I don’t remember where is the post is above in which it is speculated that blacks are the minority or nearly nonexistent in hockey and swimming because of socioeconomic circumstances.
If it’s just a matter of exposure and resources, then why has there only been one white man in history to run a sub-ten second 100 meters? After all, if it’s a poor person sports generally, regardless of race, how come only one white man in all the time there has been track sports has managed to do that?
Basketball and football are available to whites and blacks regardless of expensive resources and blacks are prevalent or dominating in both sports. How does this explain the resource-deficiency, not to mention that basketball was a sport invented by a white man and initially played by whites yet they haven’t succeeded in it in the numbers blacks do?
Anyway, at this point in time in America there are tens of thousands (perhaps more) blacks that have the means to send their children for hockey and swimming lessons. But they don’t! I work with over four hundred blacks and perhaps a few dozen other non-whites, nurses, CNA’s, janitors, housekeeping, along with solely black electricians and elevator repair men, who are making mid-five to low-six figure salaries, with great health benefits, a union, pensions, and tuition reimbursement. (Does this sound like repression to anyone?) Guess what? I think it’s safe to say that hardly any or none send their kids to hockey or swimming lessons.
Can’t we just recognize that certain sports, art, music, and recreational activities are favored by different people simply because of their inner natures and anatomical and cognitive configurations? I simply don’t know what the heck is wrong with this and why there has to be an elaborate reason or excuse as to why one group doesn’t succeed in an area in which another does, seriously?! We can’t just casually say R&B is a black thing, salsa, is a Caribbean thing, and opera is a European thing, without a subsequent song-and-dance explanation because it hurts the feelings of grown men, despite what everyone sees and experiences over and over and over again! And this goes for other sub sequential actions and behaviors and performances in areas more consequential than GAMES (it’s what they are at the end of the day) and music!
I haven’t been able to keep up with the thread, but what I find amusing (and I don’t mean this in a confrontational way), is that despite all the talk here and elsewhere regarding race–whether it’s biological or social–and socioeconomic problems and who’s downtrodden, and every excuse in the book as to why one group falls behind another–none of this matters in the end regarding RESULTS AND ACTIONS.
We can talk til we are blue in the face or type until our arms and hands can no longer go on; that all doesn’t matter in the end as far as I and others are concerned. What matters in the end are actions. That is, when left to choose and with freedom to associate, the various groups of this world mostly (nearly all) self-segregate! That is, Asians stick with Asians, Whites stick with whites, and blacks stick with blacks and so on, and so on! If this wasn’t the case, we wouldn’t find near exclusively or largely Asian, Black Hispanic, Indian, Polish, Portuguese or Italian towns and businesses here in NYC and Long Island. All such such people are obviously discriminative (otherwise how would this situation arise?) and I don’t see what’s wrong with it considering most of them are law-abiding, raising families, respectful (though perhaps not all are gregarious), and so on.
If I go to an Asian restaurant around here, in nearly all cases the staff is Asian. If I go to a Polish restaurant, only Poles are employed. Can I get into the concrete business easily? Likely not; I’m not Portuguese or Italian.
Is there something wrong with these people? Are they bigoted in their actions? Should someone reprimand and buffalo them into moving to other towns and hiring others to become less racially or ethnically discriminative and thereby change their ways of doing things? After all, these scenarios don’t happen by accident.
Let’s go forward with a more crude but realistic example, this one involving the code-speak of many people, and it’s a type of code-speak I’ve uncounted my whole life, even up to a few weeks ago when speaking to a real estate agent. Notice how the words “good”, “changed”, “bad”, and “changing” are used.
“You don’t wanna live there. The town is OK, but the school district is bad.”
“The neighborhood changed/is changing.”
“We are looking at houses in _______. The school district there is good.”
Anyone with half a brain knows what this all means.
And actually all the people I’ve heard talk in such a manner or ordinary, friendly, law-abiding people. They’re harmless. They simply want to live in a certain fashion and don’t want or want to deal with certain groups or want to mostly be around their own kinds. Is this bigoted? Some even have truly good things to say about the people they’re avoiding or who they choose not to socialize with (e.g., law abidingness, cleanliness, respectfulness, family-oriented, church-going, etc).
I make these examples because what I see not his forum and in the outside world is a supposed moral superiority or snootiness that is expressed when people imply that millions upon millions of people are heavily flawed because of their decisions and ways of living and preferences based on race and ethnicity. They’ll say, “people SHOULD judge one another individually,” this or that one is bigoted, “people SHOULD see beyond race”, should this, should that, are wrong for doing this, etc, etc. Or they’ll focus on themselves in such statements like this, “I have a friend who…,” “I never experienced/saw that…”, “I never read that…” as if everything that is unique to them goes for thousands or millions of other people in this world!
Some often say stuff with no solution at all, rightfully so, because there is no way to change the nature of billions of human beings! Some will say, as above, “I judge people individually.” Well, watcha gonna do about the billions who don’t, and continue to discriminate in benign ways, and yes, DANGEROUS ways, usually by way of tribal or nation-based warfare, or even inside a prison setting where race is the most divisive everyday life factor.
Someone gonna change all this? No! That’s why, as I said, and for a Cliff Notes/TLDR version of my post: actions are even more important at the end of the day, over biology and social constructs and theories!