Jon Entine

Let me start with a few recollections:

(1) Thirty-five years ago I was a student in an introductory biology class at BYU. I have many recollections of this class, almost all of them good. One which perplexed me at the time and is a little hazy now related to the subject of race, and I believe it arose in the context of a discussion of evolution when a student raised his hand and suggested that effects of natural selection could account for physical differences between races. The professor seemed quite upset by the comment and appeared to make the assertion that there aren't any physical differences between races. After having his say, the professor clearly wanted to drop the subject, so those of us with questions like "Not even hair?" "Not even skin pigmentation?!" were left wondering if we'd understood him correctly. Maybe I'm remembering the student's question incorrectly; maybe it was more offensive, like implying that blacks occupy a more primitive spot on the evolutionary tree. At this remove, I'm not really certain.

(2) About 25 years ago, I was riding in an airport shuttle after having attended a conference at Berkeley. When the (African-American) shuttle driver heard I was from BYU, he immediately started talking about what a great basketball player Keith Van Horn was. Partly out of politeness and partly out of inattention due to my concentrated efforts to avoid motion sickness as we meandered up and down the Berkeley hills to pick up other passengers, I played along and refrained from pointing out that Van Horn was playing not for BYU but its arch-rival up the road. I don't recall the driver's exact words, but I think he voiced the same opinion that one of Van Horn's future NBA teammates did when he called him "a very light-skinned black".

(3) Not so much a recollection, but a continuing conundrum for me. It seems like there used to be story after story on "60 Minutes" about the EEOC going after some company because there was a statistical disparity between the demographics of its employees and the demographics of the community in which it was located. Why, I thought, didn't the EEOC ever go after the NBA?

Taboo, by Jon Entine, is subtitled "Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why we are Afraid to Talk about it". Entine clearly believes there are physical differences between the races; not in the sense that the darkest-skinned white doesn't have darker skin than the lightest-skinned black--Was that my professor's point?--but in the sense that there are statistically-significant variations between races in heritable physical traits like percentage of fast-twitch muscle, hormone and enzyme levels, bone density and length, and lung capacity, that affect athletic performance. (Entine actually considers East and West Africans separately, with the former excelling at aerobic activities and the latter excelling at anaerobic activities.) He appears to try, however, to air the arguments on both sides fairly, and he hedges his statements enough that I don't think there's anything in the book he can get in trouble for saying.

I think Entine is more a journalist than a scholar and, for better or worse, that affects the way this book is written. I thought he did a pretty good job. I must say that in the second half of the book I was bugged by the number of typographical errors. There are also a few factual errors. (Contra Entine, I don't think Van Horn is a Utah native.) For BYU sports fans, there's a fun photo of Frankie Fredericks and a cheetah crouching side-by-side at the starting line of a race.

For me, one of the most powerful things about this book was Entine's depressing digression into an account of the drug-based sports empire that East Germany built. It was funny 45 years ago when it was the subject of comedy-show skits but not so funny now that the archives are open and we can see the full picture of how people were willing to wreck their (and others') bodies and break the rules in order to win at sports.… (mais)