Apartheid. USA 1988

January 27, 1988:

Anti-Semitic incidents in the United States increased 12 percent in 1987 reversing a five-year downward trend, according to a report issued by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith. New York, the state with the largest Jewish population led the nation with 207 vandal incidents. The League divides incidents into two types: vandalism against Jewish institutions and property, and harassment,

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threats and assaults against Jews and Jewish property. The audit found some of the more serious vandalism carried out by members of a neo-Nazi hate group who call themselves the Skinheads. They have a big impact in California. This state had 137 incidents of anti-Jewish vandalism registered, an increase from 62 in 1986.

A new row emerged in the US over a comment on television by Jimmy (the Greek) Snyder. Richard S Randall professor of political science at New York University remarked in this context on the Op-Ed page of the Times that Snyder's injudicious remarks and his subsequent dismissal by CBS ‘are the latest indications of the ambivalence many Americans feel about the increasing dominance of major professional sports by black athletes.’ When the barriers were dropped, or at least lowered, sports became the magnet, and the ladder for almost instant upward mobility, that they have always been for underprivileged white youths. But ‘catching up’ alone can hardly account for the remarkable success of blacks in the upper levels of almost every sport to which black youths have had access free of discrimination. Mr Snyder proceeded to offer on television a crude explanation: he said that American black athletes as a group ‘are physically larger and stronger than whites, because black people were bred that way in slavery.’ Snyder is well off the mark, according to Professor Randall. Whatever isolated examples of designed mating may be found in the long history of slavery, they pale beside a much larger, much sorrier selection. In bringing several million Africans to the New World as slaves, the slave traders and their African allies were themselves selective. The journey and acclimatization to forced labor were even more so: 13 percent of the Africans did not survive the trip and 35 percent more died within a short time of arrival. Even later generations born into and living in slavery continued to face a far more rigorous test of survival than free people. It would defy almost everything we know about the selecting effect of environment if the original survivors and their descendants were not possessed of some very superior constitutional quali-

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ties. Some of these have more than a little to do with athletic talent.

Professor Randall pointed out that more than 80 percent of players in the National Basketball Association, more than 50 percent in the National Football League and more than 35 percent in major League Baseball accounted for black players. Since black people make up only 12 percent of the US population, wrote the professor, ‘this is an extraordinary proportion, especially since on-the-field jobs in sports are awarded almost entirely on competitive skill and if anything, ‘ties’ are resolved in favor of whites.’^210.

210. The New York Times, Op-Ed-page article by Professor R S Randall