(FORTUNE Magazine) – The firing of Jimmy (''the Greek'') Snyder by CBS Sports has to be rated one of the more bizarre if not surreal stories of this young year, and yet its meaning is all too clear. It means that the subject of racial differences is now verboten on the tube. When the little red light goes on, you had better pretend to believe that people of every ethnic persuasion are exactly the same in every way, especially if you wish to retain your $500,000 or so job providing color commentary on pro football games. The event's weirdity begins with the charge of racism. Everybody rushed to a judgment that the Greek, upon being collared for an unrehearsed interview in a Washington, D.C., restaurant, uttered racist remarks offensive to blacks. When you start perusing the text, however, you are unsettled to find mainly prejudicial and stereotypical thinking about whites. Snyder said white athletes are slowly being pushed out of big-league sports because they're lazy and don't practice. He made it clear that he thought the fantastic preeminence of blacks in big-league sports reflected nothing but merit. (''The black is the better athlete, and he practices to be the better athlete.'') So why was everyone instantly judging blacks to be the offended race? One answer: because of Snyder's insistence that black preeminence in sports reflects physical differences between blacks and whites. It is true that Jimmy did not exactly get his facts straight; he is unsupported by the science of physical anthropology in talking about blacks' ''big thighs,'' and he doubtless compounded his problems by dragging in some counterfactual notions about slave-owner policy on the mating of blacks. Still, when you read over the ensuing denunciations, you are left in no doubt that his ultimate sin lay in simply saying out loud what millions of Americans know, which is that the races have different physiques on average. Had he reached instead for an environmental explanation of blacks' superiority -- e.g., they go into sports because discrimination keeps them out of traditional jobs -- he would still be a revered figure at CBS and still be unchided by Brent Musburger, Mario Cuomo, and Jesse Jackson. What is known about the physical differences between various races? Plenty. Young black males outscore young white males on mesomorphy -- the mesomorph being the physical type whose arm and leg muscles you notice -- by 5.14 to 4.29. (Physical anthropologists have labored mightily to produce such scores.) In a wide-ranging review article summarizing many such studies, Clyde E. Noble of the University of Georgia stated ten years ago that Afro-Americans also have heavier bones than whites, plus less body fat, shorter trunks, larger necks, shallower chests, longer forearms, longer hands, narrower hips, longer legs, and longer and wider feet. Racial differences affect a lot of other things too. Orientals sweat far less than either blacks or whites. American Indians virtually never go bald, even in old age. Blacks excel whites in most tests of visual and auditory acuity. On the other hand, greater average retinal pigmentation among blacks reduces their ability to pick up color contrasts on the blue-yellow scale. There are also some curious racial differences in fingerprint patterns: Loops predominate over whorls among both blacks and whites, whereas the two are about equally common among Orientals. Somebody will make a mystery thriller turning on this fact one of these days, although one senses that it will not run on TV.