Academia Free-For-All Science Sports

You’re Reading The Comments, Right?

January 9, 2023 by David 115 Comments

Where, for instance, pst314 and Mr Muldoon point us to an “analysis” piece in Scientific American, in which we’re urged to fret about “the violence Black men experience in [American] football,” and in which we’re told that the physicality of the sport “disproportionately affects black men.” This is framed in the article so as to imply some systemic racial wrongdoing – “anti-Black practices” that are “inescapable” – rather than, say, being an unremarkable reflection of the sport’s demographics, in which, at professional levels, black players are a majority.

Or to put it another, no less scientific, way – the risk of injury while playing a contact sport disproportionately affects those who actually play it.

No evidence is offered, at all, to establish that injuries are more frequent among black players compared to their white peers – which is pretty much the article’s premise – or to support the conceit that any such disparity, should it exist, must be driven by racism. And yet we’re told, with an air of satisfaction,

These playing fields… are never theoretically far from plantation fields.

Albeit a plantation with fan mail, lucrative endorsements, and an average salary of around $2.7 million.

And so, the approved line of thinking seems to be that if a sport doesn’t have whatever is deemed a representative proportion of minority participants, this must be construed, and denounced, as damning evidence of racism, regardless of the actual factors involved, including the preferences and priorities of said minorities. And if a sport comes to be dominated by a racial minority, at least at elite levels, this too must be construed, and denounced, as damning evidence of racism.

The author of the piece, Tracie Canada, is a “socio-cultural anthropologist whose ethnographic research uses sport to theorize race, kinship and care, gender, and the performing body.” Ms Canada, an assistant professor at Duke University, should perhaps be thanked for reminding us that in order to propagate a woke premise, and thereby grift, one may have to avoid thinking about fairly obvious things.

Likewise, when you’re the editor-in-chief of Scientific American:

An editor-in-chief whose thought process seems to be:

‘People are laughing at me and pointing out the errors that I didn’t spot, despite it being my job; therefore they are bad people, and therefore I am correct, and morally unassailable, and no further reflection is required.’

I paraphrase, of course. But not, I think, unfairly.*

The steep downward trajectory of said publication has been mentioned here before.

*Added via the comments.

Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.




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