uniftw wrote:Heck, let's go a step further - what makes athleticism?
It is true that athleticism in sports is often perceived in racial terms by fans. However, this stereotype does have legitimate reasoning behind it.
Scientifically speaking, explosive power is generally dependent on muscle composition. People with more fast-twitch muscles are more explosive than those that mostly have slow-twitch muscles (which have other advantages). Black people as a whole have higher percentages of fast-twitch muscles than people of other races (even Kenyans, though their fast-twitch muscles can hold much more oxygen than most other people's).
More generally speaking, we tend to express athleticism in terms of quick movements with high amounts of imparted force. Looking at the Olympics, Caucasian athletes (more specifically Scandinavian) dominate in events that require maximum force, but these aren't quick movements that can be used in most ball sports.
That said, if you look at the NFL white athletes tend to predominate in positions that require maximum pushing force, while black athletes are more common in positions that require quick (but still high-power) movements.
Quick and precise movements that aren't really high power aren't limited as much by genetics. Baseball is a sport that requires precision more than maximum force or speed (it is useful to run quickly or hit homers, but hitting the ball at all is the most important thing). As expected, baseball's ethnicity is the closest to America's population as a whole.
The basic attributes of basketball tend to emphasize the type of quick, explosive movements that utilize fast-twitch muscle fiber. As the court is relatively small, and it is very hard to score unless the player is close to the basket or unguarded, the ability to gain space is key. That ability makes explosiveness crucial on both offense and defense, even though actually scoring is a precise-type movement that isn't limited to any ethnicity.
It should be noted that some research has found that fast-twitch muscle fiber production is best linked to temperature, rather than just pure racial groups. Across the world, people born around the same latitudes and in the same basic temperature range tend to have similar levels of fast-twitch muscle and other factors that emphasize what we generally call athleticism. The Eskimos, unfortunately won't be winning any Olympic sprinting medals any time soon.
So, to summarize:
Athleticism generally is defined as the ability to exert high levels of force in very short amounts of time. In sports like basketball, the main desire for athleticism is to create space, rather than to push or pull an outside object.
Other body types are better suited to other endeavors, such as the Caucasian dominance in Olympic throwing events or the higher numbers of white people playing center in the NFL. There is also endurance involved, but Kenyans (and only a small portion of Kenyans at that) tend to dominate endurance events in ways that seem to break the rules.
Finally, you have precision. Precision seems to be a much more individual metric than lifting strength or max vertical. Some would say white people have a slight edge, but really race is not a factor when shooting a basketball, throwing a football, or hitting a baseball.
The real question though is why white athletes in basketball are always seen as unathletic, even when combine numbers disprove that or they are dominant in other factors (Love's shooting for instance). This is less based on reality and more based on culture. For one, most white athletes aren't focused in on improved their basketball skills, they are either football players or baseball players, so people grow into the idea that black athletes are naturally better at basketball because it is so much rarer to see a dominant white athlete in the sport.
Similarly, black athletes are considered worse QBs not because they don't have the genetics for the position, but because most black kids grow up playing basketball (or at least are placed into other positions early and never develop QB skills).
Long ramble over,
it is mostly cultural. We've grown into the idea that black people are athletes and white people play for other reasons, because most of the young players with any level of talent are black. By the time we thin down to the best players in the world, the explosive edge mostly goes away yet we still remember that a lot of the white players at the lower levels were slow. We forget that many, many black athletes were also slow because there are enough black athletes in the sport to fill in the blanks with dominant performances.
