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Interesting post. I checked and (to my surprise at least) there are world-class black fencers too. But let's put sports to one side, what about the subject that sport emulates and trains for: war?
War is not merely physically demanding but the most intellectually demanding test there is. It requires large-scale, long-range coordination of thousands, tens of thousands even millions of men (their food and supplies), it requires marksmanship, codemaking and codebreaking, optics and stabilizers, barrelforging, chemical industry, metallurgy, tactics and strategy, endless sophistication.
And war is dominated by whites and east Asians. Only once did a black army inflict a major campaign-ending defeat on a white army: the Italians vs Abyssinia in 1896. The Abyssinians had a 5:1 advantage in numbers and French/Russian rifles and smashed the fairly small Italian force. I chock Haiti up to disease, most of the whites who went off to fight there died of tropical illness rather than black military capacity (disease was sub-Saharan Africa's greatest shield against imperialism).
In 1935 the Italians came back and smashed Abyssinia (who were ironically getting a little aid from Nazi Germany, at that point they were unhappy with Italy over objecting to their desired annexation of Austria). The Abyssinians were using Mauser rifles, Hotchkiss machineguns, European weapons imported from whites, they had no major military industry and still don't today.
All other African states were conquered by a relatively modest white effort. There is no black equivalent to Japan thrashing the British Empire in Singapore, actually attacking and conquering a white-held region rather than merely defending their independence. They were using Japanese weapons, aircraft and warships. They produce their own aircraft today. There are no black fighter jets, not even license-built aircraft.
Today a fairly small Wagner force can go on safari and take a whole African country, they can go in on the Central African Republic and take their gold mines, take the country's foreign policy. Wagner is not the A-team of white military power, they're at least two tiers below Ukraine, who is at least two tiers below a big power like the US or China. Colonialism was, is and will remain fairly easy against blacks, it's only that colonialism has gone out of fashion.
The colonial wars fought by white powers like Portugal that ended with Portuguese defeat were primarily political defeats, not military ones. Now a political defeat is still a defeat (war is about politics first and foremost). But the military capacity is there to force surrender. If you just go in and massacre the other side, eventually the population will submit. Mongol tactics work provided you retain military superiority. Chemical weapons are almost perfectly suited to fight guerrillas. Only the international community will likely impose sanctions and there'll be domestic political problems with massacring, so this isn't an option. Political constraints with regard to democracy, nationalism and freedom make it very hard to fight a war, motivate soldiers and implement a coherent, effective strategy. Thus overwhelmingly superior military Coalition forces lost in Afghanistan. Thus superior Israeli forces are making no headway in Gaza as you point out.
Back to my main point, war is like STEM Nobels and heavy industry, chess, esports, founding unicorn companies, invention generally... it requires large investment over a long term, patient maintenance, specialized skills and deep thought. Whites and East Asians are the best at it and much better than blacks. On a micro level, there's Sailer's law. When violence is inflicted ineptly (many shot but few killed) it's usually black but when there is a big body count, it's usually white.
This warfare gap is a key fact where the antiracists are consistently wrong, rather like how I was wrong about fencing (which after all is mostly about the body no matter how much we romanticize and intellectualize it) and ye olde racist was wrong about sport. The Cold War powers assumed that Africa was quickly going to become prosperous and powerful, it would be wise to curry favour with them. Thus 'strategic' ploys all around Africa by various sides. But sub-Saharan Africa remains weak and poor today, albeit with ballooning populations. They usually find some way to squander their resource endowments, Botswana excepted. And even Botswana is mostly HIV-ridden subsistence farmers with diamond mines - a Sub-Saharan success story up until synthetic diamonds become more popular. Raw resources and key waterways remain the most important things in Africa, in strategic terms. Trying to curry favour with weak, poor states that routinely collapse is not really effective. You can just muscle in and take the gold or oil, it's not that hard.
At the end of the day, basketball does not matter. Athletics does not matter. Fencing does not matter. Boxing does not matter. Whether you can reach the rank of general in the US Army does not matter (it's more to do with politics than performance), whether you can be a CEO does not matter. There are lots of crap CEOs, judges and generals. What does matter is warfare and all that stands behind warfare (like wealth and technology). Warfare is the difference between an Israeli living more or less securely and a Palestinian who got their land taken, children starving to death and leg blown off by a bomb.
Warfare is derived from the whole population base, from the engineers and factory workers, scientists, officer corps, general staff, pilots and riflemen. There's no evidence that blacks are anywhere near as capable at warfare as whites and much to the contrary. Ye olde racist might be wrong 9/10 times but is right where it matters, regarding key civilizational abilities of which warfare is the most important. The leftist might be right 9/10 times about things that don't matter but still have a much more flawed understanding. Consider Detroit, school bussing, affirmative action and trillions in foreign aid to Africa...
Abyssinians are white. As white as the Jews, the Arabs and the Nubians.
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To interrupt your thesis, Shaka Zulu was clearly a military reformer whose innovations of 'having reserves' and 'enveloping the flanks to crush the middle' were superior enough in his local enviroment to cause the Great Bantu Migration. I'd also point to Paul Kagame as a leader of the RPF in fighting guerilla war against a numerically superior opponent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Kitona is basically what the VDF tried to do in Ukraine but failed miserably at, again the Rwandans.
OK but Shaka Zulu was using iron-age tactics in the 19th century. When the British showed up, it was over for the Zulus.
The Rwandans are quite good at fighting... by African standards. If they were in Ukraine, they'd be slaughtered with contemptuous ease by either side. Ukraine had integrated air defences, S-300s, Buks, Strelas, Tunguskas... they were coordinated and capable, loyal response forces would show up to counter a breakthrough. You can't just fly into a Ukrainian airbase with civilian aircraft, land and storm it. That's not how it works.
4 civilian aircraft continued to fly back and forth? They just bribed the Congolese army to join their cause? They grabbed some crap tanks from the 1950s and 1960s? That's African warfare, whites are on another level entirely.
All military is relative to the competency of the belligerents. You wouldn't say that Hannibal was a incompetent loser if he was bushwhacked by a time-travelling Marine Corp Expeditionary regiment. To bring up the Ukrainians and the Russians, either side would be completely annihilated by a modern western combined-arms military in a war of maneuver, but we wouldn't say that Slavs are incompetent at war.
So who counts as 'white'?
Can non-white countries adapt 'white' ways of war?
Doubtful in its own terms, and irrelevant when Khinzal or Oreshnik or Sarmat with thermonuclear warheads show up. Again, African militaries don't have that kind of firepower.
If Hannibal tried to do his thing today with Numidian horsemen and iron age weapons, I'd call him very weak, only capable of beating very weak forces in exceptional circumstances, with no hope of longterm success.
Anglo-Saxons, Swedes, Poles, Frenchmen, Germans and others... It's really not a relevant or interesting question. Normal people can give a good approximation of 'who is white' with some uncertainty in the case of Southern Italy/Balkans/Greece-Turkey.
Sure can, to differing degrees. East Asians are the best at it, co-equal IMO.
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Not very well thought out thought at the moment but I think my counters to this are:
OK but part of this is that most of the white-black wars never even make it into history since it's so quick and one-sided. If you're well-educated, you might know about the Italians losing in Abyssinia, Isandlwana and Haiti's war of independence. They're the interesting exceptions. Usually whites showed up with Maxim guns and dominated so effectively that there wasn't even a war. Thus all of Africa was colonized between about 1850 and 1936.
Consider the two biggest wars in this period. The most stubborn resistance was put up by the Boers (white but outnumbered 5:1), fighting for three years against the British Empire. Whereas the Italians (in their full-scale invasion in 1935) mauled Ethiopia in seven months, despite the latter having rough numerical parity. The British suffered much higher casualties than Italy did too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Italo-Ethiopian_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Boer_War
After decolonization, no black African state ever became a major technological/military power like India, South Korea, Japan or China. Or even a middle power like Saudi Arabia or Iran. The strongest black African state is South Africa, which is also the only black state with a significant white population. There's been noticeable deterioration in quality of infrastructure, medical excellence (the country went from pioneering heart surgery to HIV denialism) and crime under black rule.
And we see the same pattern in so much else: STEM Nobels and heavy industry, chess, esports, founding unicorn companies, invention generally, like I mentioned. Not a single STEM Nobel has ever been awarded to a black person.
If you look at the leading companies in the world of high technology, it's disproportionately whites and East Asians that run them.
These are of course legitimate objections, it is indeed hard to define racial groups and thoroughly test such a broad-spanning topic. But the trend is both important and large in magnitude. A simple, imperfect model with some limitations is still an advance on pure blankslatism or question-begging 'oh sub-Saharan Africa is struggling due to lacking the necessary infrastructure'. Why don't they build the infrastructure? They lack the capital? Well why don't they acquire the capital? Bad institutions? Well why are the institutions bad? Other countries manage these issues too.
It all requires a root cause, which is either colonialism (dubious, many countries were colonized, brutalized and exploited for much longer periods of time: Poland, Ireland, Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Greece, whereas Ethiopia was occupied for only a few years, Liberia never colonized at all) or fundamental inequality of ability, which would explain a lot more.
Uh, Liberia was a settler colony.
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Thé Japanese won one war against a white power- the Russo-Japanese war. They kicked the Chinese’s teeth in regularly, they managed to beat the Dutch at the end of their supply line but lost to the Anglosphere. China then fought the mostly white UN forces to a draw in Korea, but they never withdrew. Vietnam was a political defeat from US taxpayers not wanting to keep bailing out a corrupt, unstable dictatorship.
It looks like whites retain an edge over East Asians at war.
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Shades of the Judge. I agree almost entirely, but I'm compelled to point out that Isandlwana was essentially campaign-ending, in that the British had to completely withdraw from Zululand and plan a second, more competent invasion. Bad planning, sure, but it was also a perfect storm scenario for an African force to defeat European riflemen - a large part of the area the Zulus charged over was dead ground from the perspective of the British lines, and the British were undersupplied and had little space to fall back into. A Roman legion would have whipped the British there.
Good point, I forgot about Isandlwana. I said campaign-ending when I was really thinking 'war-ending' or at least something more decisive, like how the Singapore attack was a decisive blow against Britain in the Far East but not sufficient to knock them out of the war...
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And in the 1990's Executive Outcomes could quickly win wars in sub-Saharan Africa until the US/UN told them to stop.
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