of America’s leading hands-on researchers into this question, 7′1″,
280-pound basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain, reports that in his ample
experience being tall and strong never hurt. Biological anthropologists
confirm this, finding that tal- ler tends to be better in the eyes of most
women in just about all cultures. Like most traits, height is determined by
the interaction of genetic and social factors (e.g., nutrition). For
example, the L.A. Dodgers’ flamethrowing pitcher Hideo Nomo is listed as
6′2″, an almost unheard-of height for any Japanese man fifty years ago,
owing to the near-starvation diets of the era. While the height gap between
Japanese and whites narrowed significantly after World War II, this trend
has slowed in recent years as well-fed Japanese began bumping up against
genetic limits. Furthermore, it can be rather cold comfort to a 5′7″ Asian
who is competing for dates with white and black guys averaging 5′11″ to
hear, “Your sons will grow up on average a couple of inches taller than you,
assuming, of course, that you ever meet a girl and have any kids.” In
contrast, consider a 5′1″ Asian coed. Although she’d be happy with a 5′7″
boyfriend if she were in an all-Asian school, at UCLA she finds lots of boys
temptingly much taller than that, but few are Asian.
2. This general principle — the more racial integration there is, the more
important become physical differences among the races — can also be seen
with regard to hair length. The ability to grow long hair is a useful
indicator of youth and good health. (Ask anybody on chemotherapy.) Since
women do not go bald and can generally grow longer hair than men, most
cultures associate longer hair with femininity. Although blacks’ hair
doesn’t grow as long as whites’ or Asians’ hair, that’s not a problem for
black women in all-black societies. After integration, though, hair often
becomes an intense concern for black women competing with longer-haired
women of other races. While intellectuals in black-studies departments’
ebony towers denounce “Eurocentric standards of beauty,” most black women
respond more pragmatically. They one-up white women by buying straight from
the source of the longest hair: the Wall Street Journal recently reported on
the booming business in furnishing African-American women with “weaves” and
“extensions” harvested from the fol- licularly gifted women of China.
3. Muscularity may most sharply differentiate the races in terms of sexual
attractiveness. Women like men who are stronger than they; men like women
who are rounder and softer. The ending of segregation in sports has made
racial differences in muscularity harder to ignore. Although the men’s
100-meter dash is among the world’s most widely contested events, in the
last four Olympics all 32 finalists have been blacks of West African
descent. Is muscularity quantifiable? PBS fitness expert Covert Bailey finds
that he needs to recom- mend different goals — in terms of percentage of
body fat — to his clients of different races. The standard goal for adult
black men is 12 per cent body fat, versus 18 per cent for Asian men. The
goals for women are 7 points higher than for men of the same race. For
interracial couples, their “gender gaps” in body-fat goals correlate
uncannily with their husband-wife proportions in the 1990 Census. The goal
for black men (12 per cent) is 10 points lower than the goal for white women
(22 per cent), while the goal for white men (15 per cent) is only 4 points
lower than the goal for black women (19 per cent). This 10:4 ratio is almost
identical to the 72:28 ratio seen in the Census. This corre- lates just as
well for white-Asian couples, too. Apparently, men want women who make them
feel more like men, and vice versa for women.
Understanding the impact of genetic racial differences on American life is a
necessity for anybody who wants to understand our increasingly complex
society. For example, the sense of betrayal felt by Asian men certainly
makes sense. After all, they tend to surpass the national average in those
long-term virtues — industry, self-restraint, law-abidingness — that
society used to train young women to look for in a husband. Yet, now that
discrimination has finally declined enough for Asian men to expect to reap
the rewards for ful- filling traditional American standards of manliness,
our culture has largely lost interest in indoctrinating young women to prize
those qualities.
The frustrations of Asian men are a warning sign. When, in the names of
free- dom and feminism, young women listen less to the hard-earned wisdom of
older women about how to pick Mr. Right, they listen even more to their
hormones. This allows cruder measures of a man’s worth — like the size of
his muscles — to return to prominence. The result is not a feminist utopia,
but a society in which genetically gifted guys can more easily get away with
acting like Mr. Wrong.
George Orwell noted, “To see what is in front of one’s nose requires a con-
stant struggle.” We can no longer afford to have our public policy governed
by fashionable philosophies which insists upon ignoring the obvious. The
realities of interracial marriage, like those of professional sports, show
that diversity and integration turn out in practice to be fatal to the
reign- ing assumption of racial uniformity. The courageous individuals in
interracial marriages have moved farthest past old hostilities. Yet, they’ve
discovered not the featureless landscape of utter equality that was
predicted by progres- sive pundits, but a landscape rich with fascinating
racial patterns. Intellec- tuals should stop dreading the ever-increasing
evidence of human biodiversity and start delighting in it.