The Myth of Black Athletic Superiority

The Myth of Black Athletic Superiority

John Hoberman's Darwins Athletes: How Sport has Damaged Black America and preserved the Myth of Race has acknowledged that disparities is certain atheltic performances exist, but has cited from a range of sources, including his own inferences that "there is no evidence to confirm that black athletic superiority exists" (82). 

Basically, "black athletic superiority" is the unscientific myth that claims that black people possess certain generic and/or environmental traits that dispose them to be better athletes than non-Black people.

A rather convincing fact to put our minds at rest is this, "while it is superficially true that most of the world recordholders in the 100-metre dash are of West African heritage, they also all have partial genetic heritage from Europe and Native America, they have also all trained outside of West Africa, and West African nations have not trained any top-level runners, (7).

This above statement, if true, means that racist believers of the proposition that blacks are athletically superior have no grounds to base their claim on - it is impossible to reduce their success to genetics.

What I think I am getting at here is that we are rationally entitled to believe that the myth of black athletic superiority is purely just a myth.

We know also from what Suzanne said that Stereotyping occurs inferentially in the media through a process of:

- Essentialising the trait as something fundamental

- Reducing the person as a summation of the fundamental and essential trait

- Naturalizing the trait.

What I hope to achieve in this post is encouraging us into looking towards how the Brazil Olympics might "naturalize" the myth of black athletic superiority through commentary. 

I had not had much knowledge about stereotyping in the media, but thanks to Suzanne's lecture I am making a point of being aware how how verbal utterances through commentary might imply or construct the myth of black athletic superiority.