African Americans also represent approximately 60% of college basketball players and 40% of college football players. In addition, African American/Afro-Caribbean athletes have dominated track and field. Athletes of African descent hold world records in the men’s and women’s 100 meter dash, 200 meter dash, 400 meter dash, long jump, the men’s 110 meter hurdles, high jump, and triple jump and the women’s 100 meter hurdles. Moreover, most of these records have been help by various African American/Afro-Caribbean athletes for at least the past forty years, some for twice as long (Harpalani, 1996, 40-55). I see it every time I turn on the television to ESPN, FS1` or any other channel that carries the various sporting events. I watch a lot of college football and basketball with a bit of professional sports sprinkled in. The majority of the players I see are predominantly of African American descent especially in basketball and football both college and professionally. I see it at my kids sporting events even at just the young ages of 6 and 8 years old. The black athletes on their team and the opposing teams are larger and more athletic and dominate the other kids involved and that goes for …show more content…
Montague Cobb, a well-known African American physical anthropologist from Howard University, was among the first to investigate the physical differences between races with respect to athletic performance (Harpalani, 1996, 40-55). What Cobb found was that there are several average physical differences between African and European Americans. African Americans have relatively longer limbs and a greater leg-to-thigh ratio. He also found differences in nerve fibers and that they were larger in cross section, possibly implying better muscle coordination and also found differences in calf muscle prominence and foot length (Cobb, 1936, 52-53). In 1939, Eleanor Metheny, a renowned physical educator form the State University of Iowa, published the next major study of physical and athletic performance differences between races (Metheny, 1939). She tested 51 African American and 51 European American students and found many significant differences. African Americans surpassed European Americans in the following characteristics relative to body stature: weight, shoulder breadth, chest depth, and width, neck and limb girths, and length of arm, forearm, hand, leg, and lower leg (Metheny, 1939, 50-51). This proves to be more of natural selection or survival of the fittest has been predicated upon relative strength and physical attributes to a lesser degree in mankind than in any other form of animal life (The Black Scholar, 1971,