So, if your problem is that you’re facing a series of stereotypes about how you are intellectually inferior, how you have a broken culture, how you have . . . I could go on and on and on with all of the stereotypes that exist. Then how does playing brutally violent sports help you? How is an association, almost an overrepresentation in these various kinds of public entertainments advance your cause? I’m for those things when they’re transitional, and I’m against them when they seem like dead ends.
His point is that while other minorities were over-represented in sports and entertainment for short periods of time, African-Americans have been over-represented for a long time, which is a sign of an inability to penetrate into other fields. This thought had never occurred to me.
From a conversation with Tyler Cowen. There is much more that is worth either listening to or reading (I prefer the latter), including an amusing analogy between Harvard and Luis Vuitton.
Apart from football and boxing, though, most sports aren’t terribly violent. Did Hank Aaron becoming the career home run leager damage the public perception of black Americans in the seventies? Doubtful. I guess if you think an excessive focus on athletic achievement was/is holding people back from achieving in other areas, this is a valid concern, but in the days of big money college athletics they can also open doors for you that would have otherwise remained closed.
It also needs to be said that violent sports are quite popular and tied to our tribal instincts. Participating and succeeding in them helps others to see you as part of the tribe. Plus, comparative advantage is what it is. You’re going to have a hard time convincing an 18 year old Ray Lewis that he should give up football and go be a brick layer because his association with a violent sport hurts public perception of his ethnic group.
The sweet science? Violent?
So, if your problem is that you’re facing a series of stereotypes about how you are intellectually inferior, how you have a broken culture, how you have . . . I could go on and on and on with all of the stereotypes that exist. Then how does playing brutally violent sports help you?
Oh Brother, what an elistist crap! Maybe because these areas, especially sports, where the African-American community could make it in the world as a success! Jackie Robinson made to the Majors in 1947 almost a decade before the Civil Movement really started or Joe Louis was a respect name in the 1930s. Remember the segregation limited the jobs and income African-American could earn before 1970. (Yes there is a circular reference of variable here.)
And I am guessing a lot of the sports domination by African-Americans is starting to diminish the last several decades.
There is less black dominance in baseball but more in football and basketball.
“This thought had never occurred to me.”
Me either. Because it doesn’t stand up to much probing.
It’s pretty common in intellectual history for some brilliant minds to dedicate themselves to desperate, clever efforts to salvage respected but erroneous paradigms by means of complicated additions and adjustments, and heroic, Procrustean torturing of inconsistent data to make them fit into the old systems so long as you squint at them just right.
The monster Charles Murray has been saying for two decades at least that the future of genomics is going to likely prove incredibly embarrassing to our own era’s equivalent minds.
But that’s not what tends to happen, unfortunately. I think we’ll probably all just move on and somehow forget (or act as if we all had amnesia regarding) all about these unfortunate statements and claims. At least, if they are made by people those future judges want to admire and credit with good intentions, if also with bad judgment and foolish dedication to lost causes.
So, I’m confident Gladwell will be just fine.
There’s no doubt genetics involved here. But one thing that has struck me as deeply weird is the way in which black Americans seem to be monocultural. Somehow it’s common (at least in popular media) for a white guy to like jazz and collard greens. But it’s uncommon (at least in popular media) to find a black guy who likes classical music and ice hockey.
Basketball — the sport African Americans most dominate — is not brutally violent. MMA, a sport dominated by whites, *IS* — even more so than boxing. And boxing? I don’t follow it any more than I do MMA, but it looks like a pretty mixed bag to me:
https://goo.gl/VuPPNv
And then there’s this — ethnic attachments to particular careers apparently can be quite long-lasting:
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-03-17/irish-americans-still-do-irish-american-jobs
Glad well treats these industries as if they are static, which is ridiculous. The 50th highest paid black athlete will make more in a year than Sandy Kofax did in his career. There is no comparison between the incentives now and then.
“His point is that while other minorities were over-represented in sports and entertainment for short periods of time, African-Americans have been over-represented for a long time, which is a sign of an inability to penetrate into other fields.”
If this is about sports at the elite level, did other groups cease to be over represented because they stopped aiming for such careers or because they were displaced by African-Americans? If the latter, then we have to ask who is left to displace African-Americans?
When whites are employed in the division of labor helping blacks to maximize their abilities, nobody. But why care?
At one point blacks were the top of golf and tennis, while whites dominated football and boxing. They will always have basketball because of longer limbs. So what?
We do a lot of hand-wringing over how we assume people think about symbols and signals.
Hasn’t sports and entertainment done a lot for raising the status of blacks?
“There is much more that is worth either listening to or reading”
Pretty poor grammar there.
You can’t have “much more” if you never had anything.
This is vile thought.