An academic study of the National Basketball Association, whose playoffs continue tonight, suggests that a racial bias found in other parts of American society has existed on the basketball court as well.
A coming paper by a University of Pennsylvania professor and a Cornell University graduate student says that, 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.”
I doubt this is surprising to anyone.
Steven D. Levitt has a take on this at the Freakonomics Blog.
I wish the media would stop referring to “race”. The Human Genome Project proved once and for all race is nothing more than a social concept. There is no biological or genetic basis for race. Except of course, the muleskinner race.
How silly is the concept of race? The US Census considers a blond haired, blue eyed, fair skinned person from Brazil, of German heritage, Hispanic.
The women of Ethiopia are more closely related to the women of Norway than the women of Norway are related to the Men of Norway.
Time to stop labeling people, and then maybe, we can move forward.
But race is, if nothing else, a sociological concept.