endorsed melanin theories situate themselves within
the African-centered movement of historical interpretation, which strives to trace
the accomplishments of the diverse peoples of the black diaspora back to an
ancestral homeland and to a set of fixed racial characteristics. Yet, at the same
time, much of what is advanced as afrocentrism serves a hegemonic function by
perpetuating the noxious simplisms of the old typologies. That the majority of
African Americans continue to insist on egalitarian principles and practices should
not be discounted. Endeavoring to subvert both the structure and the substance
of racialist responses to black accomplishment while striving to enter the
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mainstream of American society by virtue of their attainments, most blacks still
subscribe to the tenets of the Civil Rights crusade. But for many reasons the
Afrocentrist stance and the assertions of the melanists are also noteworthy, The
most troubling of those reasons, perhaps, is that their positions lean heavily on
racial taxonomy and ultimately amount to an inversion of the traditional
hierarchies.
***
If racial essentialism had ever been in retreat during the era of civil rights
and national liberation—as some scholars maintain—its resurgence has been
dramatically illustrated in recent years. Indeed the emergence of melanism seems
but a sidelight to other renderings of difference and dominance that reflect
traditional patterns of thought within the mainstream culture. One of the most
notorious episodes of “typing” occurred in the late 1980s when a major league
baseball official, Al Campanis, stated that blacks performed well on the field but
lacked “the necessities” to occupy managerial positions or places of responsibility
and authority in the front offices of sports organizations. Another involved Jimmy
“the Greek” Snyder, a football commentator on television, who linked the heritage
of slavery to the modern playing field. “The slave owner would breed his big
black with his big woman so that he could have a big black kid,” Snyder
maintained. From one vantage, the consternation evinced by their respective
interviewers and the summary firing of both men indicated a shift of values and
standards toward such public declarations and their racist underpinnings. Yet
another media forum from the late 1980s was an NBC telecast hosted by Tom
Brokaw, which introduced a number of racial scientists whose experiments were
grounded in the notion of biological differences between the races. Ultimately,
too, the Brokaw report dwelled on the “over-representation” of African Americans
in professional football and basketball as a rather troubling issue for the public to
consider without raising questions about the percentage of peoples of color in
other occupations, network television for instance. More recently, the marking
of racial difference in the athletic arena received perhaps its most calculated and
crude exposition. Commenting on a stellar play by one athlete toward the end of
the 1996-97 basketball season, David Halberstam, who announces the games for
the Miami Heat, remarked that “Thomas Jefferson would have been proud of
that pass. When Thomas Jefferson was around basketball was not invented yet,
but those slaves working at Thomas Jefferson’s farm, I’m sure they would have
made good basketball players.”51
Clearly, such instances draw attention to the continuing prevalence of racialist
thinking concerning athletic accomplishment. The NBC report merely made its
contribution to this tendency by way of the issues it evaded as much as by the
questions it asked. Other commentary has been more forthright in addressing
the meaning of the success of blacks in sport. In the aftermath of the firing of
Jimmy “the Greek,” the syndicated columnist Richard Cohen vaguely suggested
that civil rights activists would want to steer clear of any assessment of the racial
dimension of physical attributes for fear of having to engage intellectual and
psychological distinctions. Raising the issue of Political correctness,” Cohen then
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shied away from further speculation about racial difference in sport or other
endeavors. Nevertheless, his comments made their way into the much more
purposive arguments of Dinesh D’Souza in The End of Racism, a book that deals
with scientific racism principally by repeating its most atrocious pronouncements
and ignoring its critics. 52 Thus in a short section concerning athletics, intended
to set up his selective digest of IQ statistics, D’Souza not only recapitulated the
“categorical imperative,” which has long prevailed among racial scientists; he
also reiterated the notion of compensation. “It stands to reason that groups that
are unlike each other in some respects may also differ in other respects,” D’Souza
contends offhandedly. “Why should groups with different skin color, head shape,
and other visible characteristics prove identical in reasoning ability or the ability
to construct an advanced civilization? If blacks have certain inherited abilities,
such as improvisational decision making, that could explain why they predominate
in certain fields such as jazz, rap, and basketball, and not in other fields, such as
classical music, chess, and astronomy.” The end of racism indeed.53
Ultimately, to discuss the racial essentialism that continues to shadow much
of the commentary on sport in the United States—just as it haunts most
discussions of intelligence testing—is not to say that a taxonomic frame of mind
is confined to American culture or to considerations of the achievements of African
Americans alone. A relatively recent article from a popular New Zealand
magazine, for example, illustrates that such is not the case. Titled “White Men
Can’t Jump,”—how ironically it is hard to tell—the 1993 piece in Metro: Essentially
Auckland documented the increasing prominence of native peoples in rugby, a
sport that for more than a century had been identified with British colonialism:
a means of toughening those who administered the Empire. Amid a wide-ranging
discussion of changing demographics in New Zealand as well as an analysis
otherwise sensitive to Maori and Samoan cultural patterns, several white sports
figures were asked to state their views. They speculate, first, on the innate abilities
vis à vis the acquired skills of Polynesian squads. “Polynesian players were naturally
superior to us in talent,” one former player declared, “but a lot of them aren’t
there now because they didn’t have the discipline for physical conditioning. They
lacked the right kind of mental attitude. They’d just turn up and play.” Along the
same lines, another New Zealander of European ancestry described a similar
pattern, though he was careful to place his assessment in the past tense: once it
was, that “your typical Polynesian rugby team would have just lost their head in
a pressure situation, ” he remarked. “It was almost as if it was the Polynesian way
to do something really stupid that gave the game away.”54
To indicate the malleability of such typologies, however, a passage from a
few pages later suggests why Polynesians have come to excel at the sport. They
are bigger now and play a “more physical and confrontational” brand of the game.
It is strategy and size that accounts for the changes. But inevitably size will win
out in such appraisals: “The Polynesian is basically mesomorphic, tending to be
big-boned, muscular, of average height, wide shoulders, thin waist,” one white
trainer asserts. “They have a higher proportion of fast twitch muscle fibre which
is the source of their explosive style and the reason they are fast over short
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distances.”55 Contrasting feats of character to mere physicality, the article offers
yet another instance where innatist constructs can be placed in comparative
perspective, encouraging us to generalize somewhat about the phenomenon of
racial essentialism.56
As with the United States, in New Zealand population changes and new
claims to cultural power—by way of participation in “national pastimes”—have
created the context where longstanding notions of essential difference make their
way into the everyday language of sports. Those ideas can be communicated in
genteel or popular scientific terms, but their purpose has ultimately been to
circumscribe the efforts of those who would use athletics as a means to enter the
social and cultural mainstream. In New Zealand as in the United States, athletic
competition has offered a way for people of color to fashion significant emblems
of identity and pride as well as to challenge the discriminatory practices of old. It
is a critical commentary on both social systems that those initiatives are still
contested, that racialist thinking continues to quality such hallowed notions as
sportsmanship and fair play, equality and opportunity
***
The original title for this article was “Excellence, the Essentials of. . . .” It
was cast in the form of an index entry in order to emphasize the linkages among
the many European-American responses to the accomplishments of people of
color in such diverse realms as the arts and the sporting arena. And it was meant
to underscore the “paradox” within Western thought that addresses achievement
The 40-yard dash, timed as a part of the NFL draft process each spring. The image depicts the
black athlete as performer, while an array of coaches determines the standard of measurement
and judges the skill and fitness of the athlete. Although in this photograph, taken in 1995, two of
the coaches are African Americans, the percentage of black players in the NFL greatly exceeds
the percentage of black coaches and officials. Courtesy of the Arizona Daily Star.
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in the language of culture and civilization only until the time when “others” make
their marks as dancers, runners, boxers-or as rugby players. Historically, the
dominant discourse has then switched to a different set of terms, and “natural
ability” becomes the touchstone—an enormous burden in the instance of athletic
accomplishments —for those who have sought to make their claims for full
participation in the social, economic, and political life of their nations.
This assessment thus emphasizes the “contingency,” the reactive dimension
of racial essentialism, just as it suggests the problematic elements of defining a
cultural nationalism out of references to innate differences in physical prowess.
Significantly, taxonomic conventions in the representation of population groups
have long stood as the predicate of social authority.57 That the dominant culture
can employ them—and modify them when necessary—to maintain hierarchies
of privilege and subordination means that “minority” cultures cannot use such
typologies in the same ways. If the strategy of “muscular assimilationism”—a
prominent element of the Civil Rights campaigns of the twentieth century—has
not been entirely successful in creating a level playing field, it is more certain still
that the separatism manifest in Afrocentrism and melanin theory is patently selfdefeating in the long run, Moreover, to the extent that many African American
youth exalt athletic heroes over other role models—spending their formative years
in “hoop dreams”—the emphasis on athletic striving has been overplayed.58 What
remains is yet another troubling fact. Even as sociological surveys and a new
generation of biographies and memoirs tell us about the increasingly multiracial
character of American society, the discourse of innate and immutable racial
difference still looms large in the popular consciousness.59
Ultimately, for intellectual historians, cultural theorists, and social scientists,
as well as journalists who hope to engage entrenched modes of racialist thought
and to create a more expansive conception of culture, it may be well as a first step
to adopt a new perspective regarding the texts that are devoted to innatist thinking.
Central to this undertaking would be the compilation of a roster of phrases and
pronouncements that clearly links academic racism, past and present. To be sure,
as we strive to move beyond category, the idea of an index of racialist literature
involves a troubling dimension. Yet it is nevertheless crucial that progressive, or
expansive, thinkers on the subject—rather than institute- and foundation-based
conservative ideologues—become the cartographers of the contemporary
discussion of “race.” Better still, though from a different interpretive position, we
might start erasing “racial” boundaries altogether.60
With notions of history and collective memory in mind, perhaps it would be
wise to evaluate such books as The Bell Curve and The End of Racism, deftly
written as they might seem to some reviewers,61 through the same lens that we
would use to assess the essentialist observations of the dance critic John Martin,
as contrived as they were and remain. From there we could examine the arguments
still insisting on a broad-based anatomy of racial difference with an eye toward
the ideological stance they share with those who spoke before, with the sportswriter
Martin Kane, for instance, with the anthropologist Carleton Coon, and with
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Coach Cromwell. We could allude, then, to the polemics on white supremacy by
Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard as well as to the pronouncements on
European superiority by the Count de Gobineau. For, “essentially,” de Gobineau
and D’Souza are of a kind. To read such works together, indeed to draw the
significant connections between nineteenth-century social theories and the most
recent versions, would ultimately reveal the shared racism of their premises as
well as of their prescriptions.
I am grateful to Paul Spickard, Elliott Gorn, David Wiggins, Peter Hoffenberg, Scott
Haine, Johanna Garvey, Steven Riess, June Sochen, Kirsten Fischer, and Ursula Bielski
for their careful readings of earlier versions of this article.
1.
Quotes are from John Martini Book of the Dance (New York: Tudor Publishing Co., 1963),
177-189. This was originally published as The Dance (New York: Tudor, 1947). Though
Martin assessed the dancing of Pearl Primus and the choreography of Katherine Dunham
as well as the work of Alvin Ailey and Talley Beatty, he used the generic male figure to
characterize the main features of black dance. For a recent appraisal of the African
American experience in modern dance, see Jennifer Dunning, Alwin Ailey: A Life in Dance
(Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1996); idem, “Classic Dance, Race and Missed
Possibilities: A Story Still Unfolding,” New York Times, February 24, 1996.
2.
Martin's Book of the Dance, 178-179. The way Martin cast his observations is all-important.
Not only did he mark differences, he also ranked them. For alternative framings and
judgments that generalized from the movements of the body, one might look to the
Western historians and ethnographers who surveyed African culture with comparisons
in mind. One English scholar noted that “African rhythm is so complicated that it is
exceedingly difficult for a European to analyse it. . . . Broadly speaking, the difference
between African and European rhythms is that whereas any piece of European music has
at any one moment one rhythm in common, a piece of African music has always two or
three, sometimes as many as four. . . . From this point of view European music is childishly
simple. . . .” W. E. Ward, “Music in the Gold Coast,” Gold Coast Review II (JulyDecember 1927), 214. “The twistings, turnings, contortions and springing movements
executed in perfect time, are wonderful to behold,” another scholar noted. “For these set
dances . . . the physical strength required is tremendous. The body movements are
extremely difficult and would probably kill a European.” G. T. Basden, Among the Ibos in
Nigeria (London: 1966 [1921]), 131-132. Both are quoted in John W. Blassingame, The
Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1982), 22-23.
3.
See, for example, Joyce Aschenbrenner, Katherine Dunham: Reflections on the Social and
Political Contexts of Afro-American Dance (New York: Congress on Research in Dance,
1981). Martin is quoted on pp. 35-36. See David K. Wiggins, “‘Great Speed but Little
Stamina’: The Historical Debate Over Black Athletic Superiority,” Journal of Sport History
16 (Summer 1989), 159-185.
4.
On sexuality and exoticism within the Western discourse on race, see Frantz Fanon,
Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967); Winthrop Jordan, White Over
Black American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1968), 136-178; Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves
in the Plantation South (New York: Norton, 1985), 27-61. Concerning the ways modern
dance has conventionally been viewed, in terms of the artistic and the erotic, one thinks
of the distinction between the mainstream appraisals of Isadora Duncan and Josephine
Baker. See for example, Ann Daly, Done Into Dance: Isadora Duncan in America
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995) and Phyllis Rose, Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine
Baker in Her Time (New York: Doubleday, 1991).
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5.
See, for example, the discussion of the “savage” and “civilized” body in John Hoberman,
Mortal Engines: The Science of Performance and the Dehumanization of Sport (New York:
Free Press, 1992), 33-61.
6.
See Raymond Williams, entries on “culture” and “civilization” in Keywords: A Vocabulary
of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Henry Louis Gates,
Jr., ed., “Race,” Writing, and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). On
the nineteenth-century development of the social sciences, see George Stocking, American
Social Scientists and Race Theory, 1890-1915 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1960); idem, Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Antbropology (New
York: Free Press, 1968); idem, Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1991).
7.
Some of the issues that I address here, at least in outline, have received substantial treatment
elsewhere. Specifically, the historians of science and culture, Stephen Jay Gould, Nancy
Leys Stepan, Sander L. Gilman, and William H. Tucker have discerned the strands of
racialist discourse that have prevailed over the last two centuries. Within a broad
framework, which is often associated with the writings of Michel Foucault, they have
clearly illuminated the lines of force between “knowledge” and power in Western society,
just as they have accentuated the social grounding of scientific speculation. For Foucault’s
thought on this subject see The History of Sexuality: vol. I: An Introduction (New York.
Vintage Books, 1980); The Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse of Language (New
York: Pantheon, 1982); The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New
York Vintage Books, 1973). See also, Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton,
1981); Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800-1960 (London: MacMillan,
1982); Stepan and Sander Gilman, “Appropriating the Idioms of Science: The Rejection
of Scientific Racism,” in Dominick LaCapra, ed., The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on
Hegemony and Resistance, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 72-103; Gilman,
Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1985); idem, The Jew's Body (New York Routledge, 1991); idem, Picturing
Health and Illness: Images of Identity and Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1995); idem, Smart Jews: The Construction of the Image of Jewish Superior Intelligence
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996); Tucker, The Science and Politics of Racial
Research (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994). See also George Mosse, Toward the
Final Solution: A History of European Racism (New York: Harper, 1980) and Michael
Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western
Dominance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989); Laura Nader, ed., Naked Science:
Anthropological Inquiries into Boundaries, Power, and Knowledge (New York: Routledge,
1996); Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1996). See also William R. Stanton, The Leopard's Spots: Scientific
Attitudes Toward Race in America, 1815-1859 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1960); Thomas Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (New York: Schocken,
1965); John S. Haher, Outcasts from Evolution: Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority
1859-1900 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971); George Fredrickson, The Black
Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914
(New York, 1971).
For critical questions about racial essentialism and constructionism within the realms of
literary history and cultural theory, see Gates, ed., “Race,” Writing and Difference; idem,
Figures in Black Words, Signs, and the “Racial Self” (New York: Oxford University Press,
1987); Houston A. Baker, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism,
Nature, and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989), esp. 73-96; Patricia Hill Collins,
Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New
York HarperCollins, 1991); Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s
History and the Metalanguage of Race,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 17
(Winter 1992), 251-274, Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary
Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Eric Sundquist, To Wake
the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1993); Naomi Schor and Elizabeth Weed, eds., The Essential Difference
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(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); Joyce A. Joyce, Warriors, Conjurers, and
Priests: Defining African-Centered Literary Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1994); Harryette Mullen, “Optic White: Blackness and the Production of Whiteness,”
Diacritics 24 (Summer-Fall 1994), 71-89. See also Michael Awkward, Negotiating
Difference: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Positionality (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1995); Judith Roof and Robyn Wiegman, eds. Who Can Speak? Authority and Critical
Identity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995).
Finally, with regard to the comparative dimension to the study of essentialism, ethnicity,
and culture, see Gary Okihiro, Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and
Culture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996). Chapter 2 is titled, “Is Yellow
Black or White?”
8.
See “The American Freshman: National Norms for Fall 1994” and for preceding years.
This survey is published by the American Council on Education and University of
California at Los Angeles Higher Education Research Institute. A summary appears in
The Chronicle of Higher Education Almanac, September 1, 1995, 17; September 2, 1996,
19.
9.
On the historical construction of racial categories, see, for instance, David Roediger, The
Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso,
1991); idem, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class
History (New York: Verso, 1994); Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the
American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Noel Ignatiev, How
the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995). Ruth Frankenberg, White Women,
Rare Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1993). See also George Lipsitz, “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness:
Racialized Social Democracy and the ‘White’ Problem in American Studies,” Shelley
Fisher Fishkin, “Interrogating ‘Whiteness,’ Complicating ‘Blackness’: Remapping
American Culture,” and Alexander O. Boulton, “The American Paradox: Jeffersonian
Equality and Racial Science,” in American Quarterly 47 (September 1995), 369-387, 428492. Concerning the scientific challenges to “racial science,” see Richard Lewontin, Steven
Rose, and Leon Kamin, Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature (New
York: Pantheon, 1984); Jared Diamond, “Race Without Color,” Discover (November
1994), 83-89; David Wheeler, “A Growing Number of Scientists Reject the Concept of
Race,” Chronicle of Higher Education (February 17, 1995): A8-9, 15. See also “Inventing
the Notion of Race,” New York Times, January 10, 1998.
10. See Paul R. Spickard, Mixed Blood Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century
America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); Spickard, “The Illogic of
American Racial Categories, ” in Maria P. P. Root, Racially Mixed People in America
(Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1992), 12-23; and Spickard, “Mapping Race:
Multiracial People and Racial Category Construction in the United States and Britain,”
Immigrants and Minorities 15 (July 1996), 107-119.
11.
See Mary C. Waters, Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1990); Karen Leonard, Making Ethnic Choices: California's PunjabiMexican Americans (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993); F. James Davis, Who
is Black? One Nation's Definition (University Park Pennsylvania State University Press,
1995); Spickard, “Mapping Race.” Jon Michael Spencer, The New Colored People: The
Mixed-Rare Movement in America (New York: New York University Press, 1997). One
might add to this literature the increasing number of oral biographies and autobiographies
by mixed race people. See, for example, Lise Funderburg, Black, White, Other: Biracial
Americans Talk About Race and Identity (New York W. Morrow, 1994); Barack Obama,
Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (New York: Times Books, 1995);
Judy Scales-Trent, Notes of a White Black Woman: Race, Color, Community (University
Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995); Gregory Howard Williams, Life on the
Color Line: The True Story of a White Boy Who Discovered He Was Black (New York: Dutton,
1995).
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12. The core text for study of the issue and the era is Michael Omi and Howard Winant,
Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1980s (New York Routledge,
1989).
13. See Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class
Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1994); idem, “Race and I.Q” The New
Republic, October 31, 1994, 10-37; Russell Jacoby and Naomi Glauberman, eds., The
Bell Curve Debate: History, Documents, Opinions (New York: Times Books, 1995); Steven
Fraser, The Bell Curve Wars: Race, Intelligence, and the Future of America (New York Basic
Books, 1995); Ashley Montagu, Race and IQ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995);
Robert Newby, ed., The Bell Curve: Laying Bare the Resurgence of Scientific Racism, special
issue of American Behavioral Scientist 39 (October 1995); John L. Rury, “IQ Redux,”
History of Education Quarterly 35 (Winter 1995), 423-438; Leon J. Kamen, “Behind the
Curve,” Scientific American 272 (February 1995), 99-103; Claude S. Fischer, Michael
Hout, Martin Sanchez Jankowski, Samuel R. Lucas, Ann Swidler, and Kim Voss,
Inequaliy by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Mytb (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1996). See also Marek Kohn, The Race Gallery: The Return of Racial Science (London:
Jonathan Cope, 1995).
Largely left out of the discussions of racial science have been the various works off Thomas
Sowell, whose notions of “cultural” variation among “racial” and ethnic groups bear a
striking resemblance to the biological distinctions that Herrnstein and Murray seek to
draw. His approach to ethnicity and culture might also be compared to the “seed catalog”
sociology of the early twentieth century. See Thomas Sowell, Migrations and Cultures: A
World View (New York: Basic Books, 1996).
14. Dinesh D’Souza, The End of Racism: Principles for a Multiracial Society (New York: Free
Press, 1995). Long recognized as several of the most conservative African American
social analysts, Robert L. Woodson and Glenn Loury count themselves among D’Souza’s
critics, not because they support affirmative action and kindred government policies but
because they object to the rational—historical and sociological—that he has concocted
for the dismantlement of such programs. See William Raspberry, “‘End of Racism’ Can
Only Serve to Perpetuate It,” Chicago Tribune, September 19, 1995.
15. See J. Philippe Rushton, Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective (New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1995). For his part, Rushton attempts to correlate IQ with
experimental findings about such matters as brain size and sexual potency, arguing for
differential rates of evolution among “Whites, Blacks, and Orientals.” By way of the
Internet, Jon Entine announced his forthcoming book, Taboo: How Blacks Have Come to
Dominate Sports and Why We are Afraid to Talk About It. With less sureness about its
grammar than about what science has revealed, the message stated, that “after years of
research, it is clear that the evidence is OVERWHELMING that there are significant
phenotypical and genotypical differences between population groups and that race is a
key ‘marker’ for these differences (even in African-Americans who have a significant
admixture of DNA from outside of sub-Saharan Africa” (emphasis in original, Sport
Sociology listserve, December 12, 1997). For a critique of Rushton, see Richard Lewontin,
“Of Genes and Genitals,” Transition 69 (Spring 1996), 178-193.
16. See, for example, “The Black Athlete Revisited,” Sporty Illustrated August 5, 12, 19,
1991, 38-77, 26-73, 40-51. The prevailing representation of black and white athletes
had not changed significantly, the authors discovered, since 1968, when the magazine
published its first expose of racism in the realm of American sport. But Sports Illustrated
has also been one of the most notable purveyors of the myth. See most recently, S. L.
Price, “What Ever Happened to the White Athlete?” and idem, “Is It in the Genes?”
Sports Illustrated (December 8, 1997), 31-55. Significantly, Murray/Herrnstein, D’Souza,
and Rushton all indulge in generalizations about natural athletic endowments, explaining
black athletic dominance as a compensation for such things as poor performance on
intelligence tests. See Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein, “Race and I.Q An
Apologia,” The New Republic (October 31, 1994), 38; D’Souza, The End of Racism, 437441; Rushton, Race, Evolution, and Behavior, 9. On sport, see Wiggins “‘Great Speed but
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Little Stamina’“; John Hoberman Darwin's Athletes: How Sport Has Damaged Black America
and Preserved the Myth of Race (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). I am grateful to
him for sharing an early draft of his book
17.
For an innovative assessment of the significance of Michael Jordan, see Michael Eric
Dyson, “Be Like Mike?: Michael Jordan and the Pedagogy of Desire,” in Reflecting Black:
African-American Cultural Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993),
64-75. From a different vantage point, it is important to consider the embrace of the
“bad man” image by players such as Dennis Rodman. On Rodman, we have his
autobiography, Bad as I Wanna Be (New York: Delacorte, 1996); John Edgar Wideman,
“Playing Dennis Rodman,” The New Yorker (April 29 and May 6, 1996), 94-95. On
notions of “badness,” “banditry,” and African American cultural resistance, from the legend
of John Henry to the career of Jack Johnson and beyond, see Lawrence Levine, Black
Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1977). For the multiple meanings of the black athletic
experience, a tine collection of essays can be found in Elliott J. Gorn, ed., Muhammad
Ali: The People's Champ. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995).
18.
Stephen Jay Gould, “Ghosts of Bell Curves Past,” Natural History (February 1995), 12.
19.
Here it should be understood that the ways in which “difference” and “dominance” have
been cast and recast clearly link gender and “race” as cognate hierarchies of privilege and
subordination. It was to de-legitimatize the accomplishments of “New Women” as well
as “New Negroes” at the turn of the century, as well as to reject their claims to full
participation in the American social, economic, and political arena since then, that the
rules of competition and the boundaries of culture have been largely redrawn by those
who would defend, or in some instances, reestablish the old gender and racial regimes.
See Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America
(New York Knopf, 1985); J. A. Mangan and Roberta J. Park, eds., From “Fair Sex” to
Feminism: Sport and the Socialization of Women in the IndustriaI and Post-Industrial Eras
(London: Frank Cass, 1987); Cynthia Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction
of Womanhood (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989); Patricia Vertinsky,
The Eternally Wounded Woman: Women, Doctors, and Exercise in the Late Nineteenth Century
(Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1990); idem, “The Social Construction
of the Gendered Body: Exercise and the Exercise of Power,” The International Journal of
the History of Sport 11 (August 1994), 147-171. See also Michael A. Messner and Donald
F. Sabo, eds., Sport, Men, and the Gender Order: Critical Feminist Perspectives (Champaign,
IL: Human Kinetics, 1990); Susan Birrell and Cheryl L. Cole, eds. Women, Sport, and
Culture (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 1994), esp. 1-92. An impressive cultural
analysis that links “race” to issues of gender and sexuality is Susan Cahn’s Coming On
Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women’s Sport (New York: Free Press,
1994), 110-139.
20.
See, for example, Patrick B. Miller, “‘To Bring the Race Along Rapidly’: Sport, Student
Culture, and Educational Mission at Historically Black Colleges during the Interwar
Years,” History of Education Quarterly 35 (Summer 1995), 111-134, idem, The Playing
Fields of American Culture: Athletics and Higher Education, 1850-1945 (New York: Oxford
University Press, forthcoming).
21.
See, E. Barker, The Politics of Aristotle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 1417; Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (New York Harper and Row, 1964),
133; Samuel Stanhope Smith, An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and
Figure in the Human Species,” Winthrop Jordan, ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1965); Tucker, The Science and Politics of Racial Research, 1-36.
On pictorial representation, see Hugh Honour, The Image of the Black in Western Art
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976-89); Albert Boime, The Art of Exclusion:
Representing Black in the Nineteenth Century (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press,
1990); Guy C. McElroy, Facing History: The Black Image in American Art, 1710-1940
(San Francisco: Bedford Arts Publisher, 1990); Jan Pieterse, White on Black: Images of
Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
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For the language of racial difference, see Jordan, White Over Black. On the
conceptualization of Africa in the European historiography of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, see Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The AfroAsiatic Roots of Classical
Civilization (London: Free Association Books, 1987). It is important to emphasize the
instability of the term “race” in this context, for Europeans attached different attributes
to “African-ness” over time. It is also important to distinguish Bernal’s historiographical
discussion from his other assertions. For responses to his problematic thesis, see Mary
Lefkowitz, Not Out of Afiica: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History
(New York: Basic Books, 1996); Lefkowitz and Guy Rogers, eds., Black Athena Revisited
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
22.
Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and
the United States Between the World Wars (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University
Press, 1992), 16. See Michael D. Biddiss, Father of Racist Ideology: The Social and Political
Thought of Count Gobineau (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970).
23.
“In strength of fist, the English are superior to all the other European races; while the
French and Spanish have a greater power of resisting fatique and privation, as well as the
inclemancy of extreme climates . . . We may conclude that the French have certain physical
qualities that are superior to those of the Germans, which allow them to brave with
impunity the snows of Russia as well as the burning sands of Egypt.” Gobineau, The
Inequality of Human Races (London: William Heinemann, 1915), 151-153. I am indebted
to Scott Haine for bringing these passages to my attention.
24.
Gobineau also addressed racial mixing, referring to “tertiary” and “quaternary” races. In
the paintbox formulation he advanced, Polynesians had “sprung from the mixture of
black and yellow.” The Inequality of Human Races, 148-149.
25.
Concerning these paradoxes, several works might be instructive. See, for example, Ronald
Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Knopf,
1979); Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease, eds., Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1993). It is noteworthy that the first American edition of
Gobineau’s work appeared within a few short years after its publication in France, and
that the person who introduced it was Josiah C. Nott, was one of the most prominent
defenders of slavery. See The Moral and Intellectual Diversity of the Races, With Particular
Reference to Their Respective Influence in the Civil and Political History of Mankind
(Philadephia: Lippincott, 1856 [translation of v. 1 of Inequality]). On Nott, see Reginald
Horsman, Josiah Nott of Mobile: Southerner, Physician, and Racial Theorist (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1987); idem, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of
American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). The
literature on the ties between sport and British imperial policy is expansive. See Rupert
Wilkinson, Gentlemanly Power: British Leadership and the Public School Tradition, A
Comparative Study in the Making of Rulers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964); J.
A. Mangan, Athletics in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School: The Emergence and
Consolidation of an Educational Ideology (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University
Press, 1981); idem, The Games Ethic and Imperialism: Aspects of the Diffusion of an Ideal
(New York: Viking, 1986); idem, The Cultural Bond: Sport, Empire, Society (London:
Frank Cass, 1992). The best survey of this phenomenon is Hoberman, Darwin's Athletes,
99-140.
26.
Encyclopaedia Britannica, American Edition, XVII, (New York, 1895): 316-320. The
longest portion of the entry relates the early closing of the cranial sutures to “the inherent
mental inferiority of the blacks, an inferiority which is even more marked than their
physical differences.”
27.
See, for instance, Thurman B. Rice, Racial Hygiene: A Practical Discussion of Eugenics and
Race Culture (New York: MacMillan, 1929). For historical assessments of eugenics, see
Mark H. Haller, Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought (New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1963); Gould, The Mismeasure of Man; Daniel J. Kevles, In
the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York: Knopf, 1985);
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Troy Duster, Backdoor to Eugenics (New York: Routledge, 1990); Tucker, The Science and
Politics of Racial Research, 54-137.
28.
The prevailing discourse still focused on the debilitated state of black Americans at the
turn of the century. See Frederick L. Hoffman, Race Traits and Tendencies of the American
Negro (New York: MacMillan, 1896). For a response from the African American
intelligentsia, see Kelly Miller’s review of Hoffman in The American Negro Academy,
Occasional Papers, 1 (Washington: American Negro Academy, 1897), 3-36.
At the turn of the century, the “science of sport” gave rise to such quixotic ventures as the
“Anthropology Days,” which accompanied the 1904 Olympic Games. This particular
exhibition featured shot-putting Patagonians and tree-climbing Filipinos. The very
weirdness of these events underscored the racism of their premises. See Mark Dyreson,
“The Playing Fields of Progress: American Athletic Nationalism and the 1904 St. Louis
Olympics,” Gateway Heritage (Fall 1993), 4-23; Lew Carlson, “Giant Patagonians and
Hairy Ainu: Anthropology Days at the 1904 St. Louis Olympics, “Journal of American
Culture 12 (Fall 1989), 19-26; Peggy Stanaland, “Anthropology Days,’ 1904: An Aborted
Effort to Bridge some Cultural Gaps,” in Alice Cheska, ed., Play in Context (New York,
1979); Matti Gorksoyr, “An Image of the Third World in the White Man’s Arena: the
Anthropology Days in St. Louis, 1904, and Their Aftermath,” paper delivered for the
13th HISPA International Congress, Athens/Olympia, 1989. See also in this regard,
Robert Rydell, All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions,
1876-1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
29.
See also, R. Meade Bathe, “Reaction time with Reference to Race,” The Psychological
Review (1895), 475-486; Wiggins, “‘Great Speed But Little Stamina,‘” 160; Andrew
Ritchie, Marshall “Major” Taylor: The Extraordinary Career of a Champion Bicycle Racer
(San Francisco: Bicycle Books, 1988), 174.
30.
See Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race; or The Racial Basis of European History
(New York: Scribner, 1916); Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color Against White
World Supremacy (New York Scribner, 1920). For historical treatments, see also, John
Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism (New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 1955); Alan M. Kraut, Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the
“Immigrant Menace” (New York Basic Books, 1994).
31.
In broad historiographical terms, the “contributionist” writings of George Washington
Williams and Carter G. Woodson, for example, closely parallel those of immigrant
American authors. With respect to sport, Edwin Bancroft Henderson was the foremost
chronicler of black achievements. See his articles in Crisis and The Messenger as well as
The Negro in Sports (Washington: Associated Publishers, 1939); idem, The Black Athlete:
Emergence and Arrival (New York: Publishers Co., 1968). See also Ocania Chalk, Pioneers
of Black Sport: The Early Days of the Black Professional Athlete in Baseball Basketball, Boxing,
and Football (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1975); idem, Black College Sport (New York Dodd,
Mead, 1976). Concerning the early history of this “strategy of appeal” to the dominant
culture, see Patrick B. Miller, “Muscular Assimilationism: Sport, Representation, and
the Paradoxes of Racial Reform,” (unpublished ms. 1995). See also David K. Wiggins,
“Edwin Bancroft Henderson, African American Athletes, and the Writing of Sport
History,” in his collection, Glory Bound: Black Athletes in a White America (Syracuse, NY:
Syracuse University Press, 1997).
32.
An especially helpful survey of the responses to Louis is Chris Mead, Champion: Joe
Louis, Black Hero in White America (New York: Scribner, 1985).
33.
For reports on Kinley, see the New York World, March 14, 1931. Eleanor Metheny,
“Some Differences in Bodily Proportions Between American Negro and White Male
College Students as Related to Athletic Performance,” Tanner et al., Research Quarterly
10 (December 1939), 41-53. See also the massively illustrated text by J. M. Tanner et al.,
The Physique of the Olympic Athlete: A Study of 137 Track and Field Athletes at the XVII
Olympic Games, Rome, 1960 (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1964). Wiggins,
“‘Great Speed But Little Stamina,“’ 162-164.
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34.
Rice quoted in Mead, Champion, 62-63. Not all white sportswriters wrote in this mode.
Westbrook Pegler, for instance, rejected “the freak theories and pseudo-scientific
speculation that inevitably attend a Negro’s rise.” Pegler continued: “It is a doubtful
compliment to a Negro athlete who is qualified to attend college to attempt to account
for his proficiency on the field by suggesting that he is still so close to the primitive that
whenever he runs a foot-race in a formal meet between schools his civilization vanishes
and he becomes again for the moment an African savage in breachcloth and nose ring
legging it through the jungle.” Quoted in Mead, Champion, 105. For a notably different
rendering of this quotation, see Hoberman, Darwin's Athletes, 226.
35.
Dean Cromwell and Al Wesson, Championship Techniques in Track and Field (New York,
1941), 6; Wiggins, “‘Great Speed But Little Stamina,“’ 161. Compare these representations
with the one that the Nazi architect and functionary, Albert Speer, attributed to Adolf
Hitler: “People whose antecedents came from the jungle were primitive. . . Their
physiques were stronger than those of civilized whites. They represented unfair competition
and hence must be excluded from future [Olympic] games.” Albert Speer, Inside the
Third Reich (New York: Avon, 1971), 114, quoted in John Hoberman, “Toward a Theory
of Olympic Internationalism,” Journal of Sport History 22 (Spring 1995), 26.
36.
Carleton S. Coon quoted in Marshall Smith, “Giving the Olympics an Anthropological
Once-Over,” Life 57 (October 23, 1964), 83. Describing the research of the anthropologist
Robert Malina, another journalist later reported the “well-known findings which suggest
that animals living in hot climates tend to have longer extremities and a lesser body mass
in order to dissipate heat. With their long legs and arms, blacks have a greater surface
area from which to dissipate heat through the skin.” See Martin Kane, “An Assessment
of ‘Black is Best,‘” Sports Illustrated (January 18, 1971), 76.
37. John McCallum and Charles H. Pearson, College Football, USA, 1869-1973 (New York:
Hall of Fame Publishers, 1973), 231.
38.
One of the most famous works concerning physiological difference was the expansive
text by Tanner et al., The Physique of the Olympic Athlete. For a more recent work placing
such thinking in context and pointing out its flaws, see John Bale and Joe Sang, Kenyan
Running: Movement, Culture, Geography and Global Change (London: Frank Cass, 1996).
39.
See, for example, a five-part series by Charles Maher in the Los Angeles Times (March
24-29, 1968) that surveyed current biological studies of black athletic performance,
concluding that hard training and motivational factors accounted for the increasing number
of successes by African American athletes. Mainstream sociological opinion had begun
to yield the same conclusions. See D. Stanley Eitzen and George Sage, Sociology of
American Sport (Dubuque, IA: W. C. Brown Company, 1978), 300, Jay Coakley, Sport in
Society: Issues and Controversies (St. Louis, MO: Times Mirror/Mosby College Pub., 1986),
146-150.
40.
Kane did not spare his readers what he considered the relevant statistics: one study reported
that black sprinters “averaged 86.2 centimeters in leg length while white sprinters averaged
83. . . The blacks’ hip width averaged 26.8 centimeters, and the whites’, 28.5. The ratio
of leg length to sitting height for sprinters, 400-meter runners, and high jumpers averaged
0.88, 0.92 and 0.93 in whites, and 0.93, 0.97 and 1.01 in Negroes,” according to one of
Kane’s experts, who also discovered “a distinct difference in the composition of the Negro
calf compared with that of the white. . . .” Kane, “An Assessment of ‘Black is Best,”’ 74.
41.
For an appraisal of the backlash, see Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall, Chain of
Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes in American Politics (New York: Norton,
1992.
42.
In 1906, at the invitation of Du Bois, Boas had delivered a paper titled “The Health and
Physique of the Negro-American” at the eleventh annual Atlanta University Conference.
Emphasizing the significance of culture in perceived racial differences, he was instrumental
in prompting young African American scholars, such as Zora Neale Hurston, to undertake
research in black folklore and culture. Through the first half of the century Boasians were
popular speakers on the campuses of historically black colleges. See David Levering Lewis,
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W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919 (New York: H. Holt, 1993), 351-352.
See Boas, The Real Race Problem from the Point Of View of Anthropology (New York: National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1912); idem, Race and Nationality
(New York American Association for International Conciliation, 1915). See also George
W. Stocking, Jr., ed. A Franz Boas Reader: The Shaping of American Anthropology 18831911 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Marshall Hyatt, Franz Boas, Social
Activist: The Dynamics of Ethnicity (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990); Vernon J.
Williams, Jr., Rethinking Race: Franz Boas and His Contemporaries (Lexington: University
of Kentucky Press, 1996). For notable articles appearing in African American journals,
see Albert S. Beckham, Race and Intelligence,” Opportunity 10 (August 1932), 240242; Morris Steggerda, “Testing the Psychology of Washington Blacks,” Opportunity 11
(September 1933), 274-275.
43. W. Montague Cobb, “Race and Runners,” The Journal of Health and Physical Education 7
(January 1936), 3-7, 52-56.
44.
Cobb, “Race and Runners,” 3-7, 52-56; See also, idem, “The Physical Constitution of
the American Negro,” The Journal of Negro Education 3 (1934), 340-388; idem, “Does
Science Favor Negro Athletes?” Negro Digest 5 (May 1947), 74-77.
4.5.
On his responses to the Kane article, see Harry Edwards, “The Sources of Black Athletic
Superiority,” The Black Scholar 3 (November 1971), 32-41; idem, “The Myth of the Racially
Superior Athlete” Intellectual Digest 2 (March 1972), 58-60; idem, “20th Century
Gladiators for White America,” Psychology Today 7 (November 1973), 43-52. Edwards’
survey works include The Revolt of the Black Athlete (New York: Free Press, 1969) and
Sociology of Sport (Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey Press, 1973). In the mode of Edwards’ cultural
critique, see Gary Sailes, “The Myth of Black Sports Supremacy,” Journal of Black Studies
21 (June 1991), 480-487. See also Arthur Ashe, Jr., A Hard Road to Glory: A History of
the African-American Athlete (New York: Warner Books, 1988).
46.
On African-centered social commentary, see Molefi Asante, Afrocentricity: The Theory of
Social Change (Buffalo, N.Y.: Amulefi Publishi ng Co., 1980); idem, The Afro-Centric
Idea (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987). See also Cheikh Anta Diop,
Civilization or Barbarism. An Authentic Anthropology (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Lawrence Hill
Books, 1991); Bernal, Black Athena. An impressive introduction to the mode of thought
can be found in Carl Pedersen, “Between Racial Fundamentalism and Ultimate Reality:
The Debate over Afrocentrism,” Working Paper, No. 4, Odense American Studies
International Series, 1993. And concerning its appeal, see Gerald Early, “Understanding
Afrocentrism: Why Blacks Dream of a World Without Whites,” Civilization (July/August
1995), 31-39. See also Clarence E. Walker, “You Can’t Go Home Again: The Problem
with Afrocentrism,” Prospects 18 (1993), 535-543; on ‘therapy’ and history,’ see Leon
Litwack, “The Two-Edged Suspicion,” American Historical Association Perspectives 31
(September 1993), 13-14. For a somewhat different view of this strand of black
nationalism, see bell hooks, Black Looks: Rare and Representation (Boston: South End
Press, 1992), 30.
47.
Edwin B. Henderson, “The Negro Athlete and Race Prejudice,” Opportunity 14 (March
1936), 77-79. Significantly, to read the large body of Henderson’s works (as well as those
W. Montague Cobb) would be to understand their primary concerns as assimilationist or
integrationist; the stray passages that speak to essentialist notions of black excellence
need to be read within this broader context. See Wiggins, “Edwin Bancroft Henderson,
African American Athletes and the Writing of Sport History” in Glory Bound; Miller,
The Playing Fields of American Culture, chaps. 7, 8.
48.
Hill, quoted in Kane, “An Assessment of ‘Black is Best,“’ 76, 79. See also David Zang,
“Calvin Hill Interview,” Journal of Sport History 15 (Winter 1988), 334-355. In
Henderson’s The Black Athlete, a number of African American athletes and coaches declared
that physiological factors largely accounted for their success. In a 1977 Time article,
titled “Black Dominance,” O. J. Simpson argued that blacks “were built a little differently.
. . built for speed—skinny calves, long legs, high asses are all characteristics of blacks.”
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See Time (May 9, 1977), 57-60; Wiggins, “‘Great Speed But Little Stamina,‘” 172-174.
In a telling counterpoint to the line of essentialist thought embraced by many black
athletes (as well as the habits of the mainstream press), the basketball player Isaiah Thomas
argued in 1987 against “the perpetuation of stereotypes about blacks.” “When [Larry]
Bird makes a great play, it’s due to his thinking and his work habits,” Thomas remarked.
“It’s all planned out by him. It’s not the case for blacks. All we do is run and jump. We
never practice or give a thought to how we play. It’s like I came dribbling out of my
mother’s womb.” New York Times, June 2, 1987; see also ibid., June 5, 9, 1987. Quoted
in David K. Wiggins, “The Notion of Double-Consciousness and the Involvement of
Black Athletes in American Sport,” in George Eisen and David K. Wiggins, eds., Ethnicity
and Sport in North American History and Culture (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994),
151.
49.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Delusions of Grandeur,” Sports Illustrated (August 19, 1991),
78. For a critique of Hoberman—and rebuttal, see Jeffrey T. Sammons, “A Proportionate
and Measured Response to the Provocation that is Darwin's Athletes and John Hoberman,
“How Not to Misread Darwin's Athletes: A Response to Jeffrey T. Sammons, “Journal of
Sport History 24 (Fall 1997), 378-396. Lamentably, neither Hoberman’s text nor Sammons’
review suggests that the authors are familiar with such critical concepts as “hegemony,”
(in any of the ways that term has been cast) or the cultural studies that seek to place the
“myth of race” in historical context. See also, John Bale et al., “Review Symposium on
Darwin's Athletes,” International Review for the Sociology of Sport 33 (March 1998).
50.
On melanin theory, see Frances Cress-Welsing, The Isis (Yssis) Papers (Chicago: Third
World Press, 1991); Alfred B. Pasteur and Ivory L. Toldson, Roots of Soul: The Psychology
of Black Expressiveness: An Unprecedented and Intensive Examination of Black Folk
Sexpressions in the Enrichment of Life (New York: Anchor Press, 1982). See also Legrand
H. Clegg II, “Why Black Athletes Run Faster,” Sepia 29 (July 1980): 18-22. The best
survey of the subject is Bernard R. Ortiz de Montellano, “Melanin, Afrocentricity, and
Pseudoscience,” Yearbook of Pbysical Anthropology 36 (1993), quotes on p. 39. See also
Christopher Wills, “The Skin We’re In,” Discover (November 1994), 77-81. Thanks to
David K. Wiggins, John Hoberman, and Don Cunningham for pointing out these sources
to me.
51.
On these episodes, see Wiggins, “‘Great Speed But Little Stamina,“’ 179-181; Phillip
M. Hoose, Necessities: Racial Barriers in American Sports (New York Random House,
1989); New York Times, March 27, 1997. The NBC documentary, a Brokaw Report on
“Black Athletes—Fact and Fiction,” was aired on April 25, 1989. For an impressive
assessment of this program, see Laurel R. Davis, “The Articulation of Difference: White
Preoccupation with the Question of Racially Linked Genetic Differences Among Blacks,”
Sociology of Sport Journal 7 (June 1990), 179-187; see also, John Hoberman, “‘Black
Athletes—Fact and Fiction’: A Racist Documentary?” lecture presented at the convention
of the American Psychological Association, August 14, 1990. I am grateful to Professor
Hoberman for sharing this with me.
52.
See Richard Cohen, “The Greek’s Defense,” Washington Post, January 19, 1988. D’Souza
also drew heavily on Amby Burfoot, “White Men Can’t Run” (A Special Report Exploring
the Reasons Why Black Runners Dominate all Running Events from the Sprints to the
Marathon), Runner's World (August 1992), 89-95. Burfoot’s piece offers updated versions
of some of the “scientific” material in Kane’s 1971 Sports Illustrated article. Burfoot has
since disavowed his article and the uses to which it has been put.
53.
D’Souza, The End of Racism, 440-441.
54. Tom Hyde, “White Men Can’t Jump,” Metro: Essentially Auckland (September 1993):
63-69. I am indebted to Charles Martin for pointing this work out to me.
55.
150
Hyde, “White Men Can’t Jump,” 69. More recently still, the New Zealand anthropologist
Phillip Houghton has spoken of the ways Polynesians such as the great rugby player
Jonah Lomu have finally reached their “genetic potential.” Houghton, People of the Ocean:
Aspects of Human Biology of the Early Pacific (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University
Press, 1996). See also Iulia Leilua, “Lomu and the Polynesian Powerpacks, “New Zealand
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Fitness (February/March 1996), 24-27. I am grateful to Douglas Booth for sharing this
article with me.
56.
One might also note in this context such statements as those by the track legend Roger
Bannister on the physical endowments of Britain’s black sprinters: “As a scientist rather
than a sociologist, I am prepared to risk political incorrectness by drawing attention to
the seemingly obvious fact that black sprinters and black athletes in general all seem to
have certain natural anatomical advantages.” Bannister qualified this assertion somewhat
in contrasting the musculature of the black sprint champions Linford Christie and Carl
Lewis. “The Brain, not the heart or lungs, is the critical organ,” he concluded. See
“Bannister Speculates on Sprinters,” Chicago Tribune, September 14, 1995. In broader
terms, Marek Kohn discusses the “race science system” directed at the control of the
Romani (Gypsy) population recently established in Southern and Eastern Europe, See
Kohn, The Race Gallery, 178-252; On issues of classification and discrimination, see also
Saul Dubow, Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa (Cambridge, England: Cambridge
University Press, 1995).
57.
For a recent discussion of this notion, see Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past:
Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).
58.
See Michael Wilbon, “Dreams of Pros Are a Con,” Washington Post, March 22, 1997.
59.
Even some of the scholars who have labored most to expose the pernicious implications
of racial essentialism remain bound to racial category. Though it should be a matter of
fact that mixed racial heritage subverts any notion of a sprinting gene, or a jumping
gene—in the athletic sense, of course—commentators such as John Hoberman neglect
or refuse to deal with multiplicity or mixed racial heritage. Hoberman, for example, does
not quote W. Montague Cobb’s comments about the light-skinned and obviously mixed
heritage of black athletic champions, Howard Drew and Ned Gourdin. Neither does he
mention Dan O’Brien, the Olympic champion and world record holder in the decathlon,
whose birth parents were Finnish and African American, and who was adopted at an
early age and raised in a multi-racial family. For his part, Tiger Woods, a legend-in-themaking among golfers, declines to acknowledge one, and only one, ancestry and identity
in the attempt to avoid the racialization of his athletic accomplishment.
60.
On the foundations, see Jean Stefancic and Richard Delgado, No Mercy: How Conservative
Think Tanks and Foundations Changed Americas’ Social Agenda (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1996). For a call similar to this one, see Rury, “IQ Redux,” 436-438; see
also, Michael Bérubé “Extreme Prejudice,” Transition 69 (Spring 1996), 90-99.
61.
See, for example, Malcolm Browne, “What Is Intelligence, and Who Has It?” New York
Times Book Review, October 16, 1994; George M. Fredrickson on D’Souza, “Demonizing
the American Dilemma,” The New York Review of Books 42 (October 19, 1995), 10-16.
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