Do discussions of superior athletic ability always imply inferiority in other areas, like intellect?
American society has created a mythology about the African American male in particular. If an African American male is walking on a major college campus, they are more likely to be thought of as an athlete or a coach of an athletic team than as a faculty member. On my own campus, when I walk to classes, students often come up to me and ask me if I’m the football coach or the basketball coach. And I tell them, “No, I’m a professor in the department of life sciences.” And when I come in to teach genetics in the fall, 99% of the Euro-American students in my class have never seen an African American professor teach a science class in the time that they’ve been enrolled in science courses. So we have a social history of believing that African Americans cannot perform intellectually. When most Americans see African Americans it’s in the context of sports and entertainment. If you look at television shows and the television coverage of African Americans, what most Americans see on the news at
