Mosley’s argument is that sports are harmful to black Americans due to exploitative effects on black people, and also that there is a racial issue in that it highlights issues with genetics being a basis for racial ideology. The argument is very agreeable, but Mosley’s process of coming to these conclusions is more what I have an issue with in that while Mosley makes a good point that sports can be leveraged as a tool used by one group in order to harm a cultural group, he doesn’t make a great point that sports are harmful to black Americans.
Mosley opens up with a discussion on attributing racial characteristics to sports in which he makes the point that racial differences based on genetics amount to endorsing racism by equivocating the line of reasoning with, “eugenic thinking in the early and middle nineteenth century,” in citing Entine (Mosley 297). Mosley discusses topics such as nazi ideology, eugenics and more having led to legislation that was race-based and caused more problems. He uses these examples to build his point that genetics and race have no real justification to be used to justify that a group of individuals had some basis by which they could “play sports better” than other groups. He frames his argument by citing that, “We are led to infer that just as the genetic makeup of Europeans predisposes them to have higher IQs, the genetic makeup of Africans and African Americans predisposes them to greater manual dexterity and athletic potential.” (Mosley 298). This frame, Mosley says, “undermines the importance of training, access, early exposure, social reinforcement and the like.” By making black youth believe that sport is their natural domain, this belief channels their energies and talents away from technical and academic areas.” (Mosley 299).
My issues begin where Mosley writes, “By diverting the energies of black youth to the least productive areas of modern culture, more lucrative opportunities are reserved for those who are not black.” (Mosley 300). This is no less racist of a consideration than his previous arguments against it, and even Mosley failed to make any substantiative point that athletics an an ‘unproductive area’ that results in less lucrative opportunities. Mosley only defends his position from an anti-genetics stance that relies on “hard work and training” as being more responsible for success. This is agreeable in itself, but it doesn’t really address the issue at the center of his argument because hard work and training can make people both athletic and intelligent.
He has not outlined the capacity of human talent in his argument and has needlessly confined his discussion to humans being either smart or athletic, but not both. Mosley’s argument that “sports are damaging” is more valid than his argument that “sports are damaging to black America”, because he didn’t select a specific educational opportunity that a Black American had missed out on due to sports. His rejection sports, because intelligence exists, suggests that physical talent is correlated with some pretentious dichotomy of human mental talent and athletics – two otherwise totally uncorrelated activities. That people may only have a physical talent, or only have a mental talent and most humans have no capacity for both is a confining thought. Mosley posits the general idea that some disambiguous white cultural group, through celebrating the physical capabilities of their peers, to somehow be a guise or front meant to keep the black American race of people in some ‘subservient’ place. This is inherently a racist thought in that the argument is built upon the solution that nobody ought to play sports and instead all people should be smart and pursue intelligent efforts.
Mosley avoids discussing the idea that Affirmative Action policies adopted by the US government ensured that black Americans were represented in sports, and this discussion is sorely missing in his section where he discusses the cherry picked data differentiating runners and jumpers from swimmers. Had he discussed that instead of concluding with the issue at hand being spectator sports then his argument may have been substantiated a bit. That being said, Mosley made a reasonable argument, with black people in mind, that the people being selected to represent a sports market, are being harmed by this sports market, but failed to make the case that sports harm “black America” specifically.
Mosley reveals a bias against science-based arguments in writing that science, “has not been an objective, value-free enterprise, and [that] the biological sciences have typically been more instrumental than descriptive.” (Mosley 301). The issue is that his argument should have differentiated between scientific applications and scientific studies. Whereas the studies are often instrumental and more accessible regarding readability, actual scientific applications themselves generally have not been turned into instruments. The problem here is that by lumping all of science into some class of “modern propaganda” he shows his own bias. This is evidenced when he writes, “The exploitation of Africans has been justified by reference to biblical texts, and now by measurements in laboratories and contests.” (301). The issue is that this point has not been substantiated or explained, further revealing the theological aspect of his argument here as he presumes the reader to know what this means, inherently, and is thus gauging his audience incorrectly. Then he says that scientists should be unbiased, as judges are, which shows how unfamiliar he is with what a scientist is. It’s the job of scientists, as inherently biased beings, to pursue the creation of unbiased scientific studies which addressing bias. His theological argument continues when he writes, “Yet one of the main contributions of the new wave in the philosophy of science…” (301). He is under the misconception that science is a pure belief-based system rather than a hybrid empirical-belief based system, here.
In conclusion, Mosley makes many points that constitute a good discussion on how sports can be leveraged as a tool to inflict harm on cultural groups. He shows that he retains a slight bias toward science, and doesn’t substantiate his argument in that sports itself isn’t really shown to harm black America. Mosley offers a false dichotomy that negates the discussion on human capacity for both intellectual and athletic talent that is abundantly perceived in many modern athletes today.
Works Cited
Mosley, Albert “Racial Differences in Sports:What’s Ethics Got to Do with It?” Sports Ethics an Anthology, Blackwell Publishing, Malden, MA, 2006, pp. 297–303.