Despite the extensive work on embodiment and performance, there is rather little explo-
ration of themes of race and embodiment and I believe this is an interesting and fruitful
area for investigation.
Some examples of the kind of approach I have in mind will help here. One study in
the USA tackled the issue of why so many professional basketball players are black. One
argument says that, as black men are discriminated against in the wider job market, they
opt instead for sport. However, this study looked at how black men and white men grew
up with basketball. Black men tended to play on crowded inner-city courts where
competition for space was fierce and certain skills were selected for – dribbling, shooting
under pressure and so on. Excellence in such skills was rewarded with more playing time
on the court, creating a cycle of reinforcement. White men more often played on courts
where the main problem was actually getting a full team together. They could develop
skills individually, but often outside the normal game environment. Thus there was a
tendency for black and white men to actually develop different bodies: the skills they
had were learnt, but they were also ingrained into their neuronal circuits as body tech-
niques (L. Harrison, 1995). The point is that black men in this example are not ‘by
nature’ good basketball players, if by ‘nature’ we mean a set of genetic predispositions.
But, in these circumstances, they stand a good chance of becoming good basketball
players – a chance also influenced, of course, by a great many other factors – in a way
that is drummed into their bodies as unconscious skill, as a ‘second nature’.
Such skills can be drummed into other, non-black bodies, but the social context makes it more
likely that it will be black men whose bodies acquire them. The skills are durable, but
they are not necessarily permanent. The process at work here is a biological process, as
it concerns the development of the body (including the brain), but it is not a genetic
process and, of course, the characteristics acquired by these sportsmen cannot be passed
on genetically.
The social effect of this biocultural process is that it is very easy to think
in naturalizing terms about the link between blackness and sporting ability. The idea of
race is reinforced by and reinforces the process by which the social realities of sporting
experience become ingrained into the body