Somewhere In Heaven, Jimmy the Greek Just Got His Wings

New at Reason: Dusty Baker's comments on heat and skin pigmentation are enough to turn Matt Welch white.

Comments

[Josh]

Good article.

Another example of skin color being meaningless with regards to athletic ability would be Dmitry Salita, a profesional boxing prospect. He's Jewish, is as white as a sheet of paper, yet fights "black." It's weird as hell to see, but it makes sense - he trains in Brooklyn.

Plus, black athletes don't dominate. They only dominate in sports we North Americans watch, and that is changing fast what with all the Eastern Europeans entering the scene.

People dominate sports they have access to and are encouraged to do.

Dusty should be left alone, though. It's a common enough idea, and on the surface makes sense. Everyone has misconceptions about something.

[Fred App]

So let me see if I understand this. Kevin Blackistone cites a military study, Rick Morrissey refers to a New York Medical College sutdy, and Mike Nadel uses a Washington University study. And to refute that, Matt Welch relies on Tim Salmon and his own preference for hot weather. Yep, that's pretty damning evidence, for sure.

Before we get all PC'ed out of shape here, let's look at what Dusty said. Most Latinos and blacks originally "come from heat." That's true. "You don't find too many brothers in New Hampshire and Maine." That's true, too -- you can look it up in the Census. And you don't see "brothers walking around with some white stuff on their ears and noses." Also true.

So what's the big deal?

[Lonewacko]

Let's skip the past several hundred years of history, and concentrate on the broader movements of people. Perhaps a few anthropologists could be interviewed and could explain why lighter-skin people didn't move south (Vikings/Celts in Turkey, etc. would be the exceptions) and why relatively recent darker-skin didn't move north. One assumes that those various groups wouldn't live (or would die out) in areas to which they weren't adapted or adaptable.

[Anonymous]

Before we get all PC'ed out of shape here, let's look at what Dusty said. Most Latinos and blacks originally "come from heat." That's true. "You don't find too many brothers in New Hampshire and Maine." That's true, too -- you can look it up in the Census. And you don't see "brothers walking around with some white stuff on their ears and noses." Also true.

So what's the big deal?

Fred App the big deal is that black people can die from believing that they can cope with heat better than everyone else. Black people who don't go around with some white stuff on their ears and noses are at greater risk of skin cancer.

That's a big deal to me.

[Matt Welch]

Fred App -- My dopey Tim Salmon example was not presented to "refute" those three articles, in the least. It was to demonstrate that the most cursory glance uncovers glaring contradictions to Baker's theory, if we were to take Baker's theory more seriously than he apparently does.

Those articles, incidentally, were the only three I found (out of a hundred or so) that actually backed up the "this is obviously wrong" sentiment with some reporting.

[Anonymous]

I don't know about their heat absorption but black people do talk funny! I was in school and we had this speaker who said "for sizzle my nizzle" - if it hadn't been for affirmative action I wouldn't have been exposed to that.

[jacob dreyer]

^i think you mean for shizzle.

^, by the way, means: "in making whatever post preceds this bit of punctuation, i am referring to the post directly above.

[Anonymous]

^fo shiz mah nizz.

[Anonymous]

see with more affirmative action I would know what he was saying! he had big lips too, never would have know that either!

[joe]

Still pissed about getting spanked in the AA debate, eh troll.

[Darwin, Jr.]

The politically "correct" folks are now experimenting with other possibilities. They want to see if polar bears can make it in the Amazon jungles. And they're transporting gorillas to the north pole ...

You never know ... It might just work. Hmm?

[Anonymous]

troll? how can you say that to a fellow AA supporter? we even had the same class together.

remember that funny black guy who spoke in front of the class who kept saying "Nigga pleez! I'd bust a cap in his ass and mac on his ho and get me some stank on my hang-lo! hizzy for shizzy!"

we grew up very sheltered! I though black people spoke very carefully, like Bill Cosby. But that was only on TV. In real life they talk very differnet. Affirmative action opened my eyes.

but in response to your rude comment, I have this to say: Shit, bitch, you couldn't even count to 13 without usin' yo mommas toes. And you won't find them, cause they're up in the air at my hizzouse!

[Anonymous]

Reminds me of a line in Albert Brooks' "Real Life":

You're bigger, you're stronger, you're faster, you use heat better..."

[student]

Darwin, are you implying that politically "correct" folks are the same as "progressives," or "bleeding hearts," or "whacko environmentalists"?

[jacob dreyer]

"Shit, bitch, you couldn't even count to 13 without usin' yo mommas toes. And you won't find them, cause they're up in the air at my hizzouse!"

yo son chill with that

[Anonymous]

OK. Time to go home and take a shower.

[Plutarck]

Lonewacko:

"Let's skip the past several hundred years of history, and concentrate on the broader movements of people. Perhaps a few anthropologists could be interviewed and could explain why lighter-skin people didn't move south (Vikings/Celts in Turkey, etc. would be the exceptions) and why relatively recent darker-skin didn't move north. One assumes that those various groups wouldn't live (or would die out) in areas to which they weren't adapted or adaptable."

Excellant comments, up to the final assumption, which I think is incorrect. In short, I doubt that it was any particular biological differentiation amongst tribes that brought about the different geographical homelands. Remember, at the time of the various human tribes splitting up and going elsewhere, so far as anyone knows, everyone looked the same! It was only later, after thousands of years of living sepperately with little to no interbreeding, that "raciation" (my word) occurred, in that negroids, mongoloids, et al came into being.

In other words, it is because the Norse moved north that they became all pasty, not that they were pasty that they moved north. It was only after living in the regions for thousands of years that they got the way they got.

While I _still_ don't know why people ended up with different skin colors, I tend to think it was less adaptation (which, though common conceptions tend to make it sound otherwise, is merely natural selection at work - organisms do not so much actively change genetically to deal with their environment, as that is Lysencoism, the theory that acquired traits are heritable) and more mere accident. It was not that having different skin color was an evolutionary advantage, so much that having different skin color was inevitable after thousands of years of being exposed to certain kinds of environments, generation after generation.

Then again, I don't fully understand why those of negroid decent have ridges over their brows and wider noses and thicker lips, or why asian/oriental people tend to have their distinctive eye shape (or why caucasians are "round eyes"), or even the various differences in general genital sizes amongst racial groups. It could of course be natural selection at work, the result of different sociocultural forces which were inevitably different due to different environmental pressures and by mere chance alone, or it could just be pure accident - the way the little ball bounces, which became exagerated and carried down through history due to the typical isolation of various tribal-racial groups.

Man, I'm really coming along on this whole anthropology, cultural, art, ethnology, animal behavior passion-streak I've developed recently. "The Ape And The Sushi Master" RULES, by the way.

[Anonymous]

Dusty Baker, Dixie Chicks. Reason sure is tackling the tough issues of the day. No wonder they're such a vital and indispensable nag that shapes national dbate.

[Plutarck]

"Dusty Baker, Dixie Chicks. Reason sure is tackling the tough issues of the day. No wonder they're such a vital and indispensable nag that shapes national dbate."

True - it isn't nearly as interesting as porn and drugs. It's about time we got back to the things we can all be interested in.

[Brad S]

People in extremely hot regions (Africa, for example) evolved with dark skin to give them some measure of protection from the scorching sun. People in cooler regions (Northern Europe, for example) did not. That's simple evolution. That's all Dusty Baker is pointing out here. For some reason, our nation is so pathologically obsessed with race that it's impossible for someone to even point out facts and reality about race without a bunch of uproar. I'm with the guy who said, "Let this be the end of the PC Police..."

[joe]

White people have tall noses to provide a large nasal cavity to warm up cold air before it hits the lungs.

[Anonymous]

http://economist.com/World/la/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1897546

---
The challenge is coming through racial quotas, which black leaders see as an indispensable corrective to discrimination. They are not widely used yet, but they are spreading. Three federal ministries recently introduced quotas of 20% for blacks in senior jobs. A handful of cities in S?o Paulo, the industrial heartland, have introduced racial quotas in the past two years. Most contentiously, so have a few public universities, the institutions that decide who will be admitted to Brazil's elite. Congress is considering a ?statute of racial equality? that would give quotas a big extra push. These and other affirmative actions add up to a ?revolution? that is ?much bigger than people imagine,? says Ivair dos Santos, advisor to the federal secretary for human rights.

As in South Africa, race is central to Brazil's idea of itself. But instead of strife, the country has myths of hybrid harmony. An early 20th- century notion that Brazil was gradually ?whitening? through miscegenation (thought to be a good thing) gave way to the idea that African elements enrich the mix. Many Brazilians think they live in a ?racial democracy?.

It was never that, today's black leaders bitterly assert. Justice will come only through quotas, which set targets against which performance can be monitored. Resisters, they insist, are simply defending a white monopoly of power and riches. That may be true of some, but there is more to it. Some campaigners for equality fear that quotas will make racism worse. ?We had a goal to have a society that didn't look at people in racial terms,? says Yvonne Maggie, an anthropologist at Rio de Janeiro's Federal University. ?Now we are creating a race question.?

[jacob dreyer]

^what does brazilian affirmative action have to do with an uncouth reamrk by a baseball manager?

[Anonymous]

what does ^ mean?

[Brady]

Reggie White
http://www.skeptictank.org/white.htm

Rocker
http://www.nd.edu/~observer/04192000/Viewpoint/1.html

etc., etc.

[Russ D]

A year ago, before Dusty got here (Chicago), Sammy Sosa bitched and moaned that the reason the Cubs suck is that they play in such hot weather. The media here played that up too.

Then along comes Dusty, and unintentionally tells Sammy that for blacks and Latinos the hot weather is a lame excuse. It's a lame excuse for the white and Asian players too, but at least someone in Chicago baseball isn't giving excuses.

[Anonymous]

Yeah, duh!

[Plutarck]

How about postmodernists, or was that implicit?