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Title:

Taboo

Subtitle:

Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid to Talk about It

Author:

Jon Entine

Publisher:

PublicAffairs, 2000

ISBN

1-891620-39-8

I'm really not sure how to begin this review. Maybe I should begin by saying that the subject of human races and human genetics is an incredibly complex subject, about which it is easy to jump to conclusions. It is certainly true that human temperament itself doesn't make things any easier, as we all instinctively form prejudices in our minds about people based on whatever stereotypes are available.

So, when I first picked up Entine's book, I naturally picked my first stereotype: right-wing lunatic with yet another Bellcurve type book. In this case, instead of calling anyone with African ancestry stupid, Taboo was calling them fast. It seemed like the same coin, just flipped on its other side. To be sure, I leafed through the book, looking for anything noteworthy, but decided that it was just your typical "look at all them blacks in the NBA" rant, and certainly not worth my time. I knew why an intelligent person would be reticent on this subject: whether you were white or black, your motives would be questioned, and nothing useful could possibly come from the discussion.

A few weeks later someone posted the URL of a column written by Entine to alt.fan.cecil-adams. The tenor of the discussion quickly became heated, with defenders of Entine's thesis arguing that such a thing as "race" existed, while Entine's detractors vehemently denied it. After a while the discussion died down, but then one person mentioned that he'd been getting email from Jon Entine. This prompted a disparaging comment from me, which in turn prompted Jon Entine to email me, as well. His email was no more temperate than my comment had been kind, to be sure, but in the end it meant that I went to the public library to read that damn book.

It was, to say the least, a schizophrenic experience. Jon Entine has an easy writing style, not the sort of thing I tend to associate with right-wing rants. (In fact, Entine is not pushing a right-wing political agenda at all. His call for more rigorous science should be kept distinct from right-wing arguments that hide behind a call for better science.) There was a certain editorial sloppiness, but not really enough to cause problems. However, if I never again see someone use the word "postmodern", it'll be too soon! (What the hell does it mean, anyway? According to Entine, it means anti-science soft headed thinking, I think.)

Entine spends a lot of time laying groundwork. This is easy to miss, in part because of the misleading title. (When I asked him about that, he called it just a "headline." He's a journalist: have you ever noticed how newspaper headlines work?) The main reason why the groundwork is easy to miss, though, is because it is laid on such slippery ground.

Take, for example, Entine's "elephant," the embarrassing problem that is so huge that it can't be ignored but no one wants to talk about it: intelligence versus physical prowess. Entine takes pains to say, throughout the book, that though he is arguing that black genetics make blacks better potential athletes than whites, that doesn't mean that whites are smarter than blacks. Clearly, physical prowess doesn't preclude intelligence. But Entine on the one hand argues that only a few dozen regulatory genes need to be considered when measuring the significant racial differences between people, while on the other hand he points out that over 40,000 genes - fully 1/3 of the human genome by some estimates - govern the development of the human brain, so intelligence must be a lot more complex than physical prowess.

Then there's Entine's take on race. Entine emphasizes the work of Cavalli-Sforza, who used genetic mapping to group human populations in terms of how closely they are related. This work collects all African descended people into one group, and everyone else is separate, though themselves split into a number of sub-groups. But when Entine examines where his sports mavericks come from, he finds that they aren't Africans, they are in fact members of some few very small groups of Africans.

Both of these problems are slippery because they are completely informed by what Entine himself calls the folk understanding of race. We tend to see people who all look alike due to skin color as being of the same race. Entine makes a heroic effort to redefine his terms, a trouble he could have saved himself if he'd just avoided worrying about the word race. (In email, Entine admitted to me that it was probably impossible to separate the word "race" from its folk meaning.)

Mind you, then the book would simply have presented the fairly unremarkable claim that there exist small groups of people on this planet who have a slight genetic advantage over all other groups of people when it comes to running fast, or running long, or upper body strength. Such a book might not have been able to carry the words "taboo" and "afraid" on the cover.

Entine, of course, complains bitterly about critics who nitpick at his book. The trouble is that the nitpicks are his own fault. He is, after all, the one making sweeping claims in the name of science, when in fact science supports only very specific and tentative findings. He pretends to give alternative arguments careful consideration, when he in fact often sweeps them aside dismissively, not even bothering to footnote key claims where in other places he footnotes even the most trivial side remark.

In the end this book is deeply troubling. While I'm not convinced of Entine's thesis, I must agree that, restated to within its limits, it is a reasonable one to start with. These limits are, however, not honestly dealt with by Entine. It is clear from the book that Entine understands the limits, but, to maintain the sensationalist tone set by the book's "headline," he hides the limits behind editoral comments and handwaving.

To the extent that issues of biodiversity and human genetics are becoming increasingly important, and must be discussed by reasonable people, books like Entine's book are a start, but I cannot recommend the book, simply because as a popular book it presents information in a manner that can be misleading, and as a book presenting a scientific thesis it seems to be sloppy and one-sided.

More Information

This NY Times review is considerably more favorable than my review, as is this review in Scientific American. The book seems to evoke ambivalent feelings among African Americans, as this review at BlackAthlete.com seems to suggest. You can find Jon Entine on the internet, of course, complete with many more reviews of Taboo.

Here is the the Salon.com article that indirectly got me started reading this book. There is an interesting interview with Jon Entine in Runner's World, which actually casts what I think is an important light on the book.

Samuel R. Delaney, a science fiction author and critic who happens to be African American, wrote an essay on racism back in 1999. (You can read it in Dark Matter, edited by Sheree R. Tomas.) There he explains how race is a social construct. I particularly appreciated his point that in our culture, everything someone from a minority race does will be seen through the socio-cultural filter of race. Thus Judge Thomas became a Supreme Court justice in spite of being black, or Michael Jordan was a demon on the basketball court because he was black. (This applies to some extent to whites, as well. While few people will say that George Bush became president because he was white - it certainly didn't hurt - there are many who might suggest that John Stockton was a great basketball player in spite of being white.)

The fact that the qualities white or black refer merely to the lack or abundance of certain pigments in the skin, is completely overridden by the team jersey prejudices of our culture which assign anyone with African ancestry, no matter how scant, to the group called black. This prejudice is shared by most Americans, not just those who happen to have no (recent) African ancestry.

For what it's worth, here's an article with more of my take on the word "post-modern."

There are, incidentally, many fewer genes in the human genome than the over 100,000 genes that made up the (or at least one) generally accepted estimate at the time I originally wrote this review. Since then the Human Genome Project has concluded that there may be fewer than 30,000 genes that make up the recipe of the Naked Ape. (That's barely half again as many as the simple roundworm c. elegans has.) Of course, there's still considerable uncertainty about that number, since it isn't easy to tell what is a gene, for a variety of reasons.