Acting White: Why NFL Running Backs Marry Blondes

I don’t know how many black NFL players/professional soccer players are also married to white women, but the title of this post speaks to the perception and greater probability of this happening with world-class black male athletes. But why? Is it because these exceptional men are self-haters? I think not. Could there be something about these woman that draws these men to them, and vice-versa? Perhaps, but it is likely not their skin color, per se.

On all the planet, a few things are sure when it comes to human differentiation. The fastest and most agile men come from West African ancestry, and their skin is black. And the most varied women come from European ancestry, and they are white. The hair of these women is near-black with eyes that are brown, dominant traits in humans, but that same hair is also brown, red, and blond, with skin tones to match. Beyond their standard brown eyes we find blue, hazel, or green. Objectively, this makes them the most attractive women on the planet, by virtue of 16 possible hair/eye color combinations versus one for everyone else. This is perhaps the most startling, but not the only, example of a species employing color as a competitive aid to sexual selection.

So while women are instinctively attracted to men with superior physiques capable of running at lightning speed, over and through competitors, these men, influenced by instinct as well, are attracted to variation that flourished many thousands of years ago in Europe, when the “operational sex ratio” (OSR) of males to females was such that competition for limited mates helped hair/eye color variation to literally explode into humanity. The ‘fever’ of interracial attraction has origins in how all men and women have been attracting each other since the beginning, and not just since it was forbidden by laws, in recent times, across skin-color lines.

To keep this in perspective, interracial dating and marriage, while on the rise, still makes up a pittance against the norm. In general, people confine themselves to mates who look like themselves. Society reinforces this, as is evidenced by the complaining blog comments I see from all sides. However, if you are either the fastest man, or the most attractive woman, who then makes the rules for who can be your mate? The slow? The plain? The status quo? No one is saying that speed/agility exist only in West African ancestry, or that beauty does not live well beyond the women of Europe, but there is a lot to learn from the evolutionary science of attraction, if we can put our predispositions aside for a moment.

James C. Collier

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