“Slave genes” myth must die
Posted By richards on July 25, 2012
In 1988, Jimmy The Greek Snyder (in)famously stated that the prowess of African-American football players could be traced to slavery, saying the black is a better athlete to begin with because hes been bred to be that way [They] jump higher and run faster. The reaction to such obviously racist remarks was fast and furious: Amid the uproar, CBS Sports fired him. So when Olympic gold medalist Michael Johnson predicted this month that African-American and West Indian track athletes would dominate the London Olympics because of the genes of their slave ancestors, I paid little attention, thinking there was no way this could become a viable conversation yet again. All my life I believed I became an athlete through my own determination, but its impossible to think that being descended from slaves hasnt left an imprint through the generations, Johnson told the Daily Mail. Difficult as it was to hear, slavery has benefited descendants like me - I believe there is a superior athletic gene in us.
As a historian, what I find to be stunning about what he said is the claim that the supremacy of black athletes in track had never been discussed openly before. Actually, with his words, Johnson plunged himself into a century-old debate that seems to rear its (rather ugly) head every four years, just in time for the opening of sports largest global stage. Johnson supported his theory with the example of the mens 100m final at the Beijing Olympics: Three of the eight finalists came from Jamaica, including record-breaking winner Usain Bolt, and two from Trinidad; African-Americans Walter Dix and Doc Patton and Dutch sprinter Churandy Martina, who hails from Curacao, rounded out the line.
But racial assumptions dont work as easily as simply noting that four years ago all eight finalists in the quest to be worlds fastest man likely had ancestors who were slaves, because race is, well, never simple, but rather works as an amoebic identity formation that changes throughout history. Its a social construction deeply entangled with definitions of class, gender, sexuality and so on.
Just ask USA Swimming. A few years ago, the organization released data from its diversity study, which found that almost 60 percent of African-American children couldnt swim, twice as many as their white counterparts. Of the organizations 252,000 members, less than 2 percent who swim competitively identified themselves as black. At the core of the racial gap, researchers found the influence of parents to be key: If a parent could not swim or was afraid of swimming, the child was less likely to learn.
The reason behind the drought of diversity in swimming is not hard to figure out, and it has nothing to do with the physical legacy of slavery: Throughout the Jim Crow era and beyond swimming pools were located where black families were not. While swimming is not really one of the so-called patrician sports, such as golf or tennis, which are connected to membership in restricted clubs, minority access to swimming pools was limited, at best.
At the Sydney Olympics in 2000, Anthony Ervin changed what an elite U.S. swimmer was supposed to look like. Heralded as the first swimmer of African descent to make the U.S. team, Ervins family background, with ties to Jewish, Native American and African-American lineages, exemplifies why it is so difficult to make racial assumptions. Just as journalists scrambled to find a language with which to describe Tiger Woods decidedly mixed parental heritage in 1997 when he won the Masters, Ervin eschewed being pigeonholed as a first anything. But in the United States, race is generally dealt with in a binary of black and white, regardless of the multiplicities of color. Thus, if one is not white, which neither Ervin nor Woods is, one is black.
Now, after retiring for a lengthy period, Ervin is heading to London alongside Cullen Jones and Lia Neal. The trio makes for the most diverse U.S. swim team in history, as never before has more than one swimmer with what Jones describes as African-American roots represented the U.S. at an Olympic Games. Thats right: Three athletes out of 49 is historic.
The diversity study has pushed USA Swimming to launch several outreach programs including Make a Splash, which Jones is involved in in minority-dense communities. But the organization recognizes the difficulty when dealing with race. We are working hard at inclusion and some of our past collection of ethnicity information is less than perfect, says Matt Farrell, chief marketing officer. The more you pull on the thread of defining ethnicity, the more complicated it becomes. As marketers we want to measure progress in diversifying the sport, but kids arent labeling themselves. They just want a sport or activity where they feel they belong. Our 2012 Olympic Team is starting to better reflect society.
But swimmings problems arent merely rooted in its inabilities to categorize the multi-ethnic backgrounds of swimmers such as Ervin and Neal. Just as Johnsons remarks about black sprinters rest upon well-worn mythologies about the black body, long-standing stereotypes about African-Americans in the water continue to plague the sport, based on a tabloid science that has wielded destructive authority in racist dialogues for decades, ensuring that the school of white men cant jump persists in a post-civil rights era. While the late Los Angeles Dodgers executive Al Campanis takes most of the heat for his infamous exchange in 1987 with Ted Koppel, in which he asserted that African-Americans were not good swimmers because they dont have the buoyancy, beliefs in racialized biology and athletic ability are deeply embedded in much of what people think they know about sports.
Untangling such stereotypes is difficult, because they feed into the racist structures upon which the United States was built. Sport has played a multifaceted role in both enforcing racist beliefs and combating them, sometimes simultaneously, from the turn of the 20thcentury to today. While strategies in the early 1900s at institutions such as Howard University and the Tuskegee Institute, for example, were meant to use sport as a means of black upward mobility for African-Americans, they also ensured the reinforcement of racialized notions of innate athletic ability, many of which were being generated in university laboratories.
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“Slave genes” myth must die
