NanoThoughts 1.0

In this article:SI.com - Writers - John Walters: Were DeBerry's comments really inaccurate? John Walters does some simplistic analysis trying to show that yes, there are more African-American players in the so-called speed positions of American Football. This is obvious to anyone with a television. Without getting into DeBerry's comments specifically, I'd like to point out that it seems people have a hard time saying/realizing/accepting that African Americans are "faster" than other racial makeups. And by African American, I mean West Africans or the descendants of West Africans as this is where slaves were taken from. East Africans such as Ethiopians, Eritreans etc. dominate marathons just as West Africans dominate sprints, and Caucasians are usually the best at upper body strength. Just as males are faster and stronger than women.

It's a fact that every human being who has run 100m in under 10 seconds was a male of West African descent. And the 100m dash, along with pretty much all track events, are the most democratized sports in the world. No fancy equipment, not much strategy (there are some tactics though), and everybody in the world can play and practice at home. Therefore, it seems to me that it has more to do with "nature" than "nurture."

I realize, of course, that some people have the mistaken idea that if you're good at something, then you have to be bad at something else and e.g., nobody could be a good athlete and smart too. Or, they want to think that intelligence, which being super-multidimensional is way harder to measure than one or two-dimensional "speed", has a huge genetic component. Hopefully, one day people will wake up.