Why Black Overrepresentation in Sports is Not Good

quote:

---

But in general, blacks are overrepresented in professional sports. Many white Americans will, again, imagine that this has something to do with black genes, black athleticism, black African musculature. But this an illusion that only justifies white dominance in, say, the tech sector. Whites have the genes for that kind of thing: coding, programming, electrical engineering, and what have you. In this view, black dominance in brawn is naturally balanced by white dominance in brains. But anyone who has taught in a US high-school system knows that this balance is strictly imposed on black males. Intellectuality is not just discouraged but not even recognized. When you reinforce this attitude by underfunding education, the remaining opportunities for black success are not found in the classroom but in the gym.

---

quote:

---

But this fact, the practicality of one profession (programming) and the impracticality of the other (balling), is obscured by, indeed, the overrepresentation of blacks in the latter. This is a disastrous feedback loop. There are no black Jobs or Gates or Bezos, but there are a lot of Kapernicks and Jameses. As a consequence, a position in the NBA or NFL has the appearance of being more realistic than a position at Amazon. And the poorer you are, the more practical the impractical looks.

---

quote:

---

the reader returns to the early days of hiphop, they will find an amazing variety of characters, modes, and voices. There was the intellectual De La Soul, the quirky Kwamé the Boy Genius, the Islamic Poor Righteous Teachers, the black militancy of Public Enemy, the Afrocentric feminism of Queen Latifah, the hippy and trippy P.M. Dawn, the gangsterism of NWA, and so on and so on. All of these acts achieved some success. There was a market in the black community for this wealth of voices and modes. But things began to change in the mid-1990s with the inflation of rappers like Tupac and Biggie Smalls and Jay-Z. Labels began to focus on black gangster culture. Eventually, the mainstream was dominated by what sold lots of records in the white suburbs: black men threatening or killing other black men. This social process completely eliminated from the mainstream hiphop diversity. And now white commentators have the gall to argue that "hiphop has done more damage to African Americans than racism" (as sampled on Kendrick Lamar's "DNA"). But, of course, the reason why hiphop is doing so much damage is because the white owners of major labels extirpated all other voices but the most harmful ones. And we now have a situation where the raps of black men killing black men is a normal think to dance to.

---