I’m just thinking that from the point of view of the official, it is very hard to purposefully alter a game and get away with it. I am also having a difficult time pondering the utility of being a racist referee. There are so many basketball games played that it is not in one or even several referees’ power to foul people out enough times in enough games to run them out of the league. If David Duke wanted to make life miserable for the most _______, being a basketball referee is a seriously inefficient way to do it.

Sure, referees are human. There is going to be variance between referees; instruction and yearly “points of emphasis” reduce that variance. When one tries to prove the simple statement, “white referees call more fouls against black players than white players”, one has to define white, black, and even “foul.” After that, one has to try to separate out the competing biases in the three referees in each game. Then you get into the situational data mentioned by RPW above. There’s no fix to be employed, because no problem can be reliably demonstrated.

Personally, the game goes too fast for me for me to apply a conscious bias. My calls would show a marked decrease in responsiveness were I to consider the identities of the players. The crowd would be able to tell that I’m considering external factors. It’s difficult enough when the two players who come in contact walk away in different directions while I’m trying to grab their numbers after the whistle is blown.

In the case of a particular foul, for example, a charge versus a block in the paint, I have to instinctually collect the following information:
1. Is the offense moving?
2. Is the defense moving his feet?
3. Did the defense beat the player to the spot desired by both players?
4. Was there contact?
5. Was there advantage in the contact?

And that’s before I consider the ramifications of all the answers, such as whether a shot occurred during the foul. There is emphasis, where we really watch for certain things. Maybe the professional referees can apply external bias faster than I can, but they are watched by the commissioner’s office. They get feedback on their performance as well. Three referees on the court can’t have the same biases, either.

A factoid for consideration:

Melanin, the chemical/material/cells that give color to our skin only comes in one color, brown. The differences we percieve in color are due to different genetically coded concentrations of melanin in our skin.

This should be no surprise to those of us who believe we are all decended fromt the same father and mother.

Tangential Question:

How can we define different races based on skin color (skin shading) when all of us carry the same color of pigmentation in our skin?

However, I think that the hypothesis would probably be supported. There was a famous study in which a picture of a guy assaulting another guy (of the “other” race) with a knife was presented to research participants along with other pictures. In those pictures with a black person holding a knife on a white person, the man was perceived to be more threatening than in the reverse situation. In fact, when people were shown the white person threatening a black person, some people misremembered the object in his hand as something more benign, such as a pencil and in some cases, the participant misremembered the photo exactly opposite - suddenly the black person had the knife (they were shown only one of the two scenarios).

I’ve mentioned the Implicit Associations Test before. It’s worth googling and taking for yourself. The point of which is, that bias comes from familiarity and how we process information, and is therefore extremely hard to combat. Therefore, people need to be aware of their bias and actively combat it (say by developing a more objective criteria for a foul such as: “no blood, no foul”) rather than assuming that they are impartial. Human processing guarantees non-impartiality.

Colin Cowherd was talking about similar studies where NFL teams that wore black got penalties called much more frequently than other teams. He was talking about how we equate white with good and black with evil (good cowboy, white hat, bad cowboy, black hat), and subconsciously, the refs (who curiously where black and white), must to. The only thing that comes to mind regarding that, though, is look at the teams that where black! The Ravens, The Steelers, and the Raiders. Now, I’d love to see the penalties listed by team, because the Ravens and the Raiders are teams that play hard and break the rules. They consider themselves to be bad boys, and they play like it. I’d be willing to bet that the Steelers had a significantly lower amount of calls, but they were in “the black group.” He did make a good point that if there was a bias, that this would call it to light, and consciencious refs would be able to analyze and adjust their behaviors, now that it was brought to conscious awareness (though I just don’t suspect this is the issue….I think the rough teams like wearing black.)

Like I said, ESPN Radio was jabbering about it constantly the day before yesterday, and Dan Patrick was pontificating on how terrible this was, right up until Charles Barkley came in with some common sense (for the record, I love Dan Patrick, I’ve been accused of having a crush on Dan Patrick, but the man can pontificate with the best of them). “Of course the refs are going to make more calls against black players,” Barkley exclaimed. “There are many more black players than white players in the NBA.” While there are good white players, more of them have a support role and they are not the key defenders or the ones making key shots (there are only a few exceptions)….so they are not the ones pushed into positions where they get calls. Even if there are players who are targeted as “dirty,” given the racial proportions in the NBA, the chances are that the more aggressive players are going to be black, simply because many more of the players happen to be black…so its more likely that the aggressive player will happen to be black also.

As my psychology profs were so fond of saying constantly….correlation is not causation.