PATERNO JOINS THE RACIAL DISCUSSION

I think JoePa’s right. It’s a rough topic, the third rail of college football.

S & O, I take a stab at it too in this week’s Bama Report. Forgive me for not being too sympathetic to “poor Fisher DeBerry”.

Nice article JC. I frankly am a bit far afield when I get into the realm of cultural and biological anthropology, but I love hearing both types of arguments. Are you familiar with a New Yorker piece that was done on this about 4 years ago? It took a genetic diversity look at athletic acheivement (specifically 100M sprinters) but I don’t recall the details well enough to discuss it.

I was under the impression that until Joe Pa got his most recent pair of glasses, he couldn’t actually tell if the players he was coaching were white or black.
They all looked nitanny blue to him.

That book—from which the article is excerpted—is Jon Entine’s Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We’re Afraid To Talk About It. We’ve read it, and it’s more of a sketch of the issue than anything else, so the meat of the book is stretched a bit thin between its arguments.

A great rebuttal from Lorretta DiPietro in Scientific American below the Amazon review is required reading.

I’ve read the article but not the book. Frankly, my bullshit detector gets twitchy around Entine’s bio part of his biocultural theory, only because there really aren’t meaningful biological differences between the races. His theory begins with and encourages an assumed premise.

I’m far more interested in how the perception of athletes changed following racial integration. As a parallel, musical ability was considered an intellectual attribute until black people started playing jazz, then it became a ‘God-given gift’.

Also, just to be clear, even though sports ability doesn’t exclude intelligence, Kenny Irons is a moron — can’t forget that.

I’m glad to see that rivalry knows no race… only school colors.

Anybody who relies on biological theories of race to explain anything is a total moron who should be confined to a colony of phrenologists. To quote Mr. Burns, “You have the brainpan of a stagecoach tilter.” Also, I am sick of hearing the white folks make the “why ya’ll’s gots to make everything so racial?” argument. Could we please get a moratorium on the Ward Connerly-style defenses of racial neutrality? Race matters. Period.

That excessive celebration call against Vandy the worst judgment call that I have ever seen.

Seconded. The officials made a slew of bad calls in the game—that was undoubtedly the worst.

Point of note: Paterno did first say that it was due to better practice facilities.

Incidentally, there are other reasons why black athletes could be better sprinters, etc. than white athletes that has nothing to do with genetics. One’s simple – geography. African American population percentage is still highest in the south, and it could easily be that a warmer climate leads to more track athletes.

Another reason is of course cultural – people tend to emulate the people they look up to. Black athletes dominate certain positions in the NFL (cornerback/wide receiver), so it makes sense that other people would follow in their tracks. I think this is even more true when it comes to college football – certain universities in areas with a lower African-American population percentage are well known for slow, strong positions (like Penn State with linebackers), and so, go fig, the (predominantly white) population in the area around it tends to produce linebackers.

I thought DeBerry may have stepped a bit over the line, but I think Paterno’s statement is right, and I think it has nothing to do with any genetic disposition (which is complete crap).

I don’t think Southerners are genetically predisposed to liking country music, but someone from the South is still more likely to be a country music fan than someone from the North.