January 13–20, 2000
critic pick|reading
Taboo
Philadelphia native Jon Entine wastes no time getting the millennium off to a thought-provoking start with his new book, Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports And Why We Are Afraid To Talk About It (Public Affairs). Entine produced a 1989 NBC special which linked black dominance in certain sports (such as basketball, football and sprinting) to genetics, and drew condemnation for even bringing up the topic. Undaunted, Entine returns to the subject with Taboo, which quotes from leading geneticists who maintain that athletes of West African origin have certain physical characteristics — smaller chest cavities, longer arm spans and higher centers of gravity — which enable them to excel in running and jumping. In the past, connecting black athletic prowess to genetics has been turned to racist ends. Early 20th-century eugenicists emphasized blacks’ physical superiority to "confirm" the intellectual superiority of whites, and in the 1980s sports figures Al Campanis and Jimmy "The Greek" Snyder lost their jobs for crudely attributing African-American success in sports to physical characteristics.
But one set of physical differences is not "better" or "worse," Entine insists, nor does physical strength equal intellectual weakness. "An appreciation of human diversity is a sign of humanity," he said in a phone interview, "not an insinuation of superiority and inferiority." Quoting existing research (much of it from the current Human Genome Project), Entine is merely probing the delicate subject of the physiological differences between blacks and whites. Just as genetic differences mean Jews are likelier that non-Jews to develop Tay-Sachs disease, Entine claims, black athletes have one set of genetic physical strengths, and whites have another. Surprisingly, Entine says he’s actually found black academics and journalists more responsive to his ideas than whites, if only because it’s better to have such ideas aired and discredited rather than allowing them to continue to exist as folklore. The Cheltenham High alum says he isn’t afraid to affront popular political and scientific beliefs: "No new idea has come without danger.… If we didn’t accept new ideas, we’d all be members of the Flat Earth Society."
Jon Entine speaks Mon., Jan. 17, 7 p.m., at Barnes and Noble, 1805 Walnut St., 215-665-0716.
