Darwin's Athletes
How Sport Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
A “provocative, disturbing, important” look at how society’s obsession with athletic achievement undermines African Americans (The New York Times).
Very few pastimes in America cross racial, regional, cultural, and economic boundaries the way sports do. From the near-religious respect for Sunday Night Football to obsessions with stars like Tiger Woods, Serena Williams, and Michael Jordan, sports are as much a part of our national DNA as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But hidden within this reverence—shared by the media, corporate America, even the athletes themselves—is a dark narrative of division, social pathology, and racism.
In Darwin’s Athletes, John Hoberman takes a controversial look at the profound and disturbing effect that the worship of sports, and specifically of black players, has on national race relations. From exposing the perpetuation of stereotypes of African American violence and criminality to examining the effect that athletic dominance has on perceptions of intelligence to delving into misconceptions of racial biology, Hoberman tackles difficult questions about the sometimes subtle ways that bigotry can be reinforced, and the nature of discrimination.
An important discussion on sports, cultural attitudes, and dangerous prejudices, Darwin’s Athletes is a “provocative book” that serves as required reading in the ongoing debate of America’s racial divide (Publishers Weekly).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Tackling an issue rarely broached by black or white commentators, Hoberman argues that the traumatic history of America has led blacks to prize athleticism so much that it substitutes for other achievement and perpetuates images of intellectual inferiority. He also takes the larger society to task for not probing the racial significance of sports and for perpetuating stereotypes and false "virtual integration" in sports imagery. If Hoberman (Mortal Engines) writes more ponderously than an enlightened sportswriter, he delves thoughtfully into history. He observes that the black soldier and aviator were public icons during WWII, but that those images were subsequently suppressed and replaced by sportive ones. He shows the way the racial divide develops similarly in European sports: "edia saturation means that every modern society generates its own racial subcultures of sports." He deconstructs the way black intellectuals (Cornel West, Michael Eric Dyson) distort the cultural importance of athletics. Finally, he delves into questions of racial biology, disputing the folk wisdom that slavers selected hardy people and that slavery helped create even hardier ones. Similarly, he adds, arguments about the inherent superiority of black athletes cannot be proven, and black sports success remains influenced by culture. In the end, Hoberman maintains, the race-based images of sports influence right-wing thinking about black criminality and inherited intelligence. This provocative book deserves wide discussion.
