Race realists and race IQ touters like Nathan Cofnas frequently reference the perceivable advantage that black people have in physical activities over other races. Specifically basketball. They use the performance of blacks in sports as a diffusive device to defend the idea that ‘not all races are the same’. The claim being that black people shouldn’t worry about their lower average IQ, because, ‘look at these cool advantages you have as a black person’. However, much like all of their arguments, this argument is remarkably stupid, lacks basic logic and is ultimately self-defeating to their premise of latent superior racial intellect.

Firstly, I have never been able to nail down a logical explanation relating to how superior basketballing genetics work… practically. Have you?

I mean, I’m genuinely interested to know if Nathan or any of his ilk can explain this phenomena. I mean, do race realists think that humans are born with a specific basketball gene or that it evolved over time as an evolutionary response to human entertainment? Or, do they think that there is a specific collection of genes related strictly to basketball performance in the autosome that determine how well you’ll be able to bounce a ball, pass it, govern your cardio, catch, jump, lay up and dunk?

It’s almost as though none of those things are affected by human commitment and endeavour to improve one’s dribbling, shooting, passing, fitness and jump verticals… all of those things are predetermined, by the important evolutionary demand, honed through millions of years of the need for humans to form small teams of 5 and shoot a ball through a net… yes. That must be it.

I’m also interested to know, do they think South Americans have a similar genetic advantage in football? Have thousands of years of evolution contributed to the recent mix of colonising conquistadors, conquered natives and captured Africans culminating in the ultimate footballing hybrid? Much like the hunt for the russian chess gene, the chinese table tennis gene, the japanese sumo gene and the indian kabadi gene, you will likely find that hunting through genomics tables looking for a genetic determinative for these differences will likely yield you no return of investment for your time or efforts.

At this point, the race realists will declare, don’t be silly… it’s not that complicated… its height…. black people are just taller… on average, than whites. That’s it… it’s their height.

Which would obviously be incorrect (No surprises there). Because, as you probably knew, the tallest average people are actually found in Europe, fluctuating between the Netherlands, Serbia and Norway. Black Americans, although possessing a very respectable average height, are still on average 2 inches shorter than their tallest European counterpart. What’s more, the average height of the German basketball team (at 6 foot 7 inches) is identical to the average height in the NBA. So no, you can’t boil the black american basketball advantage down to height or there being any kind of innate ‘height’ advantage. Was there anything else?

‘Well, now that you mention it…’ said the race realists… ‘You’ve got us all wrong… No we’re not saying that there are genes that have evolved specifically for basketball performance! What we’re actually suggesting is that black people are genetically predisposed to be cumulatively better in certain key performance indicators that are linked to basketball.’

“Really?” I respond excitedly.

Is that your final answer?

Well that’s great to hear… it’s nice to know that race realists believe that black people are born with superior cardio vascular systems, superior muscle growth, superior sporting intelligence, superior balance, superior vision, superior speed, superior wit, and superior hand to eye coordination. In fact, this really puts your fear of black people into perspective. I too would be terrified of any group with such inherent superiority! One might even feel the incessant need to peddle the intellectual inferiority of such a group to cope with said superiority. I mean, by your own confession, it sounds like you’re living with the genetic equivalent of Viltrumites!

Oh… and it gets worse… at least for the race realists… much worse in fact. Because, according to studies there is a proven positive correlation between hand to eye coordination and intelligence! A 2018 study published in Psychological Science found that after controlling for age, the children who performed better at the eye-to-hand coordination tasks tended to have higher achievement scores in reading, writing, and mathematics, based on national academic standards. The result was consistent in youth across ethnicity and was conducted on multi-ethnic cohorts. Ultimately, (and pay attention now) this means that groups exhibiting superior (on average) hand to eye coordination, should also exhibit superior (on average) intelligence. This test is a natural refutation to the racial hereditarian argumentation that ‘blacks’ possess superior sporting capability, but flawed intelligence.

The controlled study is a natural refutation to the pseudoscientific conjecture… so I guess, no surprises there.

As you can imagine… This is quite the blow for Nathan, because it means that Daquan Jamal Jones, the 6 foot 5 inch jock who he blamed for being entirely ignored throughout high school could not only shoot a three-pointer whilst getting his sisters phone number, but likely scored higher than him during the end of term assessments. Ouch, that’s going to hurt. I can see why he decided to push race realism.

No matter how you look at this, the lazy and pseudoscientific attempt to boil down all achievements to race genetics leaves no room for reality. Black Americans likely flourish in basketball for the same reason Brazilians flourish in football and even Indians flourish in cricket. Yes, groups have likely leaned towards sports best optimised for their population, but ultimately, performance cannot be explained by genetic disposition alone, and even where genetics plays a large part in one’s sporting achievements, that individual advantage has never (and will never) be proven to exist on a ‘racial’ cline.

A perfect example in this case would be to consider the observable and undeniable advantage that populations who have ancestral lineage tied to the highlands of the East African Horn and Kenya experience in regards to both limb proportions and cardiovascular endurance. These are climatic adaptations experienced because of their deep ancestral residence in a uniquely high altitude, super-tropical environment, and the advantages (for distance running) are clear: longer average stride length and better endurance in comparison to the rest of the world. But these are NOT racial adaptations! Heck, they are not even consistent regionally.

Pygmy populations along central continental Africans, etc who are members of the same ‘Race’, do not experience any such evolutionary adaptations beneficial for distance running (remember, race is a nonsense social construct, that people ‘who do not like themselves’, created to ‘feel better about themselves’, according to Toni Morrison). Cofnas and his lazy cohort have argued themselves into a corner with their desperation to lump all black people into a single genotype, this example shows that populations within the ‘black’ race can have drastically different evolutionary paths resulting in drastically different biological traits. This is why Cofnas, Lynn and Murray’s attempt to create averages for a continent that is 20x more diverse than the rest of the world combined is simply laughable and self-refuting. It’s the same reason he will continue to deny the reality that the Yoruba and Igbo of Nigeria (alongside other African migrant groups) consistently outperform Western Europeans academically, instead claiming we are all beneficiaries of some mysterious selective education program (whilst simultaneously never levying the same complaint against Asian migrants – or Jews for that matter – both groups for whom it is much easier to make observe such conditions of ‘selectivity’ over Nigerians).

Cofnas and his cohort of race realists will frequently attempt to claim that the cultural importance of basketball in the Jewish community is equal to the cultural importance of the same sport in the black community. Now, you’d be right to ask at this point, why would he claim something that is obviously not true? The answer is simple, he exists on the fringes of hereditarianism where every outcome of an individual’s life is that direct result of genetic expression… the alternative, for him, is the acceptance of ‘wokism’, that will somehow, inevitably lead back to ‘white guilt’. (Yes, those are his words!)

His argument, therefore, must center on the fact that Jews are genetically inferior… at basketball (or they are being discriminated against). Both arguments will suit him depending on his audience. What’s consistent is that they (Jews) would like to be better, but they just can’t succeed at the sport. They are not ‘genetically’ primed for it. His pseudoscientific conclusions will break if this set of circumstances is not true at any point. He needs this to be true. You see, Cofnas’ kindergarten hereditarian argument relies on the fact that groups are born with genetic traits that make them innately better and worse at certain things and this ultimately means our racially organised society is simply an expression of genetic inevitability. So, the logical idea that Jews, Nathan argues, are super duper smart… must also be caveated with, “unfortunately, they’re not too good at sport”… and that’s just the way it is…. you know… its genetics! Unfortunately for Nathan, he hasn’t done the reading. Because, Science argues, if they are innately bad at certain athletic indicators that ‘blacks’ are naturally better at (like hand to eye coordination), then it naturally follows that they’re probably not that smart. Perhaps it’s time to rethink Race Realism altogether.