Sports and IQ: the persistence of race ‘science’ in competition

Abstract

Skin Deep: Journeys in the Divisive Science of Race Gavin Evans OneWorld (2019) Hitchhiking in Zimbabwe in 1981, Gavin Evans encountered an English-speaking couple who told him that the mental capacity of black Africans was so limited that they would never invent anything. Evans, who is white, grew up in apartheid South Africa. As he writes in his book Skin Deep (joining his 2014 Black Brain, White Brain), his "reassuringly pale skin" made him privy to the everyday prejudice of other white people who had been "breast-fed on racism". Many assumed he would share their loathsome views. He did not. Horrified, he became determined to fight prejudice through his writing.