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They can skirt the question without overtly rejecting HBD explanations. The claim that disparities are always systemic racism already engages in massive burden-shifting without regard to the accuracy of HBD explanations. In the absence of biological differences in ability between two groups, there will remain differences in culture, environment, preferences, and norms. There will be cultural effects that are similar to how founder's effects and genetic drift work biologically. Why are Australians great cricketers, but Caribbeans are baseball players? Well, it surely isn't a product of their biological differences and that's obvious for anyone to see. The same sorts of explanations likely carry non-trivial weight for things like what professions groups wind up in, even for someone that's a proponent of strong-form HBD. There can't actually be all that many people that think Filipinos are just genetically really into the nursing profession.
Rejecting systemic racism as the catchall default for disparities does not require HBD.
No but after all of the other interventions fail to correct the difference HBD (dumb name by the way) might answer the question for some.
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The West Indies (the team that represent the Caribbean in cricket) has produced some of the greatest cricket players of all time. Sobers, Lara, Richards etc. etc. Baseball is really only dominant in Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean, everywhere else it's cricket. For, (to reinforce your point) cultural reasons due to historical ties to the British Empire.
Huh. Shows what I know about the Caribbean and cricket. Fun fact of the day, thanks!
One of those (national scale) bubble things I think, I certainly didn't know any part of the Caribbean was known for baseball until I moved to the US. But then all the Caribbean people I had exposure to back then were from the "British" side.
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