Sir, I sometimes suspect that Kevin Myers writes the rubbish he does purely in order to get up the noses of people like myself This might be paranoia on my part, but the alternative is that he really believes himself, and I find that even less likely, given the nonsense he trotted out once again about race on August 9th. Wary though I am of rising to such bait, if Mr Myers wants to play the role of the wide eyed boy asking why the emperor has no clothes a self image he seems very much to enjoy then I suppose I will play the role of outraged courtier, if only because what he said in his piece should not go unchallenged.
From a more or less uninteresting discussion about Olympic fame, Mr Myers clumsily manoeuvres things around to a variation on a favourite theme of his "American baseball basketball and football players are black but not the swimmers. Why?" The little boy then appears. "Why does nobody talk about this?" His own theory is that all the successful sprinters are descended from non swimming slaves. The "freakish gene pool" of the "African slave population" is responsible for US athletic success. I was surprised that he did not suggest that the success of black athletes in other sports was due to the fact that transport ships to the US had basketball courts or baseball diamonds on their quarter decks. But even he knows that the reason the dream team thrashed everyone else was that the US has the only full time professional basketball league in the world. Nor does he argue that the absence of black athletes in, say, equestrian events has to do with an innate inability to ride horses or understand the rules of dressage.
I have trouble taking all of this piously, and I think this is what Mr Myers wants it lets him parry attacks by saying that what appear to be smugly racist remarks are really common sense or plain good humour. They are neither. Contrary to what Mr Myers believes, the most obvious thing about a person is not his or her race. Their skin colour is obvious, yes, along with a few other superficial characteristics. But this is a long way from the notion of "race" that he has in mind. When commentators identify an athlete by their "race", they do far more than tell you their skin colour. They plug in to a socially constructed category system with associations and implications that are neither obvious nor given in the way that skin colour is. I think Mr Myers knows this, too it's what lets him get away with talking about slaves in the way he does. If he wants to write an article about differential structures of opportunity in American (or Irish) sport and their effects on Olympic competition, then by all means let him. But if he insists on peddling faux naive nonsense about black people and slave gene pools, take him off your editorial page. Yours, etc., Department of Sociology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544.