This paper confronts the salience of arguments that identify the racial basis of athletic ability. It is argued that these notions of racial athleticism are developed through the interaction between ideas and ways of thinking about human beings and racial groups, reflecting Gramsci's concept of ‘common sense’ that explores the complex correspondence between the presentation of fact and opinion, science and myth. The paper suggests that the mobilization of objective scientific method and subjective plural multiculturalist values within racial athleticism help reinforce its claims to logical validity and moral legitimacy. In response, it is argued that the presentation of the biological basis of race and integrity of cultural difference and particularity within a scientific, intuitive, and principled framework constitutes racial athleticism as a powerful common‐sense idea that cannot be easily dismantled by the simple counter‐presentation of alternative facts. Rather, it is suggested that a progressive resp...

Sport and common-sense racial science

This article explores the ethical implications of recent discussions that naturalize the relationship between race, the body and sport within the frame of genetic science. Many suggestions of a racially distributed genetic basis for athletic ability and performance are strategically posited as a resounding critique of the `politically correct' meta-narratives of established sociological and anthropological forms of explanation that emphasize the social and cultural construction of race. I argue that this use of genetic science in order to describe and explain common-sense impressions of racial physiology and sporting ability is founded on erroneous premises of objectivity and disinterest, and inflates the analytical efficacy of scientific truth claims. I suggest that assertions of a value-free science of racial athletic ability reify race as inherited permanent biological characteristics that produce social hierarchies and are more characteristic of a longer history of `racial science'.

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'Sport, genetics and the "natural athlete": the resurgence of racial science.'

The current orthodoxy regarding science within sport science is rethought so as to enable the social sciences to enter the field and allow for a debate over the nature and purpose of the sport sciences. An alternative vision of the potential of the sport sciences is proposed: A more “scientific” picture of human beings may be produced if human beings are studied “in the round,” capturing them as whole selves, not as isolated physiological or psychological units. If a multidisciplinary synthesis were adopted, the subject, via its component disciplines, would provide a model for the reintegration of disciplines in the urgent need to study people in human-development and not performance-efficiency terms.

Human Sciences, Sport Sciences, and the Need to Study People “In the Round”

This investigation explores the role of science in teaching about diversity in schools and among pre-service teachers. Driven by the ubiquitous presence of scientific innovation and global intersec...

Race, multiculturalisms and the role of science in teaching diversity: towards a critical post-modern science pedagogy

The longest continuous thread in sport sociology research is the study of stacking. Briefly put, the phenomenon of stacking discussed and analyzed in this essay means the placement of African-American baseball players in non-central positions more often than they are placed in core positions. Most American research studies have been concentrated on the sports of football, soccer, basketball and, to a larger extent, baseball. While discussions of stacking are often severed from the structural changes in the larger economy and society, this research provides a different perspective by concentrating less on primary empirical research and concentrating more on addressing theoretical issues that have been only peripherally addressed in the empirical studies. We hypothesize that the interrelated set of phenomena captured by the term stacking are primarily issues of social isolation, marginalization and the systematic discrimination against African American athletes on and off playing fields.

Twenty-five years of stacking research in major league baseball : An attempt at explaining this re-occurring phenomenon

The purpose of this paper is (a) to present brief historical notes on the concept of race, (b) to define race in the context of evolutionary biology, (c) to quantify the extent of human genetic variation, (d) to estimate genetic differences within and between races, and (e) to comment on the implications of these concepts for racial differences in sport performance. Research shows that genetic variation in gene products and in the non-coding sequence of DNA is quite extensive in humans. Variation is found more frequently in non-coding DNA sequences than in coding exons, and while this variation does not influence the primary structure of the proteins, it may have considerable impact on gene expression. However, much of that genetic variation is shared by all human beings, and only about 10% is specific to races or populations within races. At this time, it is not possible to conclude satisfactorily the significance of these modest racial differences in genetic variation for racial differences in performance. It may turn out that this low level of genetic heterogeneity may have considerable implication for performance.

Bouchard C

Papers

Genetic basis of racial differences.