Are Races Racist?
07/10/2012
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From the L.A. Times:

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

By Dan Turner 

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

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

And so forth and so on.

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

How much evidence is there for genetic selection of blacks in the New World? Let's look at the simplest relevant database for evaluating the Snyder-Johnson theory: Wikipedia's list of the 83 men who have run 100m in faster than 10 seconds

I count 14 runners born and raised in Africa out of 83 (of which 81 are sub-Saharan Africans by ancestry). That includes 12 running for African countries and two who grew up in West Africa but run as adults for Norway or Qatar. 

The West African figures aren't as impressive as the 38 from the U.S., 11 from Jamaica, and five from Trinidad. Yet, excluding American and West Indian blacks, Nigeria leads the world with eight men under 10 seconds. In contrast, only two non-blacks have gone under 10.00. 

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

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