The Myth of American Meritocracy

October 26, 2013

The first rule of Fight Club is you don’t talk about... race.

Twenty-five years ago, Jimmy "the Greek,"a CBS sports anchor, attempted to explain why African-American athletes seem to dominate sports: 

“The black is a better athlete to begin with because he's been bred to be that way, because of his high thighs and big thighs that goes up into his back, and they can jump higher and run faster because of their bigger thighs and he's bred to be the better athlete because this goes back all the way to the Civil War when during the slave trade… the slave owner would breed his big black to his big woman so that he could have a big black kid …”

Jimmy was raking in $750k per year as a talking head. Jimmy broke the first rule of Fight Club, and CBS kicked his ass to the curb.

This was 1989. The year Chinese students stormed Beijing’s Tiananmen Square and demanded economic and political reforms. Also the year the U.S. Congress bailed out the failed Savings and Loan industry. Fourteen years later, scientists mapped the human genome. 

If these events seem unrelated, read on.

Back to Jimmy. Now he might have possessed an encyclopedic knowledge re sports, but Jimmy knew jack about genetics. If only Jimmy could’ve read The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance, by David Epstein, he might've said:  

“I’m no scientist, let’s be clear about that, but any fan knows that some people are born with innate advantages that no amount of determination, hard work, and training will ever overcome. Sports are not a level playing field. The hand you’re dealt determines whether you’re even allowed on the court for tryouts.”

Instead, Jimmy used words like ‘black,’ ‘breeding’ and ‘slave owner.’ Politically incorrect and ignorant.

In The Sports Gene, Epstein hurdles this slave-breeding myth and tunnels back to our genetic roots, to the African cradle when early tribes migrated North into Europe, and East into Asia, across the Atlantic and to the Caribbean islands. These new harsh environs, over many millennia, selected genes best suited for longer agrarian work days, or higher altitudes, or—

Hold up, you say, how does this apply to martial arts? Well, let's consider genes that convey a height/reach advantage. For years Jon Jones mowed through the who's who of MMA talent: Shogun Rua, Vitor Belfort, Rashad Evans, Lyoto Machida, Quinton Jackson, Daniel Cormier. None posed a threat. Until he fought Alexander Gustafsson, who at 6’5”, took the 6'4 Jones into the deepest waters. Race and skin color had nothing to do with it. It was Gustafsson’s gargantuan genetics that minimized Jones’ strategic use of distance, and all but negated his outstretched arm and stomping oblique kick. It was pure genetics that forced a war of tactic and guts.

But height isn’t the only relevant fighting adaptation. Let's consider:

Endurance. Researchers quantify an athlete’s endurance as VO2 max. We’re all born with a baseline capacity that many believe we can raise through aerobic training. That’s a given, you might say—but you’d be wrong. Epstein points out that our genes (there is no single gene that determines VO2 max, but perhaps thirty genes working in concert) not only determine this initial capacity, they also determine whether or not, and to what degree, we respond to aerobic conditioning. As with most of nature, the range falls along a bell curve, with some showing little improvement despite months of hard work, and some improving dramatically with scarce effort. 

Head trauma. It’s an inevitable result of contact sports. Football. Soccer. Boxing/MMA. But as with VO2 capacity, certain genes dictate the extent of the trauma. Specifically, the singular ApoE4 gene. Years ago I was skating a pool. My trucks slipped on the coping and I fell ten feet, cracking my head on the concrete. The lights doubled. Time split, doubling back on itself. Though I lay at the bottom of the pool, blinking upward, I could see myself riding the coping, ready to drop back in, and I thought, Do it, you got this. Next thing, several hands carried me out, and for the next few hours I sat quiet, didn’t want anyone even touching my skin. Felt like bugs all over me. A real-time scan would’ve shown the impact of the accident—my brain slamming into skull and a protein called amyloid flooding over the gray matter. Researchers recently discovered that those with a variant of this ApoE4 gene (as per Epstein): “have longer comas, more bleeding and bruising in the brain, more post injury seizures, less success with rehabilitation, and are more likely to suffer permanent damage or to die.”

The anti-doping test gene. This was a shocker. Leagues and athletic commissions traditionally test an athlete’s urine for the hormonal T/E ratio of epitestosterone to testosterone. Most of us walk around at 1:1. Inject yourself with testosterone (in order to increase strength, speed recovery, and up your mental aggression, inter alia) and that ratio rises. California allows a ratio of 4:1. Nevada, 6:1. Alistair Overeem got popped at 14:1. But Overeem is not alone. Google Marion Jones, Barry Bonds, Roy Jones Jr. Mark McGuire—in every sport, athletes trying to eek an edge over their genetic ceiling. But some athletes are born with a variant of the UGT2B17 gene that allows them to dope without worry. For ten percent of Europeans, they can inject as much testosterone as they want, that T/E ratio remains 1:1. For Asians, it’s much higher. 66% of Koreans enjoy this exemption.

I spoke with David Epstein about the reluctance of people to talk about genetic advantages in sports. “For some reason there is popular rebellion against the idea of [inborn] talent,” he said, “Perhaps because we want to tell children they can do absolutely whatever they want. In reporting, some psychologists even told me they realize talent exists, but they think that doesn't make for a good social message—”

That’s the issue. Any talk of genetics threatens the role of sports-as-social-institution. Sure, we shuffle into the arena for entertainment, but for the last sixty years—with the rise of a new middle class; the desegregation of basketball, baseball, and football; and the omnipresence of national broadcasts—sports have served to unify and reinforce the message that we’re all in this together. Try hard and you too can achieve the American Dream.

But there's a growing disconnect. In the richest country in the history of the world, Floyd Mayweather Jr. earns an estimated $100 million for two hours in the ring, while our government cuts food stamps that benefit innocent children, the next generation of leaders. Whether in sports or life, the most important thing is to realize the fight has begun.

“There’s class warfare, all right,” said Warren Buffett, one of the richest men in the world, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we are winning.”

In summary, just as with sports, our economy is rigged. Corporate welfare for the billionaire class. Think tanks funded by the Koch brothers. Effective tax rates for the top earners as low as 10%, while the middle class pay 35%. What’s mind-boggling, is that although it’s the final round for the dwindling middle class, instead of acknowledging and protesting the rigged rules, they labor in delusion and tell themselves, and each other, that with enough commitment and grit, they will prove the exception that thwarts the rule. 

Just do it. 

NOTE: there is no link between ethnicity and intelligence. Humans feel compelled to pre-judge, and this need, ironically, evolved from our early days as prey. In the wild, those who quickly classified the sounds of a lion stalking the Savannah, or signs of an enemy’s footprints in the grass, survived. Those that didn’t, well, their genes didn’t make the cut. And pick up The Sports Gene, it’s hands down one of the best sports books I’ve ever read.