Cross-posted at Racialicious.
Race as biology has largely been discredited, yet beliefs about one race being biologically superior to another still seem to pervade one social arena: sports. Claims that different races have genetic advantages to play particular sports persists both because individual athletic ability obviously has some basis in biology (even though that does not mean it is racial biology at play) and athletics appears to be one social arena where racial minorities succeed over whites in certain sports.
For example, according to the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports’ 2011 Racial and Gender Report Card on The National Football League (http://www.tidesport.org), over 2/3rds of players in the NFL are African American — far higher than the proportion of Blacks in the general population of the United States. This report also shows that all other racial groups are under-represented in the NFL relative to their proportion in the general population, including Asians who make up only 2% of the players in the league.
These statistics compel many to assume that racial biology plays a large part in athletic success. However, the 60 Minutes investigation Football Island debunks this assumption during a trip to the place where most of the Asian players in the NFL come from: American Samoa. This small island is a U.S. Territory in the Pacific and has a population small enough to seat comfortably in most professional football stadiums. Yet the average Samoan child “is 56 times more likely to get into the NFL than any other kid in America.”
60 Minutes finds Samoans succeed at football only in small part because of their size and strength. Rather, their success grows mostly out of a “warrior culture” that instills a strong work ethic in young men. Also, on the island the daily chores that are a necessary part of survival provide a lifetime of athletic conditioning. In short, many of the Asian players in the NFL are successful because of their nurturing, and not their nature.
[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/60688464[/vimeo]
Samoans are also driven to succeed at football because they come from a place plagued by poverty and often their only chance at a better life is through athletics (that, or follow another Samoan tradition and join the Armed Forces). In the video, the most famous Samoan player, Troy Palamalu of the Pittsburgh Steelers, explains “football is a ‘meal ticket.’ Just like any marginalized ethnic group, you know, if you don’t make it to the NFL, what do you have to go back to?”
—————————-
Jason Eastman is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Coastal Carolina University who researches how culture and identity influence social inequalities.
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Comments 37
Yrro Simyarin — September 10, 2012
What common culture did Carl Lewis, Michael Johnson, and Usain Bolt grow up in? Nurture is important, but you can't hand-wave away biological differences just because racial boundaries are poorly defined.
Hard work and warrior mentality will not get you into the NFL without size and strength to match - just look at the hundreds of solid college players who never even get drafted.
Lost_Left_Coaster — September 10, 2012
"Warrior culture" sounds a bit dubious too -- I think that Troy Palamalu's comment at the end there probably gets at it better than anything else. After all, does anyone assert that so many Dominican men succeed at pro baseball because of their "warrior culture"? (what does that even mean?) That kind of idea explains very little, but I bet that we can draw parallels between the types of pressures that Samoan and Dominican boys feel in order to succeed at sports, and then once pro scouts start to take notice, the whole enterprise gains more momentum and attracts more athletes and scouts alike.
Joonas — September 10, 2012
Either you're slinging crack rock or you've got a wicked jump shot.
Grace Scrimgeour — September 10, 2012
I think Michael Messner's work on athletic careers is relevant here- middle-class high school athletes are less likely to go pro because the likelihood of success in sport is small, and they have better avenues to success, whereas if your opportunities outside sports are minimal, even a small chance of success looks good.
drdanj — September 10, 2012
The all A's are B's therefore all B's are A's type mis-logic seems at work here. A funnel leads some folks "of color" into pro sports, the funnel does not work the same way for us "peach" folks (the official Crayola Crayon color for the rest of us). A highly selective process that becomes a self-reinforcing system says little about the underlying population.
decius — September 10, 2012
How well do people not of Samoan ancestry adopted by Samoan parents do in sports?
Lori Halford — September 11, 2012
The BBC did a feature about this during their Olympics coverage, and specifically relating to the 100m sprint final. They questioned why so few white runners can currently compete in this event or in the past have run really fast times.
Video is online: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmvtwjqYZcY
anon — September 12, 2012
Replying to this.
I fear we are talking past one another. I'm not to worried about this since I expect the result will hold under any definition of "ethnic group" that anyone would advance with a straight face. For example, whatever the definition of "ethnic group" is, it will surely be the case that Swedes and Mbuti people belong to different ones. In fact, I'm really not even concerned with ethnic groups at all. I'm concerned with the heritability of traits. Many physical traits are at least partly heritable, and people tend to be (more) related to the people who live near them (than to human beings sampled at random). People also tend to define themselves ethnically in terms of relatedness, and the conclusion follows immediately. But it is probably conceptually clearer to drop the term "ethnic group" altogether and speak only of allele frequencies.
I'm not sure what you mean here? Physical tasks like "jump as high as you can", "lift as much weight as you can", "run 100m as fast as you can" and "run 26.2 miles as fast as you can" will clearly advantage certain body types. Do you remember that much-beloved portrait series of Olympic athletes that celebrated the diversity of Olympic athletes' body types? Why do the marathon runners, weightlifters and high jumpers all look exactly like you would expect, just knowing the definitions of the sports? Because physics is "prejudiced"? I really can't make out what your position is here. If sports were designed in order to disadvantage certain ethnic groups, doesn't that presume physical differences between groups in the first place? I can only assume I'm misreading you.
Again, I'm not interested in ethnic groups per se: I'm interested in allele frequencies, which require no such assumptions about the well-foundedness of ethnic groups to partition humanity. The preponderance of elite sprinters from West Africa and West African Diaspora countries suggests that some combination of alleles advantageous for sprinting is statistically over-represented among people of West African descent. What is the definition of "West Africa", really? Just a short-hand for a sub-population that originally inhabited some part of West Africa.
The argument is quite straightforward:
(1) Elite sprinting is overwhelmingly dominated by the descendants of inhabitants of a very specific part of the world.
(2) These descendants grew up on four different continents in extremely different cultures (Compare Jamaica to Nigeria to the UK to Qatar).
(3) The potential talent pool of non-West African sprinters is very large and culturally diverse. If sprinting ability were primarily culturally conditioned, the world would presumably contain at least one non-West African culture conducive to elite sprinting performance. Instead, 95% of sub-10sec sprinters come from perhaps 3% of the world population.
(4) We already know in general that physical performance is strongly influenced by hereditary biological factors. Indeed, the best known performance enhancing drugs are just natural human hormones and growth factors, which vary between individuals and between populations.
NK — September 18, 2012
Uh Samoans aren't Asian. Samoans are Polynesian. These are different races with different stereotypes attached. It is not true that sport is the only area biological racism survives, it is just the only area where whites arent found to be biologically superior. What a coincidence that it is the only area you decided to 'debunk' and failed to debunk because you didn't even bother to find out the race of specimens you used as evidence. This article is just utterly ludicrous, whites invented racial categories so you should be able to get them right. This website needs to stop talking about race if you can't do it properly.
David Mayeda — November 25, 2012
This post/article is highly problematic. I don't mean to be rude but it really illustrates the problems with how we construct racialized concepts more than anything. As one commenter posted, "Asians" are not "Polynesians." But then there is no category for "Polynesians" or the broader group of "Pacific Islanders" so I suppose players of Samoan (and Hawaiian, Tongan, etc.) ancestry got put into the "Asian" category. This just isn't appropriate, and analysis should critique how the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports screws up its own analyses based on its limited racialized categories. As someone who's worked in Hawaii and now in New Zealand, I find this post falling into a mainstream American idea of race that inappropriately lumps as "Asians and Pacific Islanders" together as one homogeneous group.