Sport: Of Mandingo and Jimmy the Greek

"On the plantations, a strong black man was mated with a strong black woman. ((Blacks)) were simply bred for physical qualities."

Those are not the words of Jimmy ("the Greek") Snyder, the football speculator cashiered by CBS Sports for enunciating a virtually identical sentiment in a Martin Luther King Day interview. Rather they were spoken by black Olympic Gold Medalist Lee Evans, a militant protester against white racism during the 1960s. Evans was quoted in a 1971 SPORTS ILLUSTRATED article on the purported physiological differences between blacks and whites. In that story, among many other things, experts claimed that what Coach Al Campanis more recently declared was true: blacks are less buoyant. If there are significant genetic differences between blacks and whites, the ability to spew psuedohistorical nonsense about racial distinctions is one trait both races have in common and in abundance.

The notion that systematic efforts to improve the prowess of slaves by selective breeding have something to do with black athletic achievements is one of the most persistent and pernicious myths in America's overflowing collection of racist ideas. Historians as diverse as Ulrich B. Phillips, a staunch defender of the Confederacy, and Eugene Genovese, a Marxist, have convincingly shown that there was no widespread deliberate mating of slaves. This preposterous theory has nevertheless wormed its way into the collective consciousness through such classic works of pulp fiction as Mandingo. It is probably no coincidence that Kyle Onstott, creator of that lurid depiction of the couplings between and within the races on a fictional slave-rearing plantation, was also the author of The New Art of Breeding Better Dogs.

A century of efforts to quantify physiological differences between the races has yielded plenty of anthropological mumbo jumbo. In the early days of Darwinism, some European scholars suggested that the major races had each descended from a different species of ape: Caucasians from chimpanzees, the most intelligent nonhuman primates; Orientals from orangutans; and Negroes from gorillas, the biggest and blackest of all.

More recently, attention has focused on blacks' supposedly longer lower legs and skinnier calves, which are said to give blacks an advantage over whites in jumping and sprinting. Most evolutionists dismiss attempts to link race and individual excellence as silly. "The differences between the races are very small," says Harvard Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, "just tiny compared to the variation within races." When specialists compared the legs of Jesse Owens and Frank Wykoff, the leading black and white sprinters of the 1930s, they discovered that Owens' calf muscles more closely resembled the presumed white model, while Wykoff's were in the black mold.

How then could the Greek, who at $500,000 a year presumably knew how to keep his football out of his mouth, say something so stupid? The explanation really lies in his subsequent warning that "if blacks take over coaching like everybody wants them to, there is not going to be anything left for the white people." Seldom does a public figure so plainly state what many whites seem to feel when blacks break into previously all-white enclaves: more for them is less for us.