The unbearable race-baiting of McKinsey
The international consultancy firm does almost more than any other company to sow racial division in the United States and across the western world
One of the more exasperating articles that crossed my path over the last week was an interview at McKinsey (as part of their Author Talks series) with a black American woman named Alison Mariella Désir. As with so many other areas where white people are blamed en masse for inequalities of outcome with other groups, no matter how innocuous those differences might be, Désir has settled on a niche from which to discharge her own brand of decidedly middlebrow anti-white animus: running. Besides being involved in a number of vaguely charitable identity-based endeavors, she also recently published a book entitled Running While Black: Finding Freedom in a Sport That Wasn’t Built for Us (Portfolio, October 2022).
Right from the start it’s obvious there’s not going to be any clear-sighted analysis of the topic at hand, with the article’s subtitle stating:
Activist Alison Mariella Désir dismantles the Whiteness of long-distance running
It’s not clear whether Désir is referring here to the whiteness of long-distance running everywhere or only in America, but the implication is that white people are somehow at fault for disproportionately participating in long-distance running. If Désir is indeed referring to the whiteness of long-distance running worldwide she wouldn’t be the first American guilty of projecting US social issues onto the rest of the world; as everyone well knows, non-whites—and particularly East Africans—have dominated long-distance running for decades.
Désir says that all of her life:
I had known and felt the pain of Black [sic] and brown people being killed by vigilantes or being murdered by police, now that I had a young Black [sic] son, I had a vision of what the rest of my life would be: constantly worrying and having fear over what could happen to my son.
Statements like this are indicative of the critical innumeracy that abounds in the modern world, even among the ostensibly intelligent managerial class. In reality, non-whites are killed by vigilantes and police in numbers so low as to be unworthy of serious consideration. The Wikipedia article documenting police shootings of unarmed African-Americans lists 14 for 2022. Almost every case involved an easily avoidable showdown with police officers. The men shot did things like driving away from police in a stolen vehicle, kidnapping a baby with the likelihood of doing it serious harm, and assaulting an armed officer. In other words, they were behaving like characters in the videogame Grand Theft Auto, where punching cops and resisting arrest are commonplace.
Black mothers like Désir must urgently explain to their sons that real life isn’t even remotely like Grand Theft Auto, and playing with fire sometimes gets you burned. Here’s the truth: if a young black man is genuinely law-abiding he has a near zero chance of being killed by police. Désir need not be “constantly worrying and having fear over what could happen” to her son; indeed, a more serious concern for her should be the likelihood of him murdering someone else or being killed by another black man: blacks commit over 60% of all known homicides in the US, despite comprising a mere 13% of the population. (The culture of “snitches get stitches” within the black community no doubt means the true number is even higher). Either way, the overwhelming majority of the country’s killers are young black men, and the widespread ignorance of such inconvenient facts is what makes talk from Désir about “the dangers of taking up space as a Black [sic] person in America” and “there’s nothing micro about these aggressions” so egregious.
Probably the most confusing part of Désir’s argument is that she rambles on about white people making up most of the people involved in long-distance running. “What does it mean that most running races are disproportionately White? [sic]”, she asks. Has she considered the possibility that it’s because white people make up the majority of the US population? I’m not sure she has. She notes that:
If you think about what it requires, for example, to go out for a run: it requires safe streets, it requires clean air, and it requires, of course, running shoes.
Why hasn’t this so-called environmental racism affected black involvement in so many other sports? How do blacks manage to dominate short-distance running, basketball, and the NFL? Isn’t participation in these sports also contingent on safe streets, clean air, and specialist shoes? It is, of course, but when you dig into Désir’s background it becomes clear she probably just isn’t aware of the extent of black involvement in other sports. Basketball and American football are most popular among the American working classes, but she’s spent the bulk of her life in a rarefied air quite unknown to most Americans. She is of Haitian and Colombian descent—i.e., her parents hail from soccer-oriented sporting cultures—and she was privately educated from sixth grade onwards. After this she went to Columbia University and earned three degrees. Does she refer to the “unbearable blackness” of the NBA because it’s almost 75% African-American? Has she any idea that the NFL is about 60% black? I’d say we’re dealing with one of two possibilities here: a) she is so detached from blue collar sports that she simply doesn’t know the extent of black overrepresentation in those sports, or b) she is aware of the overrepresentation and doesn’t think it’s important.
Désir has concluded that the reason why long-distance running is so white—“the mainstream image of marathon runners is skinny white guys”, she says—is because of a nefarious white supremacy that prevents black people from pursuing it. Désir’s academic background in post-rationalist fields like counseling psychology and education have left her ill-equipped to parsimoniously explain why racial disparities in sports participation exist, but it’s important: why do these issues not stop black Americans excelling at short-distance running? All eight male finalists at the US 100-meter Olympics trials were black, for example.
The most obvious answer for anyone who cares about empirical science is that people of West African ancestry (i.e., almost everyone descended from African slaves brought to the Americas) have a genetic advantage when it comes to sports that require explosive power—e.g., basketball, soccer, sprinting. Désir admits herself she was a “natural sprinter”, even making the Junior Olympic Games as an 80-meter hurdler. People of West African ancestry are disproportionately good at those things, and human groups tend to disproportionately participate in things they’re good at. It’s almost certain that, had all slaves in the Americas been brought from East Africa rather than West, long-distance running in the US would be dominated by (East African) black runners and Désir would be writing racially inflammatory opinion pieces on the unbearable whiteness of American sprinting.
Beyond all that, and as Thomas Sowell has pointed out so many times, human groups have different interests, and to expect an equal distribution of all throughout every field of human endeavor is folly. Maybe black Americans just don’t like long-distance running as much as Désir does. As Sowell has written:
I doubt whether any of the guys who grew up in my old neighborhood in Harlem ever went on to become ballet dancers. Nor is it likely that this had anything to do with either genetics or racism. The very thought of becoming a ballet dancer never crossed my mind, and it probably never occurred to the other guys, either.
America is a society locked in a serious, possibly existential, struggle to come to terms with its extraordinary ethnic diversity. Propounding the idea that a relatively low black American participation in marathon-running is caused by “white supremacy” rather than black disinterest is not only deeply uncharitable to white people, it doesn’t pass the most rudimentary application of Occam’s razor. I nevertheless expect McKinsey to continue stoking the profitable flames of racial disharmony, holding as they do the solutions to these problems—for a fee.
Excellent points
A nice write-up on a charged topic.