So, is slavery responsible for the athletic performance of African Americans?

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59. Remember - Murray, Herrnstein and their ilk are not biologists or geneticists.

They ignore the fact that while "race" is an important sociological construct, it is absurd and scientifically baseless to divide humanity into fixed biological "races" based on arbitrary criteria like skin color, which is just one of many inherited physical characteristics. Why not the swirl of thumbprints instead, which would give a quite different set of "races"?

Worse still, they ignore how fluid and local these categorizations are. A hundred years ago, Victorian England would have scoffed at the idea of "swarthy" Italians being considered "white". Or consider that Barack Obama, with 50% "white" genes is socially "Black". Hell, Greeks were considered "w*gs", not "white" in as recently as 1970 in Australia.

Coming to Johnson, you can't ignore power asymmetry and history in judging behavior as "racist". Not to mention motive. Johnson is not known for being a supremacist or even a bigot of any kind, nor does he make a living at being one. The authors of the "Bell Curve", on the other hand, had a deliberate racialist agenda and were funded by like-minded folk (Pioneer Fund etc). They have a long history of research which is most accurately characterized as scientific racism, an attempt to use biology and statistics to push racial determinism and a far right-wing agenda in society.