Comments weren't racist

In the past several weeks we have seen two elder statesmen of the game of college football labeled "racist" for comments that they made in public. After suffering a 48-10 loss to Texas Christian University, longtime Air Force head coach Fisher DeBerry was asked his opinion on the reason why Texas Christian dominated his Air Force squad so effectively. His response included the statement that "They (TCU) had a lot more Afro-American players than we did and they ran a lot faster than we did ... Afro-American kids can run very, very well. That doesn't mean that Caucasian kids and other descents can't run, but it's very obvious to me that they run extremely well."

DeBerry was roundly criticized by everyone who had an outlet to do so and issued an apology later in the week.

Joe Paterno was asked his opinion on DeBerry's statements in one of his press conferences. "The black athlete has made a big difference," he said. "They've changed the whole tempo of the game. Black athletes have just done a great job as athletes and as people in turning the game around ... It's a different game because of them."

The knee-jerk reaction here as a journalist is to take the easy route, and jump on the bandwagon of criticism that is riding through this country as we speak, condemning DeBerry and Paterno across the board. Some are calling for their retirements. Most are slipping in as many elderly jokes as they can.

It's a shame that none of them, none of these so-called journalists who are paid to give honest opinions, actually have the brass to address these comments with anything that comes close to honesty. The motivation is money; the trend in journalism, especially sports journalism, is trying to be as loud and obnoxious as possible in the hope of someday landing a television job. Stephen A. Smith would be the perfect example of someone who has exploited this route to a large paycheck.

These loudmouths aside, can we actually look at what was said, and not just jump to an instant conclusion of screaming "Racist!" at the top of our lungs as soon as someone makes a generalized statement about an ethnicity? We all need to tread carefully when discussing these topics, because they are obviously sensitive matters. Actual racist language creeps in when the conversation defines all black athletes simply by their abilities, such as when Dodgers executive Al Campanis generalized blacks as unfit for management, either in the front office or on the field, as a quarterback for example. What Campanis said was racist and deserved criticism, but what DeBerry and Paterno were hitting at was not racist, nor was it untrue. I am not claiming that every black person is inherently fast, or athletic. But an educated person can not look at the athletic landscape and not at least admit that blacks are disproportionately represented on the playing fields. Blacks represent just over 12 percent of the world's population; 77 percent of the NBA is black; 65 percent of the NFL is black. If you look at the rosters for last year's Pro Bowl, you will find that every wide receiver, running back, and defensive back on both teams was black. There have been just over 200 men who have recorded times in the 100-meter dash of less than 10 seconds. All are black.

Would you like some more numbers? Good because here they come. Women's professional basketball is 70 percent black. 60 percent of men's collegiate basketball players are black. Nearly half of all NCAA football players are black. If you are a black man, the odds that you will someday play in the NBA are about 1 in 4,000. If you are a white man, you face odds of 1 in 90,000.

I'm not pointing these things out to perpetuate bad stereotypes about black athletes, and neither were DeBerry or Paterno. Neither of the coaches attributed this dominance to genetics; no definitive answer really exists as to why black athletes have dominated professional sports so thoroughly.

Could they have worded things differently, so as not to allow for misinterpretation? Maybe. But no matter how carefully you word something, somebody is always going to misinterpret it when the topic is race. In this world of incredibly heightened political correctness, we have lost the ability to think critically.

Blacks are, on the whole, faster runners than whites, and I can say this with no fear of honest objection, because this statement's undeniable truth is proven across the board by a slew of statistics that exist on the subject. Stating this truth does not imply any hidden deficiencies in any other aspect of sport, nor does it say that a member of any other ethnicity cannot also run well.

I am not racist. Neither are DeBerry or Paterno.