Steve Sailer writes: The original rosters announced for both the East and West teams in today’s NBA All Star Game were all black: 24 out of 24. In fact, all were American-born blacks.
…But, mostly, #AllStarsSoBlack just seems to be the usual combination of nature and nurture leading to racial imbalance among top performers.
COMMENTS:
* The irony if Spike and Will have front row seats!
* The AAU system is overwhelmingly coached by blacks. (I played against the team Adrian Dantley coached after they had won the national championship.) AAU coaches have (had) a reputation for being slimy, and I never really saw exactly what that meant, my coach was hugely ethical, but I assume they make and break a lot of promises to underprivileged kids, and perhaps get funnelled from wherever the kind of petty cash that hooks slimy black dudes. Strikes me slimy black dudes might recruit white players less just because those ones tend to come with parents they can’t confidently bullshit, an effective racism out of respect. But generally yeah those coaches are racist. I mean they seem to basically be self-made recruiters of kids. That sounds pretty slimy plain and simple.
* Systemic racism against white developing players may exist, but I haven’t seen it in twenty years of coaching at various levels. I think it’s more likely that parents of good, tall white athletic boys recognize early on that their sons can be successful in a number of sports, notably baseball, football and basketball, but the natural genetic advantages in quickness and jumping ability that the best black athletes enjoy mean that the white kids would have to have incredible skill advantages just to stay even.
Basketball, more than football, and far more than baseball, is a sport that rewards natural genetic advantages. Even if you can’t shoot, why if you’re quick enough and can jump high enough to keep grabbing the ball, you’ll eventually get it to go in. The best young black kids can do that better than most of the best young white kids.
Most white parents are not stupid and can intuit this or see it in action at a young age. So, predictably, they make the rational decision to push their sons away from basketball and into other (often much more skill-based) sports.
This is especially true for white parents of taller, athletic daughters. Very few white parents are pushing their daughters into AAU or travel basketball, where they would have to compete with aggressive, large black girls. Instead, white parents are pushing their tall daughters into travel volleyball.
Travel youth basketball results in heavily black high school teams for both boys and girls.
And, that travel volleyball, travel soccer and travel baseball results in almost all-white teams later on in high school is, as you have noted many times, for both black and white parents, a feature, not a bug.
* What white kid in his/her right mind would willingly enter a locker room where he’s the only one of his kind and surrounded by angry Africans talking smack about cracker this and peckerwood that? From both personal experience as well as confidential conversations with other very big athletic white guys, I can unequivocally say that African behavior pushes a lot of otherwise capable white kids away from team sports like this and into things like swimming, diving, golf, lacrosse, skiing, motorsports, hockey, etc. We may still play b-ball with our (non-angry racist African) friends, but that’s it. For me, the real loss there was football and the closing off of opportunities for athletic scholarships. But until you’ve experienced situations where you’re the only white guy (or one of just a tiny minority of whites) in an overwhelmingly African environment, you simply have no conception of how unpleasant it is.
