Ebook: Darwin's Athletes: How Sport Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race

The African-American sports fixation -- Jackie Robinson's sad song: the resegregation of American sport -- Joe Louis meets Albert Einstein: the athleticizing of the black mind -- The suppression of the black male action figure -- "Writin' is fightin'": sport and the black intellectuals -- Wonders out of Africa -- The world of colonial sport -- The new multiracial world order -- The fastest white man in the world -- Imagining the black organism -- The Negro as a defective type -- African-American responses to racial biology -- Black "hardiness" and the origins of medical racism -- Theories of racial athletic aptitude -- Athleticizing the black criminal -- The fear of racial biology.;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.