Generations of whites and blacks have absorbed this model of racial difference, thereby encouraging the search for racial differences in every nook and cranny of the human organism. This tendency to find differences is not limited to laymen. Anyone who reads through the medical literature of the 20th century can watch ideas about alleged racial differences fal1 out of favour as better science facilitates more accurate research. The point is not that racial differences do not exist. It is rather that a tradition of racial thinking has primed us to see apparent differences that often turn out to be illusory or the result of factors other than race.
Social class is a good example of a trait that is often confused with racial essence.
But precisely how establishing the reality of an athletically superior black physiology might serve this purpose is never made clear. Indeed, there is reason to believe such an announcement would have the opposite effect. This assumption that mind and body are linked racial variables is an axiom of 19th-century racial anthropology that remains part of our racial folklore. Documenting organic racial differences in athletes is likely to strengthen rather than subvert it. And there are other reasons to suspect that drawing blacks and whites into well-informed discussions of muscle fibres and enzyme levels would be spoor strategy for bringing about racial reconciliation.