Great black hopes.

### SAILER, STEVE

Black athletes triumph by toiling intensely at those games where they tend to enjoy not just cultural, but also physical and mental edges over whites. This suggests a new, pragmatic view of racial differences.

Mr. Sailer ([e-mail]) is a Chicago businessman and writer. His "How Jackie Robinson Desegregated America" appeared in the April 8 issue of NR.

AS the competitors in the Olympics grow ever more representative of the entire globe, the more obvious becomes the kaleidoscopic variety of the human race's gene pool. Back in the Chariots of Fire days, when entry was largely restricted to genteel North Atlantic amateurs, the games chiefly showcased the most gifted white males. Today, though, by inviting pros from 197 countries, the Olympics spotlight differences not only among individuals, but among ethnic groups. The Summer Games are now the world's festival of genetic diversity.

Consider running, the cheapest, most universal sport. In Atlanta, Kenyan, Ethiopian, and other elegantly slender East African men are again excelling in running races from 800 to 10,000 meters. In contrast, explosively muscular men of West African descent like America's Michael Johnson are once more dominating the sprints and hurdles from 100 to 400 meters.

These heroic performances by blacks will come as no surprise to American sports fans. Fifty years after Jackie Robinson integrated baseball, it is now clear that equality of opportunity in America's top team sports has led not to equality of results but to black supremacy. For example, a random American black is currently about 10 times more likely to reach the National Football League and 25 times more likely to reach the National Basketball Association than a random non-black.

Mentioning these tremendous accomplishments, however, inspires unease among white intellectuals. Writers and editors try to block sports fans from noticing black pre-eminence since it disproves the dogma that all ethnic groups are equal in all ways. If told the truth, they fear fans might conclude that if blacks are stronger on average physically, then they could be weaker on average mentally. As well intentioned as this journalistic cover-up may be, it suffers one shortcoming: it doesn't work. Fans don't have to read about black superiority; they see it for themselves round the clock on TV sports channels, and discuss it endlessly in sports bars. The taboo certainly doesn't slow down those whites who want to conclude that since blacks are faster, then whites must be smarter, end of story. The good news is that there's more to the story. The bad news is that the taboo stops it from getting heard.

That liberals are afraid to look hard at sports and race implies that helping blacks has become less important to them than protecting their own investment in a theory of absolute racial equality that did heroic service in the 1960s but is now running on vapors. Like generals yearning to refight the last war, for 25 years the civil-rights establishment and its army of fellow-travelers in the press have forced the same strategy that once won black legal equality upon the current struggle for black personal fulfillment and economic prosperity. By operationally defining "economic equality" to mean scattering a representative percentage of blacks into every field, affirmative action encourages psychological frustration and economic stagnation among black men.

Why? In the job market, if you are equal, you are just a commodity. How to succeed in business? Find some niche where your talents and connections are not merely mediocre but potentially superior, sweat to fortify these competitive advantages, then monopolize the hell out of them. Immigrant groups thrive because they understand acutely the advantages of specialization (e.g., Asian Indians, the most successful of the recent arrivals, manage about half of America's hotels). In the sports market, where affirmative action hardly exists, blacks grasp this logic equally well. Blacks don't account for 12.4 per cent of NBA players, 12.4 per cent of synchronized swimmers, etc. Instead, blacks concentrate on basketball, football, and track. This narrow focus on those games where they are most apt to possess natural edges also grants them sizable cultural advantages: growing up amidst a critical mass of players, coaches, and aficionados, black youths can conveniently absorb the needed expertise.

By dogmatically (and defensively) insisting that all racial groups must be equal in all ways, liberal fundamentalism has stymied discussion of just what competitive advantages blacks do tend to possess, and how they could get more mileage out of them in the general job market. By dismissing sports as mere feats of brawn unworthy of intelligent inquiry, liberal intellectuals ironically overlook that black sports success reflects not just physical but, as we shall see, mental superiorities -- assets that blacks could exploit in other careers, too. Asking four major questions might encourage a new, more productive way to think about America's present racial impasse.

1. Are blacks the best athletes? When sports fans say that blacks are better athletes than whites, they are not saying that Al Sharpton could outskate Wayne Gretzky, that any black can beat any white in any game. Rather, blacks appear to be stronger performers on average in basketball and football.

But are basketball and football truer tests of athleticism than, say, surfing, curling, dog-sled mushing, or English Channel swimming (at which walrus-shaped whites stand out)? If the greatest basketball player is the greatest athlete in the world, as so many presume, why has Michael Jordan flopped at baseball and golf?

Clearly, there are many different athletic skills. So how can we possibly claim that one man is a better athlete than another, much less that one race is more athletic than another? This is exactly analogous to a common attack on Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's contention in The Bell Curve that Asians and whites tend to be smarter than blacks: How can just one number represent all the many kinds of mental talents? In sports, the closest analogy to the IQ test is the decathlon. Olympic decathletes compete in ten track and field events, but against the stopwatch and measuring tape rather than against one another. Their ten tallies are summed, and the overall highest scorer is hyped as the "world's greatest athlete." Similarly, IQ isn't just a single measure, but a sophisticated aggregating of many skills. Of course, any scheme for weighting the components must be somewhat arbitrary. For example, just as black decathletes often excel in sprinting and whites in upper-body-strength events, so Jews and Japanese both tend to score above average on IQ tests, but in opposite manners. Jews often display exceptional verbal logic linked with mediocre visualization skills, and vice versa for Japanese. Who can really say in the abstract how track v. field or verbal v. visual scores should be weighted? 50 - 50? 80 - 20? It all depends on the task at hand.

For example, you can often make more money by perfecting a few skills and finding a role that suits them than by being pretty good at everything. Take slugging first baseman Cecil Fielder, who is "well rounded" only in girth, yet will rake in close to $9 million in 1996, more than any of those versatile decathletes. Tremendous strength compensates for Mr. Fielder's being only slightly more mobile than a mausoleum.

Another unavoidable shortcoming of objective measurements is that so many talents useful in sports or in life are subjective, and thus hard to quantify with a stopwatch or a #2 pencil: e.g., faking out a tackler in football, rousing your platoon in combat, or sweet-talking a customer in business. How could Magic Johnson, with little skill at leaping or jump shooting, lead the Lakers to five titles? More valuable was his supreme faculty for anticipating what the other nine players would do. Or consider Dennis Rodman. Although only 6'8", he has made himself the greatest rebounder since 7'1" Wilt Chamberlain. Mr. Rodman's edge is in his ability to predict, based partly on rigorous study of the NBA's shooters and partly on a queerly artistic intuition, where a ball just leaving the shooter's fingertips will ultimately bounce.

The IQ test was invented by a Frenchman, so it's not surprising that it's good at gauging what the French value most: impersonal reasoning in a formal setting. It's worth remembering, though, that since Josephine Baker, Parisians have been importing black American artists to dazzle them with that improvisatory creativity at which the French seem so hopeless.

So, just as the decathlon is a valiant but hardly conclusive effort to rank athletes, the use of IQ to rank thinkers, while certainly handy, has significant limits: talents differ in importance depending on the situation, and standardized objective tests can't measure crucial subjective skills. However, most Bell Curve detractors can't take much comfort from this critique, because this logic also undermines their own core tenet that the races must be absolutely identical. You see, the more skills there really are, the less plausible it is that all groups possess exactly equal potential on all these dimensions. And that implies that the destructive debate among white supremacists, liberals, and Afrocentrists about whether in some ill-defined overall sense blacks are empirically inferior, equal, or superior to whites is as meaningless as arguing over whether the sky is equal to the sea. We should view every man as morally equal in the eyes of God and the law; but in terms of actual skills, the only truthful summation must be that each person and each group tend to have many relative strengths and weaknesses.

Does this more realistic world view endanger America's core belief that "all men are created equal"? More likely, by lashing Jefferson's sacred moral faith to the leaking hulk of the anti-scientific theory that all men are created identical, liberals are threatening to end up scuttling both ideas in a sea of cynicism.

A more meaningful question than "Are blacks the best athletes?" is:

2. Whether or not basketball and football are the ultimate tests of "athleticism;" what empowers blacks to dominate them? Average sports fans would suggest physical advantages in jumping and running, an idea that Sports Illustrated long denounced as a redneck's stereotype. Then last year Dr. Roger Bannister, the first four-minute-miler and a distinguished medical researcher, informed a scientific gathering, "Black sprinters, and black athletes in general, all seem to have certain natural anatomical advantages." Unable to bring themselves to slander SI's first "Sportsman of the Year" as a racist, the editors grudgingly conceded that maybe this is an open question. In contrast, black athletes like the late tennis star Arthur Ashe tend to hold more urbanely realistic views: "Fast runners are born, not made."

Sadly, too few whites notice that much of black sports success seems to originate above the neck, in certain common mental advantages blacks tend to have over whites. For example, in the NFL, most offensive linemen, who diligently execute the coach's plays, are white. Most defensive linemen, who instantly devise their own responses, are black. More spectacularly, black basketball players like Elgin Baylor and Julius Erving blew wide open a stodgy game of set-piece plays. White coaches long resisted their black players' ability to make it up as they went along. The only man to consistently hold Michael Jordan to no more than 20 points per game was Dean Smith, his college coach. Yet, "playground jungle ball" eventually routed predictable white-style basketball. Obviously, the occasional Larry Bird or John Stockton shows that some whites can master the black game. Still, whites seem less often able to meet modern basketball's demands for creative improvisation and on-the-fly interpersonal decision-making. As Thomas Sowell notes, "To be an outstanding basketball player means to out-think opponents consistently in these split-second decisions under stress." These black cerebral superiorities in "real time" responsiveness also contribute to black dominance in jazz, running with the football, rap, dance, trash talking, preaching, and oratory. (Martin Luther King Jr., for example, improvised the immortal conclusion to his "I Have a Dream" speech.)

A second advantage that black men enjoy -- in manly charisma --can be deduced from the endorsements they can command. Black pitchmen now outsell their white rivals. Michael Jordan has earned more than $200 million from global endorsements.

Why is the world more thrilled by a black man tomahawking a dunk than by, say, a white woman swimming the Bering Strait? Ultimately, it comes down to: What are sports for? At their sociobiological foundations, sports appear to be preparation for (or diversion from) hunting and fighting. Pro sports figures make money largely by furnishing male fans with masculine role models, mighty warrior heroes with whom to identify. At least for now, the world sees black American jocks as the epitome of masculinity.

3. Do these black advantages originate in culture or in biology? The refusal of certain liberal white males to even consider the possibility of innate black superiority in some sports may stem less from egalitarianism than from egotism. For instance, Gregg Easterbrook, one of the Atlantic Monthly's highest-IQ pundits, began his denunciation of The Bell Curve by recounting that once he'd played pickup basketball daily in a black neighborhood. Within a few weeks he had improved so much the black guys were actually "wanting me on their team." His feat seems to have made such an impression on him that years later he just can't believe the evidence for genetic diversity. Could it be these facts imperil his secret self-image -- that beneath his disguise as a mild-mannered reporter, the real Gregg Easterbrook is man enough to do Nike ads?

Unfortunately, the lack of public discussion about group differences has badly retarded our thinking about what might be the most important question facing America today: How can black men earn more money? By smugly tarring as a bigot anyone who even ponders whether there might be fundamental differences, the reigning orthodoxy encourages us to assume away group inequalities as arbitrary and fleeting, when all history shows that a group's advantage in particular skills -- whatever their origins -- can long endure.

It appears that cultures tend to emphasize what their members have inborn aptitudes for. Put another way, people will work harder on what they find rewarding and shrink from what they find frustrating. Of course, if you are raised in a segregated society, you may not notice your comparative shortcomings. This helps explain the curious fact that the integration of a society frequently deepens the segregation of roles. In monoethnic Japan, for example, Japanese fill all the roles advanced societies seem to require, including game-show host, organized-crime boss, professional wrestler, barroom bouncer, repo man, crooked politician and scary cult leader. In multiethnic America, however, Japanese-Americans find themselves confronted by an abundance of rival job hunters proficient at shooting the breeze or violently intimidating people. Rather than toil to equal other Americans in these skills, Japanese-Americans instead generally converge in those fields like engineering and health where they find competition less formidable.

Similarly, a group can tire of a career or pastime even if its members tend to be better than their rivals, if they enjoy more glittering opportunities elsewhere. This helps explain why, after black Americans fled Southern segregation, they began specializing in basketball and football at the expense of baseball. Pundits often blame a shortage of baseball diamonds in the inner city. Yet, immigrants from rural Mexico haven't forsaken fastballs for free throws. More astute observers point to the decline of patriarchy in the black ghettos, since a love of baseball is best passed on by fathers playing catch with sons. Perhaps most important, however, is that black Americans have found baseball, with its straight-line baserunning, less suited for expressing their creativity than basketball or football.

4. How could black males who aren't pro athletes make more money in the twenty-first century? Of course, we can't stress enough the importance of morals. For example, the intense effort black youths put into mastering basketball shows once again the value of hard work, a lesson they could remember better in the classroom. However, the half-emptiness of black culture's glass has been lamented by more eloquent voices than mine. So, I'll discuss its half-fullness. One strategy for economic advancement is to look for new markets for a group's traditional strengths. For instance, centuries of rabbinical disputes over the Talmud seem to have paved the way for many modern Jews to prosper as lawyers. Similarly, how could black men with competitive advantages in creative improvisation and manly charm better exploit them in the job market? Well, it's easy first to identify an entire class of jobs that don't reward black men's strong suits: paper-pushing assignments in stagnant bureaucracies. Unfortunately, those are exactly what affirmative-action programs most often proffer.

The not-for-profit sector is especially plagued by this Paradox of Voluntary Affirmative Action:

1. The more feminist an institution, the more its white leaders will favor affirmative action for black applicants.

2. The more accurately the Verbal SAT predicts success within an institution, the more likely the high-scoring white leaders are to talk themselves into lowering test requirements for blacks.

Therefore, the more whole-heartedly a not-for-profit -- like, say, a trendy college English department specializing in Lesbian Studies and Deconstructionism -- wants to pursue blacks, the more likely the black men hired will find their jobs pointless and their colleagues insufferable.

The flip side of the Paradox is also revealing:

1. The more male-chauvinistic an institution, the more black men thrive. Exhibit A is The Citadel, where the black cadets confounded Shannon Faulkner's supporters by standing firm for sex discrimination. Seldom mentioned was that The Citadel, which emphasizes character development and leadership training rather than scholarship, is one of the most successful integrated colleges in America at inspiring black males to achieve.

2. The less relevant that written tests are to a particular career, the more that entrenched whites will stress exams as a way to keep blacks out. For example, Irish-American firemen and cops fought for segregation for years, and have since battled for color-blind testing. Why? Because Irish-Americans and African-Americans tend to possess such similar talents (e.g., strength, courage, street smarts, a commanding personality, and a touch of blarney) that they're natural rivals for fire and police jobs. One advantage the Irish possess, however, is in generally scoring higher on written exams, so they swear by testing.

THE nice liberal white who beseeches black men, "I'm your friend, be like me," is not always somebody they could (or would) be like, and thus can't give them the sort of job they'll do themselves proud in. On the other hand, the not-so-nice white often holds the keys to what could be the right career.

What careers should better-educated black men consider in the next century? This question has been unthinkable under the reigning intellectual orthodoxy, but somebody has to stick his neck out first. So here goes:

Conservatives often advise blacks to start their own small businesses. However, ambitious blacks tend to face fierce competition from immigrants who can call upon more dependable relatives for advice, loans, and labor. But the good news is that there are some fairly lucrative corporate careers that especially reward persuasiveness and manly charm: selling big-ticket contracts, stock-brokering, headhunting, motivational speaking. In a word: sales.

Unfortunately, the media climate saps for blacks the confidence a salesman needs. By automatically ascribing all gaps between whites and blacks to discrimination, the press drains that virile self-confidence that inspires customers to buy. Of course, some clients are anti-black, but over time blacks can mitigate that by discovering the less biased industries and sales territories. Anyway, unfair as it is, the relevant question for a young black career-seeker is not whether he'd get richer if he were a white salesman. No, he needs to ask himself whether he'd ultimately end up generating more money and pride as a black salesman or as quota fodder in a make-work posting like Diversity Sensitivity Liaison.

Beyond sales, in coming years black men should also be able to better exploit their leadership talent. "Natural leadership" is practically synonymous with something black guys have in abundance: masculine charisma.

White fears that other whites wouldn't follow black leaders slowed black advancement into leadership positions for decades. Yet, when given a chance, blacks have tended to exert impressive command charisma, even over Southern whites. The performance of black Army sergeants has been exceptionally encouraging. Their success implies that similar unscholarly black men should be better able to work their way up to comparable civilian positions in blue-collar management. Unfortunately, affirmative action methodically lures many of these men into white-collar careers where their scholastic shortcomings slam a "glass ceiling" down upon their need to lead.

The apathy that too often drags down black males' job efforts stems partly from this systematic mismatching between those Big Man personalities that black America seems to specialize in (think of Charles Barkley or James Earl Jones) and the modest paper-fumbling billets that affirmative-action campaigns pester black men into accepting. The U.S. Army has best exploited their capacity for command, specifically because it doesn't toss affirmative-action victims in over their heads academically.

At the high end, we are likely to see blacks, especially ex-jocks, furnish the Republican Party with many leaders (like Congressman J. C. Watts, former Oklahoma quarterback). Just as politically conservative Jews, who make up a tiny fraction of the population, supply much of the GOP's intellectual firepower, so black Republicans, no matter how few there are overall, will be winning an impressive number of elective offices within two decades.

We must finally take seriously the value of diversity. The first step is to drop the fashionable but Orwellian habit of saying "diversity" when we mean "sameness." To pretend that all groups have all the same talents to the same degree is the antithesis of truly celebrating diversity. By insisting upon "diversity" within all institutions, affirmative action tries to impose the same homogeneous demographics across all institutions. This diffuses black talent thinly and impotently across the economic landscape. Rather like what Gandhi once replied when asked his opinion of Christian civilization, diversity is such a great idea that somebody ought to try it.