Coming to terms: 'race', ethnicity, identity and Aboriginality in sport.

Tatz, Colin

Abstract: Notions of genetic superiority have led to some of the world's greatest human calamities. Just as social scientists thought that racial anthropology and biology had ended with the cataclysm of the Second World War, so some influential researchers and sports commentators have rekindled the pre-war debate about the muscular merits of 'races" in a new discipline that Nyborg (1994) calls the 'science of physicology'. The more recent realm of racial 'athletic genes', especially within socially constructed black athletic communities, may intend no malice but this search for the keys to their success may well revive the old, discredited discourses. This critical commentary shows what can happen when some population geneticists and sports writers ignore history and when medical, biological and sporting doctrines deriving from 'race' are dislocated from any historical, geographic, cultural and social contexts. Understanding discourses about race, racism, ethnicity, otherness, identity and Aboriginality are essential if sense, or nonsense, is to be made of genetic/racial 'explanations' of sporting excellence. Between the two major wars boxing was, disproportionately, a Jewish sport; Kenyans and Ethiopians now 'own' middle- and long-distance running and Jamaicans the shorter events; South Koreans dominate women's professional golf. This essay explores the various explanations put forward for such 'statistical domination': genes, biochemistry, biomechanics, history, culture, social dynamics, the search for identity, alienation, need, chance, circumstances, and personal bent or aptitude.

The 'old' racism

'Great abuse has occurred in the past with notions of "genetic superiority" of one particular group over another. The notion of superiority is not scientific, only political, and can only be used for political purposes' (Risch et al. 2002:10). Given the homicidal history of genetic 'superiority' and immutability, social scientists were entitled to think that the Second World War had put an end to 'scientific racism', to race as a biological construct and to biological determinism (Figure 1). It was finally accepted by the academy that measurements such as cranial capacity could not and did not provide or support an index of 'racial' intelligence, let alone a scientific ranking of 'superior' and 'inferior' peoples. John Hoberman (1997) has written trenchantly about the post-war 'fear of racial biology' and the avoidance of 'race' generally in academic discourse. But the malady lingers on, as Marek Kohn (1995) has pointed out in his book on 'the return of racial science'.

While race politics is by no means dead, we were entitled to believe, at the very least, that the 'racial science' established by men like Arthur de Gobineau, Robert Knox, Heinrich von Treitschke, Henry Garrett, Alfred Rosenberg, HFK Gunther, Maurice Barres and Madison Grant had ended in 1945 (see Snyder 1962:45-50, 57, 65-6, 73-5, 84, 151-2). By that time, two centuries of this immutable biological determinism had led to the deaths of 50 million people across the globe (Tatz 2005:82-93). We cried 'enough' and 'never again' about these 'scientific' justifications of the so-called racial rankings of mankind. In the first half of the twentieth century, eugenicists in the United States and Europe had tried to turn some nations into social laboratories--almost, but not quite, in the manner of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932)--where they could manufacture the 'right' human pedigrees or at least eliminate the 'bad' ones (Mosse 1978; Schaft 2004; Zenderland 1998). They had their field days, literally and briefly. They provided the ideological justification to fight several wars--against the Herero and Nama people in what was then German South-West Africa (Namibia), against Armenians in Turkey, and against Jews, Roma (Gypsies) and Slavs in Europe. Racial fantasies, the ludicrous search for the mythic Arya and its so-called descendants, the Aryans, ended in utter nightmare. In 1888 the inventor or creator of 'Arya' and its 'Aryan people', the Anglo-German philologist Friedrich Max Muller, repudiated his views (Snyder 1962:41-2). But exactly 50 years later Reichsfuhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler sent an anthropological expedition to Tibet to validate the Aryan basis for what was to be the Thousand Year Reich (Hale 2003), the one that lasted just short of 14 years. Rightly, the schuldfrage, the guilt question, hangs over not just a re-emergent, democratic Germany but the West (and those disciplines whose histories includes racist science) in general.

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A growing number of academics and sports critics now proclaim new and exciting explanations of muscle rather than of mind. The 'old' and discredited mismeasures of man (Gould 1981; Mosse 1978; Zenderland 1998) have been replaced with a strident and confident present-day 'science' that 'identifies' physiological and anatomical characteristics as the keys to athletic success--and which legitimates the now commonly accepted view that 'white men can't jump' (Kohn 1995:76-87) and 'white men can't run' (Burfoot 1992; George 1994). Fast twitch fibres, longer and wider calf muscles, narrower hips, longer arms and legs, less body fat, denser bones, better eye-hand co-ordination, more 'powerful' hormones and--especially, among Aborigines--peripheral vision are said to be the result of biological 'athletic' genes, of community alleles particular to 'races', rather than of political contexts and of cultural and social propensities (Burfoot 1992; Ellis and Nyborg 1992; Entine 2000; Herrnstein and Murray 1994; Malina and Bouchard 1991; Murray and Herrnstein 1994; Nyborg 1994; Rushton 1995; Sarich et al. 1996; Sarich and Miele 2004).

None of this is new. The 1930s were fertile years for discussion about America's 'black auxiliaries' at the 1936 Berlin Olympics (Mandell 1972), physical educator Eleanor Metheny's (1939) propositions about the longer legs, arms and hands of blacks, and psychiatrist Laynard Holloman's (1943) postulate that blacks achieved because of their hatred of whites and their desire for revenge, especially in the ring. The noted black physical anthropologist Montague Cobb (1936) weighed and measured many black athletes, including the legendary sprinter Jesse Owens, and concluded that the weight of evidence was that any differences between black and white participation in sport was primarily a consequence of 'different historical experiences' (Wiggins 1989:159-61; Wiggins 1997).

Biomedical visions

Hoberman (1997:222) has rightly criticised the biologists who seem to have blind faith in the Human Genome Project and who ignore social and environmental realities. Some, like Philippe Rushton and Helmuth Nyborg, appear to have taken over the mantle from the eugenicists in positing that 'race' is the absolute determinant of socially relevant characteristics. Echoing the earlier views that too much muscle meant too little brain, Rushton has reduced the formulation to a neat 'trade-off': in nature, it has to be either 'more brain or more penis' (Hoberman 1997:230). Some scientists have offered two 'new' dimensions to validate race theory: disease and sport. Both fields appear suffused with good will, Samaritanism, even altruism, with much talk about healing, not killing, repairing, not destroying, prolonging, not shortening, embracing, not segregating. The espousers and advocates would be aghast at being linked to the pre-war racial biology theorists but they--or those who misinterpret or even manipulate their findings--are, in essence, very much in the continuum of that ideology, discourse and politics (Barkan 1992; Hoberman 1992; Kohn 1995; Wiggins 1989, 1997). Both Charles Murray and Dinesh D'Souza (1995) assert that 'black athletic superiority is evidence of more profound differences' (Hoberman 1997:xiv).

Briefly, most branches of medicine have taken on board the adamant biomedical vision that illness as such lies solely within the body and treatment must therefore be confined to the patient (Filc 2004). Context--be it social, economic, historic, geographic, cultural--is denied any relevance or validity. Some branches of medicine--notably the neurologically minded and 'genetic school' of psychiatry in relation to suicide--push this vision of reductionism and determinism to the extreme: they posit that there is an immutable set of genes particular or even peculiar to 'races' (Goldney 2002). Their inclination is to argue that external personal action--such as converting to another religion, estranging oneself from one's ethnicity or even inter-marrying--is of no avail. The old prophet Jeremiah proclaimed that the leopard remains spotted and the Ethiopian can't change his skin; David Hume, the father of modern social science, once explained that the only worthy civilisations were white and that 'in Jamaica, indeed, they talk of one negro as a man of parts and learning, but it is likely that he is admired for slender accomplishments, like a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly' (in Rose 1968:18). Both the older and the newer racial theorists insist that you are, immutably and indelibly, your genes. Sander Gilman (2003:151) is scathing when he asks, 'in an age of biologization, have not our genes become the ultimate definition of who we believe we are?' At a more extreme level, Andy Miah (2008) would argue that medical technology will soon allow our genes to be manipulated so that we can become what we want to be in terms of physique and appearance.

The British writer Hilaire Belloc insisted that just as a horse is a horse, an apple an apple, so the Jew is a Jew (Snyder 1962:76). Dozens of researchers have looked for somatic qualities that demarcate Jews: skulls, nostrils, noses, lips, height, hair, fertility, age of menstruation, temperature and the like. These fruitless efforts led the noted physical anthropologist Carl Seltzer to demonstrate finally (in 1939) that there is no such thing as 'a Jewish race' (Snyder 1962:149-50). Nevertheless, it is still asserted that Ashkenazi Jews (essentially those of German and East European origin) can be identified or defined as a group because they, seemingly alone, suffer Canavan disease, Bloom's syndrome, Mediterranean Fever, Fanconi anaemia, Niemann-Pick disease, Pemphigus vulgaris and a Tay-Sachs gene that kills their children (Forth 2008; Gilman 2003:149-59; Mourant et al. 1978). For a long time now, Ashkenazi Jews have been constructed by some as a 'racial' community definable by its medical afflictions--the 'diabetic race' of the nineteenth century and the neurologically disordered people of the twentieth and twenty-first. Now they are said by some to have 'Jewish ancestral genes' in relation to breast, ovarian, pancreatic and colon cancers--despite gross flaws in eliciting 'ethnicity' as a genetic basis for such diseases (Science Daily 2006). Those Jews who embrace these assertions are as guilty of accepting these perceptions as the portrayers who present them as 'fact' (Gilman 2003).

The sickle cell trait, indicating abnormal haemoglobins and leading to sickle cell anaemia, is said to have originated in Africa, where some 40 percent of the total population manifest this characteristic (Ganong 1987:441). African-Americans are claimed to be definable as a slave-descended group by the omnipresence of these sickle-shaped anaemia cells, allegedly affecting between one in ten and one in 50 people (Johnson 1982). Non-diabetic kidney disease is now said to be disproportionate in African-Americans and pharmaceutical companies have developed what they call 'race-specific' drugs to deal with 'black' blood pressure and cardiac problems (Hoberman 2008). To be disproportionate, of course, is not the same as being unique, or race-specific. In a genre almost akin to the race-disease model, sections 4 and 5 of the (repealed) Natives (Citizenship Rights) Act 1944 in Western Australia explained the cultural and social circumstances under which an Aborigine could become a citizen and thus be exempted from the controlling laws. But if the emancipated 'non-Aborigine' in question contracted what were inferred as being Aboriginal (genetic) specific illnesses--active leprosy, syphilis, granuloma and yaws--he reverted to being a biological Aborigine and in need of control once more.

None of these 'facts' nor postulates nor propositions about racially unique disease genes has been shown to be valid. Some diseases clearly evolved in specific regions and migration carried the defects to new places. Commonality of geographic origin is quite different from saying that 'race' is the cause and source of such diseases. A few diseases have a single genetic cell (monogenic) cause, including Huntington's chorea, a progressive neurological disorder associated with an abnormal protein, and Marfan syndrome, a connective tissue disorder. There is no suggestion that either disease is 'race' specific. The polygenic genes said to be involved in such conditions as cancer, heart disease and metabolic disease raise questions about where genes begin and social and environmental factors--such as smoking, alcohol, pollution, diet and asbestos--end. Most diseases or disorders that seem endemic or peculiar to particular groups are explicable by history, geography and socialisation (Zinsser 2007). What is heritable is not the same as saying that such diseases are specific or peculiar, let alone unique, to a 'race'. Huntington's chorea, for example, occurs across all peoples, as all the medical literature shows.

The genetics proponents argue that since, not if, there are indelible genetic markers that have outcomes like denser bones, narrower hips, and longer calves, arms and hands, there must be validity not just to a science of race but a science that justifies 'nature's ranking' of the races. In several senses, much of this is a continuity, if not a defence, of the old order of eugenics, originally a veterinary science of pedigree as applied to humans: these proponents contend that the earlier 'science' wasn't really flawed--it was just misapplied or misunderstood (see Kingdon 1993; Sarich in Kohn 1995:79-80). Those who have no such agendas and who are unaware of these wider contexts are nevertheless pursuing racial rankings in racially or socially constructed communities, however well intentioned their search for sporting excellence may be.

As indicated earlier, the idea of racial superiority in sport has been around for a long time, certainly going back to the nineteenth century. The agendas have been mixed: either asserting the physical superiority of one group by insisting on another group's inferiority, or excluding another group simply because of who they were as 'others', or establishing criteria that justified the exclusion of racially defined competitors (Cobb 1936; Edwards 1969; Olsen 1968a, 1968b; Orr 1969).

Sander Gilman (1991), John Hoberman (1995:141-53), Alan Klein (2000:213-8) and Todd Samuel Presner (2007) expose the mindset involved in the general perception of the Jewish posture, anatomy and physiology that led to Jews being seen as lethargic, non-physical, effeminate, defective, sexually infective (or ineffective), cowardly, not quite white, and unfit to sit astride horses or handle weaponry, all of which were used to 'rightly' and 'sensibly' exclude them from the officer and military classes of Europe (Hoberman 1995:141-53). In early 1936, in the context of a possible American boycott of the Berlin Olympic Games, Frederick Rubien, secretary of the American Olympic Committee, declared: 'Germans are not discriminating against Jews in their Olympic tryouts. The Jews are eliminated because they are not good enough as athletes. Why, there are not a dozen Jews in the world of Olympic calibre' (in Tatz 1984:18).

Rubien, like his avowedly antisemitic colleague (and later Olympic president) Avery Brundage, was an open admirer of the Hitlerian regime and its Games. A brief glance at the records would reveal that by the end of the 1932 Games athletes of Jewish descent had won 70 gold, 48 silver and 32 bronze medals in ten Olympics (Mayer 2000:162-85). Hungarian Jews went on to win seven of their country's ten gold medals in Berlin, three of them in fencing, a sport that the antisemitic literature of the time said was quite beyond Jews (Hoberman 1995; Taylor 2004).

Queensland produced an amazing stable of Aboriginal professional runners, including Australian champion Charlie Samuels (Figure 2), Patrick Bowman, winner of the prestigious Carrington Cup in 1887, Combardello Billy, Paddy Doyle, CA Murray, J McKinley and Tom Dancey, winner of the Stawell Easter Gift in 1910 (Figure 3). Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Queensland Amateur Athletics Association (QAAA) tried to disbar all Aborigines from athletics. The first contention of the QAAA was that Aboriginal athletes lacked moral character; the second, that they had insufficient intelligence; and, finally, that they could not resist white vice (Blades 1985; Tatz 1995). When the secretary of the Australian Amateur Athletics Union rejected these ludicrous reasons, the Queensland body simply deemed them all to be professionals, hence excluding them in 1903. Dr WE Roth, the second Protector of Aborigines in Queensland, disapproved of Aboriginal participation in sport. He declared that 'the racing men' (the professional runners) would not work on the farms, would not take to authority and loafed: they make 'plenty of money for a few years on behalf of the betting fraternity ... Come back to us wrecks, as a rule, and a nuisance and a burden upon the rest' (Brisbane Courier 1904 in Tatz 1995:88-9).

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South Africa was forever seeking scientific justifications for its non-selection of black athletes (Lapchick 1975; Tatz 1984:23). Frank Braun, one-time president of the South African Olympic Association, explained the absence of any black swimmers thus: 'the water closes the pores of their skin and they cannot get rid of carbon dioxide and they tire quickly' (in Lapchick 1975:92). One official explained a relatively slow time by a one-time excellent track sprinter, Humphrey Khosi: 'You must understand that Africans cannot perform well on a chilly day, because of their black skin. They are black because their skin must absorb heat so they do their best in warm weather' (in Lapchick 1975:133).

Such examples may now be regarded as part of the old scientific racism, the misbeliefs and disbeliefs that we have left behind on the path to progress. The modern engagement with 'race' in some areas of sport science claims it is celebrating sporting characteristics rather than belittling or negating them. However, these advocates are engaging in a paradigm long abandoned by mainstream research and seem quite unaware of the dangers of doing so. While researchers in these areas may not be aware of the destructive contexts of yesteryear, influential sports writers and scientists have 're-discovered' a series of similar propositions, propelled in particular by Martin Kane's (1971) assessment of the literature in Sports Illustrated. From several of the articles he cites, it seems clear enough to him that blacks win because they are black. The slave trade had once applied an identical formula: blacks were slaves because they were black. Consultant and journalist Jon Entine (2000), marathon-runner Araby Burfoot (1992), and kinesiologist Robert Malina and population geneticist Claude Bouchard (1991) have followed, mostly with compendious statistics about black gold medallists. Usain Bolt's sprint achievements at Beijing in 2008 and Berlin in 2009 will doubtless advance this case, with some absurd claims in many newspapers, in Australia and abroad, about Jamaican 'unfairness' in having so much of the allegedly jet-propelling, fast-twitch muscle protein ACTN3 gene. The popular attraction of belief in genetic propensity to succeed in sport is perhaps well demonstrated by the market forces it enables: Atlas Sports Genetics in Colorado is now selling DNA tests for under-eight-year-olds to see if they have enough ACTN3 to warrant a sports career in the sprints or longer distances (Sydney Morning Herald, 8 December 2008), and there are now brochures advertising similar facilities in Australia. Sports watchers claim it simply cannot be algebraic or arithmetic coincidence that blacks dominate, even overwhelm, sprint athletics, boxing, baseball and basketball (in America, that is), or that a quite disproportionate number of Aborigines and Islanders feature so prominently in Australian football and rugby league, and they jump to a conclusion that the answer must lie in biology. From time to time, respected sports commentators in Australia fall back on biology: Roy Masters tends to talk about Aboriginal peripheral vision in rugby league and Martin Flanagan quite often suggests 'clairvoyance' on the part of Aboriginal Australian footballers. John Hoberman (1997:187-207) has succinctly demolished this kind of 'tabloid science' in his chapter on 'Theories of racial athletic aptitude'. To Hoberman's work I would simply add that the basketball laurels won by Yugoslavia, Russia, Italy, Greece and Argentina have been sans blacks, and that Latino domination of boxing and baseball also needs some explaining.

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The arithmetic of colour

Racism is not a nineteenth- or twentieth-century invention. It is as old as recorded history, with many examples of groups making distinctions between 'them' and 'us' on the basis of faith, religion, ties of kinship, anatomy, colour and ethnicity (Rose 1968). For me, modern racism has two forms. First, prejudice, or non-active racism, is any set of beliefs that view genetically ,transmitted differences between people, real or imagined, as intrinsically associated with the presence or absence of certain socially relevant abilities or characteristics. St Thomas Aquinas pat it more simply eight centuries ago: prejudice is thinking ill of others without sufficient warrant. Second, overt or active racism is activity that uses, or depends on, such differences as the legitimate basis for differential treatment of groups that have been socially defined as 'races'. In other words, if prejudice is thinking ill of others without sufficient reason, then racism is 'legitimated' acting on such thoughts.

The study of racial forms by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century anatomists and physical anthropologists was conducted in a context of conviction about racial hierarchies of mankind. Their efforts at devising taxonomies of physical form were not an evil as such. But when they began to equate social with physical characteristics, without offering any causal connections, we had the beginnings of fatal cocktails. In Australia the condition of blackness 'guaranteed' the demise of 'primitive Stone Age people'. In Africa blackness was equated with what were deemed to be socially relevant characteristics: lethargy, laziness, indulgence, deviousness, large genitalia, promiscuity and, of course, an inability to govern themselves. Hence the veneration of 'the sacred blood' by Professor Ernst Hauer in Germany, the 'Anglo-Saxon destiny' of the 'master race' by the American cleric Josiah Strong, the 'menace of the under-man' and the need for an 'iron law of inequality' by the American Lothrop Stoddard (Snyder 1962:159, 165, 171). Hence the 'justifiable' nature of colonialism, servitude, slavery and even genocide (Schaft 2004). So-called 'science' could now explain and justify the centuries of custom, belief, myth, credo. The descendants of Ham were not simply an apocryphal, accursed people but also 'scientifically proven' to be a muscular race whose anatomies ordained their perpetual status as hewers of wood and drawers of water (van Jaarsveld 1964).

Among the many hundreds of examples, let me cite two powerful encapsulations of these 'legitimising' beliefs in order to maintain racial hierarchy and the 'preservation of white civilization'. In 1936 General JBM Hertzog (in Tatz 1962:40), South Africa's Prime Minister from 1924 to 1939, declared: As against the European the native stands as an eight-year-old child next to a man of greying experience--a child in religion, a child in moral conviction; without art and without science; with the most primitive requirements and a most rudimentary knowledge of how to supply these needs ...

There was, he said, a difference in 'race-civilisation' and therefore there were 'different racial needs': 'for that reason separate treatment shall be meted out not only as regards legislation, but also in regard to the administration of the law' (Tatz 1962:40). It is interesting to compare the wording of David Hume in 1770 on 'non-white civilizations': 'No ingenious manufactures amongst them, no arts, no sciences' (in Rose 1968:18). In South Africa 'different racial needs' was always the dominant dynamic--from the mid to late 1700s, but much more vehemently and cruelly so in the mid-1900s.

When Baldwin Spencer (1913), Professor of Biology at The University of Melbourne, was the Chief Protector of Aborigines in the Northern Territory, he described Aborigines as 'a very curious mixture': mentally, about the level of a child who has little control over his feelings and is liable to give way to fits of temper during which he may very likely behave with great cruelty. He has no sense of responsibility and, except in rare cases, no initiative ... [Moreover,] the native has no idea whatever of the cultivation of crops nor the domestication of animals... [In this respect] he is far lower than the Papuan, the New Zealander or the usual African native.

And so, on the basis of his beliefs, Spencer helped establish the Kahlin Compound in Darwin, the first of the Territory's 'assimilation homes' for children forcibly removed from their parents. The notion that Aborigines needed white guardianship had begun in New South Wales with Governor Macquarie in the early 1800s and in Victoria in the 1840s but became the major theme of government policies following the protection legislation in Queensland in 1897. These 'homes' were needed for another reason: embarrassment at the large numbers of 'half-caste' children in a racist and racially segregated society. It may be sheer coincidence, but Spencer was president of the Victorian Football League from 1919 to 1926, a period in which only one Aborigine managed a game in senior Australian Rules football (see Stephen, this volume).

Today racism is a generic term, one that covers both antipathy towards and action against people because of their colour, form, culture, religion, language and 'ethnic appearance'. Even history and geography give rise to socially relevant (and undesirable) characteristics; for example, the overt hostility of German Jews to migrant Ostjude from Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century, and the equally vigorous reaction of American Jews to migrant German Jews in the same era. Yet colour, the so-called skin-visibility test of race, remains the clearest marker for most people. Whiteness, blackness, brownness, yellowness, redness were the indelible markers for the first race anatomists: they remain so. Degrees or levels of colour are often crucial. Starting in the seventeenth century, South Africa was predicated on a hierarchy of colour: whites foremost, then Cape Coloured people, then, later, and lastly, always, blacks, variously known as Kaffirs, Natives, Bantu and only later as Africans.

The arithmetic of colour, and the convoluted biology involved, is well illustrated in Australia. The Queensland colony set the tone with its Aboriginal legislation in 1897. With few amendments, the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act set the tenor of tangled race definitions, as follows. Aborigines were 'full-bloods', persons with a preponderance of 'full blood', part-Aboriginal spouses of Aborigines already defined and, quite remarkably amidst the biology, 'residents of reserves'. Part-Aborigines were those with one 'full blood' parent and one 'with no strain of the blood of the indigenous inhabitants'; and those whose parents both had a strain of the blood and who themselves had more than 25 percent of such blood, but not a preponderance of it. These haematological fractions --full, three-quarter, half, quarter, eighth--indicated levels of civilisation. These fractions were not measured in any scientific sense: family genealogy and the 'skin-visibility' test were the usual criteria. The greater their proportion of 'white blood', the more they were deemed salvageable, and rights were apportioned accordingly.

This is not the place to spell out the disastrous consequences of such policies and practices in South Africa, Australia and elsewhere. Christopher Forth has discussed the eighteenth-century view that Jews were outside the 'universal family of humanity' because of their 'physical degradation' and 'odious practices' (Forth 2008, quoting Henri Gregoire in 1788). In a similar vein, blacks in these white supremacist states were outside the nation and outside what genocide scholar Helen Fein calls their 'universe of obligation' (Fein 2004). Clearly, these people were (wrongly) perceived as lacking the requirements of belonging: whiteness, Christianness, intelligence, inventiveness and goodness. The obviousness of the present-day Aboriginal conditions of life is testimony to their continuing 'outsideness', the manner in which they weigh or do not weigh when society allocates entitlements, benefits, goods and elementary services.

Ethnicity, sport and belonging

There is always a problem when population geneticists and sports scientists do not read history, let alone work hand in glove with historians. Several writers quoted earlier, especially Entine (and in Australia, journalist Geoff Wells), peddle the view that black athletes always win the world and Olympic sprints because they are short, squat, muscular, labour-hardened descendants of West African slaves. One is left to presume that as escapees they needed that much speed to outrun their masters and mastiffs. In terms of human evolution, usually over spans of 60,000 years, it would seem that these twitch fibres--the fibres in the muscles that are said to regulate speed and endurance--fast-forwarded from the start of a harsh, physical slavery in America in 1619 to Eddie Tolan's 100-metre Los Angeles Olympics win in 1932. The fibre story appears to rest on a conviction that these black muscle speed responses have either been there since creation or somehow they came to life with the onset of slavery. Of interest is that between 1896 and 2008, 13 whites and 13 blacks have won that particular Olympic laurel. An historian rather than a geneticist would better explain the absence of a black winner between 1896 and 1932. It should be noted that Aboriginal/Islander men have won the last six Australian 100-metre championships from 2004 to 2009. What could explain that achievement? The chance to run, the desire to run, the rewards of running, emulation of role models and the new 'race' theory that blacks are destined to win come to mind as answers.

In 1755 the Dictionary of the English Language defined 'Ethnicks' as 'Heathen; Pagan; not Jewif h; not Chriftian'. Ethnicity has come a long way since then and embraces a great deal more than Samuel Johnson's one-liner. The word 'otherness' is now commonplace in the social sciences and is often used by people to distinguish others from themselves--as Edward Said (1978) described the British and French view of 'Orientals'--or by the very others to identify themselves.

The early nineteenth-century German philosopher Georg Hegel talked of 'self-consciousness' (Kainz 1976). But he did not quite say what it is that one is conscious of, and nor do the modern users of 'otherness'. In 1934 an influential American rabbi, Mordecai Kaplan (1934:177-8), described Jewish otherness as including history, language, social organisation, folkways, sanctions, standards of conduct, aesthetic values and social ideals. He could well have added geography and domicile, material culture and spirituality. There is, as always, a trap: while this wide-ranging otherness is the social cement that holds a group or a unit of people together, the binding that enables them to survive, it is that very essence that enables their detractors to summarise, encapsulate and generalise what they see as their disagreeable characteristics. In many ways ethnicity can be more dangerous to a definable or self-defining community than so-called 'race' membership: it has a wider net than the skin-visibility criterion.

In Obstacle Race (Tatz 1995:183-5), I wrote at some length about the playing styles of Aborigines and Islanders. I quoted several noted commentators who have talked less about style than about inherent qualities. Patrick Smith of the Age considered that footballer Gavin Wanganeen had 'innate coordination' and 'a freaky way of doing things', characteristics not shown in other talented players. Martin Flanagan concluded that Aboriginal footballers have 'a different sense of time and space', together with a quality of 'clairvoyance', especially between brothers Jim and Phil Krakouer (Figures 4 and 5). 'Born to play football' was a recent television observation on the skills of Adam Goodes, the Sydney Swans Aboriginal player and twice winner of the ultimate Australian football award, the Brownlow Medal. The commentator intended compliment, not racial denigration, but he also meant that Goodes' essential Aboriginality was the explanation of his football displays. Both day-to-day conversation and the serious literature are replete with these 'abnormal' physical attributes and 'born-to' convictions--born to shoot baskets, sprint down the track, win marathons, hit home runs, score tries or touchdowns, knock out opponents and run rings around the opposition (Burfoot 1992; Entine 2000; Sailes 1990, 1998; Sarich et al. 1996; Sarich and Miele 2004). The intent was and is meant to be positive. As a kind of quid pro quo for the past exclusions, we now embrace and celebrate black inclusion because it is demonstrably worthy and, politically, it is 'owing'.

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The 'evidence' for racial or ethnic excellence seems clear enough if one looks only at the achievements or characteristics of a small, core group in a restricted environ. In all population studies we need to remember that the so-called key characteristics--the ones on which we base stereotypes--are to be found only at the central core of any population's total and that there are considerably more people at the periphery and poles who in total do not manifest them. The most identifiable of the high, steel, skyscraper girder workers in big American cities are Iroquois Indians (Wilson 1960). The non-Iroquois believe it and the Iroquois have come to believe it. There appear to be more of them than any other identifiable group: they are very good at it, are seen to be good at it and soon enough they become the only ones who are good at it. Ergo, a myth is created that all Iroquois are 'born to' this vertiginous occupation--which is manifestly not the case. Similarly, the most proficient layers of railway sleepers in Australian dry lands were the seafaring Torres Strait Islanders in whose early lives no train was ever present. Railway genes? Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, European antisemitism included the 'truth' that the Jewish posture (and nature) was different, decadent and pathological. Yet during the 1920s and 1930s, nearly one-third of professional boxers were Jewish and Jews held 30 world titles between 1910 and 1940 (Bodner 1997). Myth creation is at work in all cases like these. The one difference is that beliefs and convictions about one group can be positive (in employment, for example) and often injurious or even fatal for another. Hoberman's Darwin's Athletes (1997) has a subtitle that captures this entire problem: How sport has damaged black America and preserved the myth of race.

There is nothing innate, nothing genetic, anatomical or physiological underlying these social and occupational behaviours. Social forces and dynamics--including alienation, prejudice, racism, exclusion, survivalism, need, desperation, escapism, ambition--push people towards areas where 'being' and identity can gain a small place in the sun. One can add the pull of parental ambition and drive, college grants and scholarships, and immense social and financial rewards.

Mainstream people have a confident sense of 'we' and 'us'. We are, we belong, we belong because we are. We may have personal and social problems but identity is not one of them. Essentially, we are Sydneysiders, Canberrans, Queenslanders, Aussies, Australian Catholics... Identity is with a street, suburb, class, region or a religion. At worst, there is social denigration, as in 'Westies' (those in Sydney's western suburbs) or 'the working class'. The 'working classes' have, of course, also been the subject of theories of biological determinism. Sociologist Kevin White reminds us that earlier notions about heritable disorders among the working class continued in the late twentieth century and may still be alive today. He cites a 1979 article in the respected Medical Journal of Australia, which claimed that 'working class sperm' had a different structure from its middle-class brothers, giving birth to people with 'simple and repetitive thoughts', 'unlike the complex thoughts of the middle classes' (White 2008:166).

Belonging to a place, a group, a belief system is a given. Alienation of an individual from his/her social group occurs, as Emile Durkheim told us, but that is different from ethnic alienation from the mainstream in the sense that German sociologist Georg Simmel wrote about in 'The Stranger'. Simmel (1950:402-08) was not writing about the social boundaries of race and racism as such. Nevertheless, his work was central to later writers who realised that some groups, like African-Americans, diasporic Jews and Armenians, need to find social unity without having a central location. Ethnicity outside of the immediate 'homeland'--the nation, region, ghetto--is always associated with belonging and not belonging. It is all too often about what WEB Du Bois (1903) called 'double consciousness', that is, being forever aware that one is black in the United States and forever aware that others are aware that one is black--even when they pretend not to be. An old Jewish proverb sums it up neatly: if ever you forget that you are a Jew, there is always someone to remind you. Double consciousness can be an awful burden and sometimes it can be made both dominant and triumphant, as with Black Islam. For many members of minorities there is an ever-present sense of doomed helplessness, of pessimism, of what has been called the self-fulfilling prophecy, the acting out of the stereotype. For some, there is a sense of determination to win a place in the sun, to achieve in order to rate a sense of social acceptance rather than merely educational, economic, political or legal equality. It becomes a conscious or unconscious grail to count for something, to be recognised for something, to become or to remain a social unity.

For many, just to break out of the cycle of oppressive poverty, of being regarded, always, as an uncouth underclass, was enough. Even in the last century American black entertainers were (seemingly) happy enough to be regarded as sepia Sinatras and to get a reasonable share of the gigs and the recording studios. For others, like Jack Johnson and Muhammad Ali, alienation produced an intense desire not just for social acceptance, but a burning sense of superiority over all opponents and what they represented. Neither man liked boxing that much, if they liked it at all (Roberts 1986). But they were not prepared to be what white society wanted them to be. Where else, but in sport, can black men and women pit their bodies against others without having to go to school, finish school, go to university, graduate, start at the bottom of the heap, work through to the middle or the top, then get the key to the executive suite? And then, in a lifetime, earn the kind of money, let alone the fame and the acclaim, that some can earn in a few rounds or in a fraction less than ten seconds?

A matter of bent?

Past research in psychology has provided a range of information to discredit attempts to link particular skills with particular groups of people. For example, Professor Simon Bieshuevel (Director of the National Institute for Personnel Research in Johannesburg in the 1970s) was interested in psychomotor skills in industrial workers. There was, he concluded, no evidence of any skill differences between blacks and whites (Bieshuevel 1979:271-93). He showed that these skills were predominantly the outcome of training but conceded that 'cultural circumstances'--by which he meant politico-socio-economic conditions--may affect skill achievement. He was also interested in the notion of 'bent' rather than aptitude, as in a particular inclination or tendency, even a bias towards something like physical or intellectual activity.

Bent, or rather socialised bent, is also related to what Thomas Kochman (1981) called 'styles', or different ways of viewing and playing sport. Do Aboriginal people have the same motives in sport as others and do they play in the same way? Martin Flanagan, perhaps the most astute and acute observer of Aborigines in Australian Rules football, came close to 'the genetic explanation' when he asserted that 'they defy what is immediately apparent, they do the unexpected and create a new sense of the possible' (in Tatz 1995:183-5). Their emphasis, he says, is on spontaneity, clearly something one does not find in the grinding, ground-gaining strategies of most white styles of play, many of them set pieces and quite formulaic. Mark Ella always said that 'the secret of our success was the total enjoyment we received out of rugby' (in Tatz 1995:351). Fun is not something one hears from competitive sportspeople; one does hear it from non-conformist Aboriginal players. Grinding out the yards was not for the Ella brothers (Figure 6).

[FIGURE 6 OMITTED]

Social and geographic circumstances explain a great deal. I recall Australian football legend Polly Farmer saying that he used to handball footballs through the open window of a car parked some distance away: if he understood the ball well enough, he said, the rest would follow. The three Hayward brothers kicked balls through the narrow forks of trees, achieving great accuracy in the absence of goal posts. The Kickett parents relate how their boys used to kick and pass balls in the dark: if they could hear the location of the ball, the rest would follow. In the absence of electricity, radio, television, internal water or even housing as normally understood, there was not much else to do. With few exceptions, such were the environments of most of the Aboriginal football achievers (Gorman 2005; Haebich 1998; Hayward 2006).

What is perceived by some as 'clairvoyance' is not physical, not inherited, but rather a legacy of what Bieshuevel called 'cultural circumstances': skills honed through living closely together, kicking balls through tree forks and in the dark, and not through some biological genesis that produces 'peripheral vision'. Ted Egan, who has lived in Aboriginal communities for decades and who has watched, played with and coached Aborigines in Australian Rules football for well over 50 years, has an explanation that convinces me. Aboriginal children, he says, are adventurous, even dangerous, at play; parents do not exercise the same kind of anxieties and disciplinary admonitions as occur in white society. The child, he contends, learns very early on to survive heights, depths, difficulties and dangers. To survive, one learns to assess and comprehend situations. Qualities like defensiveness, avoidance, acceleration and, above all, the ability 'to read a game' have their basis in early cultural socialisation, not in biology. There may well be a need to research this proposition, but here I endorse Egan's contentions, supported by my fieldwork experiences, especially during the Aboriginal youth suicide studies.

Once allowed on the field, black players have been subjected to another form of prejudice, the one American scholars (Loy and McElvogue 1970) called 'stacking', that is, choosing black players but placing them in relatively unimportant positions, as in the outfield in baseball or as lineblockers in gridiron football, never in the 'brain positions'. Rugby league used to invariably assign Aboriginal players to the wings or centres, irrespective of physique, strength and speed. A former Australian captain once told me how much he respected Aboriginal backline players but 'I wouldn't want to rely on an Aboriginal forward pack behind me'. But this situation has gradually changed, and over the past three decades Aboriginal forwards have come in to their own: Sam Backo, Artie Beetson, Mal Cochrane, Ron Gibbs, Cliff Lyons, Bruce Olive, Ron Saddler, Ian Russell, Craig Salvatori, Gorden Tallis, Sam Thaiday and Dean Widders, among others (Figures 7 to 10).

[FIGURE 7 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 8 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 9 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 10 OMITTED]

Just on 35 percent of the 42 Australian football players in the updated and current (2009) Aboriginal and Islander Sports Hall of Fame were born in the south-west of Western Australia. Six little towns--Bunbury, Gnowangerup, Narrogin, Wagin, Tambellup and Kellerberrin--with an Aboriginal population of perhaps 5000 people, have produced the Hayward, Kickett, Narkle, Matera and Krakouer clans, Barry Cable, Polly Farmer, Ted Kilmurray and Stephen Michael, among others. Very close and powerful kinship relationships and communal striving to overcome vigorous legal, economic and social racism, including child removals, offer real explanations, as opposed to mythical Tambellup genes.

There is a book waiting to be written about Aboriginal kinship in sport. Sibling, parental and familial patterns are astonishing: the three Tutton brothers in volleyball; the Mullett family in badminton; the Chalker family in golf; the Duncan family in judo; the Anderson brothers and the Ivy Hampton-Eileen Foster sisters in darts; the Gabelish sisters in basketball; the Sands and Richards brothers, and the Mundine father and son, in boxing; the Bonson, Kantilla, Lew Fatt, McAdam, Rioli and Vigona families in Northern Territory football; the Benbolt, Betts, Burgoyne and Johncock families in South Australian football; the Johnson, Longbottom, Blacklock, Simon, Liddiard and Daisy families in rugby league; the Ella brothers in rugby union ... (Figures 11 to 13). So it goes on: an immensely rich vein for social, not biological, inquiry.

All this is not to say that there should be no biomedical research in sport, or that all such research is inherently or automatically dangerous. It is also not to say that the search for the clues and the keys to athletic success should cease. Rather, it is to say that sport appears increasingly to be a field that can be misused by those dedicated to a science of race and racial rankings--not for the sake of science but rather for their own political and social beliefs about society. Harvard educationalist Arthur Jensen (1969) set a trend with a paper on black intelligence, basically asserting that American governments were wasting money on education programs for blacks because their innate inabilities did not allow the delivery of their aspirations, or those of white society on their behalf. Psychologist Hans Eysenck (1975), physicist William Shockley (Pearson and Shockley 1992), Jensen (1998) and Jensen again, this time with Philippe Rushton (2005), have continued in this vein of heriditarian 'brawn or brains'. Psychologist Leon Kamin (1974), palaeontologist and naturalist Stephen Jay Gould (1981) and anthropologist Melvin Konner (2002) have clearly demonstrated the flaws in the writings of these advocates of genetic determinism; but they have also shown just how influential their works have been on policy makers and legislators, especially in the United States. Those who do the work on athletic success may not have any interest in 'race politics', but they need to be aware that their work is capable of being put to misuses that they never intended and which they may well despise.

[FIGURE 11 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 12 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 13 OMITTED]

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Colin Tatz

AIATSIS & School of Social Sciences, Australian National University

Colin Tatz has held chairs in politics at the University of New England and Macquarie University. He is now Visiting Fellow in Social Sciences at the ANU and Honorary Visiting Fellow at AIATSIS. <colintatz@gmail.com>