If your schooling was anything like most in the US, you were taught about the evils of America’s original sin for about 30 seconds. Some will even go so far as to attribute the dominance of Black athletes to the atrocities of slavery.

Elite Black athletes are “freaks of nature” and “athletic specimens,” rather than the products of years and years of blood, sweat and tears put into their respective crafts. From LeBron James to Lamar Jackson to Serena Williams, Black athletes are lauded for their perceived natural physical abilities far more than their intellect and diligence – a recurring theme in the perception of the Black body. Many studies have been conducted on the topic, including University of Georgia professor Daniel Buffington’s, which found that observers of basketball are likely to recognize a Black player’s strength, speed and athleticism before other traits such as leadership and IQ. While everyone is not as willing to be as openly ignorant as Entine was, if one listens to the manner in which Black athletes are discussed today, they will find traces of the same prejudiced ideology. To call this flimsy logic would be an understatement – this is an egregiously, laughably, irresponsibly asinine line of thinking. White running backs, cornerbacks, or wide receivers in the NFL? Count them on one hand.” “Check the NBA statistics,” Entine wrote, “not one white player has finished among the top scorers or rebounders in recent years. Over more than 300 pages, Entine defended the same idea that my classmates and I had devised: Black people simply possess an inherent physical advantage for athletic competition.

In 2000 journalist Jon Entine wrote on the concept, publishing his infamous book, Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We’re Afraid to Talk About It. Many people ascribe to the same sort of logic that my peers and I possessed in elementary school, but on a much larger scale – if Black people so heavily dominate football and basketball, then they must be built differently than the rest of us, right? This week, as some of the most gifted college basketball players compete in the latter stages of the NCAA Tournament, we’re likely to hear many of the same tired old tropes from analysts and announcers, referencing the inherent physicality of some of America’s best Black athletes. These groundless theories have transcended the schoolhouse, making their way to the mainstream.

Unfortunately, the same can’t be said of everyone.

Black young professional racer