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nba officials are racist

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jimotis4heisman;827833; said:
cant find a link yet but its been all over sports talk radio today. an ivy league academic study shows a statistical variation of 4.5percent based on 1 official vs 3 officials being of the same race against the opposing race.
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I'm not an expert in statistical analysis, but a variation of 4.5% doesn't sound like much to me. That equates to a variance of less than one foul in every 20 called.
 
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MililaniBuckeye;827882; said:
I'm not an expert in statistical analysis, but a variation of 4.5% doesn't sound like much to me. That equates to a variance of less than one foul in every 20 called.
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I think that's an important thing to remember.

The matter of 2 games over the course of a season (from what I can tell) is an aggregate effect - if you consider 40 fouls to be the high end of the range of calls on one team in a game (and I just checked the Raptors-Nets game, and they were at 25 and 26 last night, respectively), than we're talking about 2 calls a game - probably not enough to determine the outcome except in the off-chance that the racially biased call came in the last few minutes of a close game.

I personally think that this report is interesting (and I also believe that it is probably accurate), but, and I can't tell for sure, this probably doesn't have a huge impact on the league.
 
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I haven't read the actual study, so I don't know how far the authors go with the data....but it's important to realize that if the effect exists, it doesn't speak to whether refs are doing this intentionally (and therefore possibly "racist"..ly) or whether it is an unconscious bias (not racist, just part of a shared cultural implicit bias). That goes for both black and white refs.

I would suspect the latter, as there is tons of interesting research out there on the unconscious associations in our brain between different concepts that influence our behavior (even though the associations don't necessarily correspond to our conscious beliefs or even rise to the level of awareness). The unconscious association between "black" and "bad" is a widespread one, even though this goes against what most people believe. And again, this doesn't mean that people are secretly racist, it just means that their behavior is influenced unintentionally by a brain association that is heavily influenced by factors outside our control.

Ok, I'll stop being psych-y now. That probably made no sense.

see this website for some cool work on unconscious (implicit) associations: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/
 
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NBA: Claims of racial officiating bias 'flat-out wrong'

NEW YORK -- The NBA responded strongly and angrily Wednesday to a front-page story in The New York Times alleging a racial bias in officiating, saying the study the report was based upon was wrong and contained flawed statistical methodology.
"The story is based upon a paper that is flat-out wrong in its conclusions, and we're disappointed that they ran the story this way," NBA president of basketball operations Joel Litvin told ESPN.com, saying The Times ignored data the league provided to the newspaper to support its argument.

Entire article: http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/news/story?id=2858137&campaign=rss&source=ESPNHeadlines
 
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scooter1369;828222; said:
What's petty? The NBA or racism?
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The fact that someone thinks NBA referees are racist.

Barkley just said it best, "there will always be more calls on black players because there are more black players in the NBA, 7 out of 10"......"someone has too much time on their hands"
 
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Golferdow01;828246; said:
Frankly, I think more attention needs to be paid to the Mexicans, Arabs, and Asians...always getting away with shit...
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Eduardo Najera is a very sneaky player, but Denver was eliminated tonight. :wink2:
 
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