Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports And Why We're Afraid To Talk About It Paperback – January 10, 2001

This is a tough book to review, so many positives and negatives. I give this book strong marks for "fairly" addressing the taboo of black sports superiority. He cites other books which had "hidden" agendas and sounds believable that he is not supportive of that agenda.
But the book had obvious weakness. He early in the books states his general thesis. I kept waiting for more in-depth knowledge supporting his position but frankly it was not forthcoming.
The second part of the book discussed evolution in depth which I found very boring. But immediately after this, there were great discussions about the history of black sports in America as well as race relations in that period. During this section, Jewish domination of basketball in the 40s-50s was discussed which I found interesting as I had no knowledge of this.
The book moved into the last section which I expected to be a conclusion with more in-depth support. Unfortunately, it was not forthcoming, only a general repeat as stated in the first section.
From the breakdowns of the sections above, you can see I found some parts of the book interesting and some quite boring. But the more I thought of this book, the more I realized it did provide a valuable function; to make you think about a "taboo" subject. For presenting a controversial subject in an unbiased manner and generating thought, I have to give this book reasonably high marks. Some people will hate this book and some will love it. But maybe, more importantly, it provided a balanced view of a difficult subject for the majority of readers to draw their own conclusions.

When I first started watching sports on tv more than fifty years ago, one of the first sports events I remember watching was the Wisconsin state basketball tournament. In the championship game (there was only one division in those days) there was one team from northern Wisconsin with all white players. The other team was from Milwaukee and all-black. The black team won the game , but what struck me most was the athletic ability of the black kids. All the black players easily out-jumped and outran all the white players. I wondered at the time why all the black kids could jump so much higher and run so much faster than the white kids.
Since basketball was my favorite sport, I not only watched it a lot, I read numerous articles about the sport. In the sixties blacks started to dominate other previously white-dominated sports. In the mid-fifties the NBA was only 5% black. Ten years later the league was about 50% black. Many commentators and writers about the sport said blacks dominated because they played and practiced much more than white athletes. I accepted this "wisdom" for a time, but nagging doubts bothered me.
One issue that bothered me was that while blacks on average practiced far more than white athletes, the black population was only ten percent of the total population of the country. Many white kids, in states like Indiana, put in just as much time as black athletes.
Another thing that bothered me was that even if black dominance had to do mostly with their practicing longer than white athletes, why were the white athletes that did make it to the NBA on average slower and less springier than black athletes?
But in other previously white-dominated sports like American football, black athletes began dominating. And they dominated mostly in the positions that emphasized speed, like running backs, receivers, and defensive backs. And even in baseball where the hitter is stationary, there were no white equivalents in the National League to Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Ernie Banks, Frank Robinson, and Roberto Clemente. And baseball was a sport where whites played and practiced far more than black athletes. Boxing was similar. In virtually every weight category, blacks dominated.
But the clincher for me proving black superiority, as it should have been for most realists, was track and field, especially the sprints. For the last fifty years there has been no white American sprinter in the 100 and 200 meter sprints.
A deluded person can make excuses for other sports, but in the one event where raw ability wins out, blacks not only dominated, they totally monopolized the events...in both male AND!!! female sprints.
There is no contest...there is no argument. In sports where speed is paramount, blacks dominate.
Given the relatively small numbers of blacks who populate the U.S. and the world, if athletic abiltity were equal, it would be statistically impossible for such small numbers to dominate certain sports for so long.
The bigger questions is why so many people refused to accept facts for so long. I believe the thinking has changed over the years to the point where most people, white and black, accept black athletic superiority. That does not mean that blacks are superior specimens. It simply means that adaptation to their environment genetically selected for people who could run and jump better than other races. Whites had to adapt to colder environments where more fat was needed to survive. Hence, whites are superior to blacks in aquatic events like swimming and water polo where buoyancy is extremely important. Blacks have higher bone density than whites and are known as sinkers making it much more difficult for them to remain buoyant.
The sooner people accept the obvious that the peoples of the world are not physically (and mentally) identical, the better off the world will be.

The one major criticism of this book is while Entine does an excellent job overall, he omits detailing approximately how superior blacks are to whites. This could be done by simply studying track events like the sprints.
Nobody is a racist for pointing out differences in ethnic groups. The truth is always better than lies in the long run.

Journalist Jon Entine examines the controversial question of whether or not black dominance in sports has a genetic component. He also examines the social history behind the question, which has given rise to the taboo he speaks of. Entine begins by establishing the fact of black athletic dominance in sports, and then breaks it down further, noting long-distance runners tend to come from East Africa while short-distance athletes come from West Africa. Entine then moves into the history of blacks in sports, taking us from the rise of blacks in sports, begining with boxers Jack Johnson and Joe Louis through Jesse Owens disproving Hitler's racial theories at the 1936 Olympics and to the present day. At first, blacks were considered inferior and incapable of competing with whites. But when blacks began to dominate sports, the ideology turned around: Blacks were good at sports since they were animal like.
Were genetics driving this dominance of blacks in sports? Entine believes the answer is yes. Entine claims that Africans have certain hereditary traits that translate into success in sports. These include less body fat and more muscle, greater bone density, and more fast-twitch fibers. It is hard to make a plausible environmental argument to counter this wealth of evidence. And Entine doesn't really see why intelligent people should balk at any mention of black hereditary advantage in sports.
Strangely enough, this book really did not cause the stir one would expect. It was well-received critically, and few attacked Entine on racial grounds. But by establishing that one racial group had certain biological differences that cannot be explained in terms of the environment, Entine has opened a veritable Pandora's box on the entire issue of race. The burgening white nationalist movement has of course used this book as proof that biological differences do indeed exist, and those differences include not just physical but mental traits as well. In other words, they used the implications from this book to claim blacks are inferior, just like critics feared they would. However, we cannot deny reality must because someone perverts science. The conclusions here seem undeniable: Races vary in physical attributes and capabilities. How this fact will be interpreted will largely determine whether or not we use the evidence presented here to understand our differences and celebrate them, or use those differences to drive others away from us, as we have in the past.