Flaws of “Racial Thinking”: A Geographical Case Study of Fast Bowling in Men’s Test Cricket

Fleming, S. and Cooper, S. M. (2025) Flaws of “Racial Thinking”: A Geographical Case Study of Fast Bowling in Men’s Test Cricket. In: De Gruyter Handbook of the Geographies of Race – A Multidisciplinary Global Perspective. De Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 317-325. ISBN 978-3-11-152131-2 (In Press)

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Abstract

‘Racial thinking’ assumes that ‘Races’ exist and that they have inherent characteristics. Through ‘othering’ and false universalism, racial stereotypes become established, embedded and often linked through biological determinism to assumed physicality of Black athletes. There are currently 12 men’s teams that play Test cricket – the élite and most unrestricted version of the game. The West Indies team is one of the 12 and stereotypes based on flawed racial thinking exist in relation to perceptions of natural ability and aggression amongst fast bowlers from the West Indies. The present study refutes these stereotypes through statistical analysis of data from a reputable and publicly available digital archive. Two-tailed Z-tests for proportions between independent samples were conducted, having applied the Šidák correction to avoid inflating the error rate. Cohen's h was reported to indicate the practical implications of all statistically significant differences. There are five principal conclusions. First, ‘Races’ do not exist as homogeneous populations and this creates an insurmountable problem of operational definitions for comparative analyses. Second, acknowledging the problematic nature of ‘Races’, the uneven distribution of ‘racial groups’ shows no significant differences in the prevalence of fast bowlers between Black West Indians and White Australians (Z = 1.98, P > 0.02). Third, there is a mistaken inference in racial thinking that skin pigmentation is linked to sports performance – they are fast bowlers because they are Black. Fourth, an extension of the faulty assumptions about genetics is that Black fast bowlers would be the fastest and (absurdly) that the fastest bowlers would also be the Blackest – both are unequivocally false. Finally, racial thinking offers a partial explanation for the assumed prevalence of Pakistani fast bowlers, yet given the shared history prior to partition in 1947, it would be illogical to suggest that Pakistanis were ‘racially’ different from Indians.

Item Type:	Book Section
Keywords:	‘race’, cricket, West Indies, racial science, fast bowling, two-tailed Z-test
Divisions:	Research and Innovation Centre
Depositing User:	Scott Fleming
Date Deposited:	02 Jul 2026 09:50
Last Modified:	02 Jul 2026 09:50
URI:	https://lbro.repository.guildhe.ac.uk/id/eprint/1337

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