Darwin's athletes

by John M. Hoberman

Darwin's Athletes zeroes in on our society's fixation on black athletic achievement. John Hoberman compellingly argues that this obsession - one shared by both blacks and whites in the media, in corporate America, and even by athletes themselves - has come to play a disastrous role in African-American life and a troubling role in our country's race relations. The sports fixation originates in the painful century-long exclusion of blacks from every other path to high achievement. The scarcity of other kinds of "race heroes" has conferred messianic status on the most popular black athletes, fostering a delusion of integration while contributing to deep social divisions. Ironically, Hoberman argues, the decline of European empires and the rise of the black athlete helped to preserve rather than undermine the inferior status of nonwhites.