BLOG Day 2

No time to talk much....
Invitations to order.... work to figure.... emails to read..... shower doors to reorder (not my mistake, for once!)...... work to figure...... emails to read......



work to figure.....

say, there was this tragically amusing entry from
"The Best of the Web Today" by James Taranto
http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110010021

Dribbling While Black
The New York Times brings us shocking new evidence of America's deep-seated racism:

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." . . .

"Basically, it suggests that if you spray-painted one of your starters white, you'd win a few more games," Mr. Wolfers said.

But that's not really a solution, is it? Sure, the Chicago Bulls of the 1990s might have won more games if they'd spray-painted Michael Jordan to look like a player of pallor, but that would have been demeaning to him and the fans.

If the NBA is ever going to move beyond racism, it's going to require a change in attitude--one ref at a time. In the meantime, kudos to the New York Times for courageously facing this problem. Too many Americans have believed for too long that the reason blacks can't succeed in the NBA is that they just aren't good at basketball, as if they lacked some sort of "basketball gene" or something. It's time to lay that foul stereotype to rest.

'Opposite Race'
Here's a little something that rankled us about that NBA study:

We find that--even conditioning on player and referee fixed effects (and specific game fixed effects)--that more personal fouls are awarded against players when they are officiated by an opposite-race officiating crew than when officiated by an own-race refereeing crew.

That's from the abstract. The phrase "opposite race" appears 31 times in the paper itself (including as a hyphenated antecedent adjective but excluding table headings). And it turns out these guys didn't invent the term. A Google search turns up nearly 50,000 pages, some of which are from other academic studies.

Are we alone in thinking it invidious to refer to blacks and whites as "opposite races"? True, the colors black and white are opposites (to be precise, each is either the absence or presence of all colors, depending on whether the reference is to pigmentation or light). But if you're "black" or "white" and you look in the mirror, what you see will be either a shade of brown or a sort of pinkish light beige.

It seems likely that the phrase "opposite race" is an analogy to "opposite sex." But men and women really are opposites, at least as far as sex goes. And whereas both sexes need each other to carry on the species, mankind has no need for either a white or a black race. China has 1.3 billion people, most of whom are neither "black" nor "white."

Here's what's really problematic about this analogy, though: Opposite sexes imply that certain social roles can be filled only by one sex or the other. Only a man can be a father, husband, brother or uncle; only a woman can be a mother, wife, sister or aunt.

Are there any roles that can be filled only by someone black or someone white? Not that we can think of, but there used to be. In America, it was once the case that only a black person could be a slave; and, by and large, only a white person could be a master. Sex roles are compatible with the equal dignity and humanity of both sexes; there is nothing inherently superior or inferior about a mother as opposed to a father, or an uncle as opposed to an aunt. Needless to say, the relationship between master and slave is in a different category altogether.

It's hard to see how the idea that blacks and whites are "opposite races" is anything other than a throwback to white supremacy. The use of this phrase in scholarly papers may tell us something unlovely about the racial attitudes that prevail in academia.