Race and the NBA - aww, the refs too?

May 2nd, 2007 | Posted by PostmanE

Following last night’s pretty incredible Warriors-Mavs game - in which the Warriors all but granted the Mavericks another shot at survival (and Dirk finally showed up when it mattered) - I actually agreed with Charles Barkley’s postgame assessment that Stephen Jackson didn’t really deserve a technical at the end of the game. Jackson was clapping, sure, but unless he said something to one of the referees, he didn’t seem to be directing his scorn anywhere in particular. He was just frustrated. It happens, right?

Barkley called it a reputation tech, which got me thinking for a bit last night: what if Dirk had been the one clapping? I didn’t mean it as a question of race, but as reputation, and I thought that there was no way Dirk would have been given a tech under the exact same circumstances. Call me crazy, but I think refs have Stephen Jackson in the corners of their eyes for 48 minutes.

Today, though, researchers at Penn and Cornell bring a different dynamic to the question. Would Dirk have avoided a tech, or at least get called for fewer fouls, because he is white? Actually, yes:

… during the 13 seasons from 1991 through 2004, white referees called fouls at a greater rate against black players than against white players.

Justin Wolfers, an assistant professor of business and public policy at the Wharton School, and Joseph Price, a Cornell graduate student in economics, found a corresponding bias in which black officials called fouls more frequently against white players, though that tendency was not as strong. They went on to claim that the different rates at which fouls are called “is large enough that the probability of a team winning is noticeably affected by the racial composition of the refereeing crew assigned to the game.”

Three independent experts asked by The Times to examine the Wolfers-Price paper and materials released by the N.B.A. said they considered the Wolfers-Price argument far more sound.

“I would be more surprised if it didn’t exist,” Mr. Ayres said of an implicit association bias in the N.B.A. “There’s a growing consensus that a large proportion of racialized decisions is not driven by any conscious race discrimination, but that it is often just driven by unconscious, or subconscious, attitudes. When you force people to make snap decisions, they often can’t keep themselves from subconsciously treating blacks different than whites, men different from women.”

Mr. Berri added: “It’s not about basketball — it’s about what happens in the world. This is just the nature of decision-making, and when you have an evaluation team that’s so different from those being evaluated. Given that your league is mostly African-American, maybe you should have more African-American referees — for the same reason that you don’t want mostly white police forces in primarily black neighborhoods.”

Now, I don’t mean to use Stephen Jackson as an example here, because he does have a reputation of being petulant, disrespectful, and even borderline crazy, and those qualities have nothing to do with race. But this study, unfortunately, explains a lot about the ways the implicit bias we live with everyday creeps into our sports.

That nice little delusion we have - that sports are context-free gathering places for all - well, uh, not so much.

Oh, and watch: Jason Whitlock will definitely find a way to blame this on black people.