Essential Facts about Race

More sports to start this week - the World Athletics Championships giving rise to more debate. There was a nice piece on the Today programme this morning. Today featured a debate between Jon Entine and Matthew Syed, sports correspondent of The Times. Entine was arguing that the predominance of black athletes at the World Champs was down to genetics. Actually, his claim did get a bit more complex, in that he argued different races were good at different things. However, Entine did make the generalisation that ‘West Africans’ dominated running events, because of their superior genetics for that event.

Matthew Syed did quite an effective job on disposing of Entine’s claims, at one point listing about 10 West African countries which have patently not been at all successful at the World Champs. As Syed argued, Jamaica - one country which was predominant - has a history and tradition in athletics. Resources are devoted to athletics in Jamaica; that is why, Jamaican bobsleigh team apart, they tend to do well in running. In other words, a social reason.

But there are wider methodological points.

Beware false dichotomies. Far be my intention to peddle sociological imperialism. Good athletes are obviously the result of genetic and social factors. But let’s avoid invalid and reductive explanations.

Race - a dubious, indeed, downright fictitious concept anyway. So Entine is arguing about something which doesn’t exist. Race is a social construction.

Beware naive empiricism.

Empiricism can’t be trusted; that’s why Karl Popper tells us to remember the uncertainty of science and to engage with sophisticated falsificationism. If you go out and observe swans, its quite likely that you will find that they are all white. But try insted a different methodological approach. Don’t start with collating facts and then trying to develop a theory which explains them - that’s called induction and the trouble with it is that you can generalise from your own, limited experience. Deductionism turns this on its head - you develop a theory, then test it against what evidence you can find. That means you test your hypothesis to destruction. If you confine your study of swans to waterways in the UK, you will stumble upon the fact that all swans are white. Hooray? No, go back and work your way around the rest of the world. Somewhere in Australia, or thereabouts, you will come across a black swan or two and will have to revise your hypothesis. The deductive method isn’t foolproof against error or generalising from the observer’s own experience - but it does try to make it less likely to happen and more open to questioning.

So, be cautious about ‘facts’, including so-called statements about the ‘natural’ abilities or superiorities of any hypothesised racial groups.