Racism in the NBA? Not a Slam-Dunk...

Maybe we should just call it "Revenge of the Nerds" - all those scrawny white kids (like me!) who just didn't have what it takes to compete in athletics are now sequestered in the elite's ivory towers, trying to take down sports as a measure of achievement once and for all:

Justin Wolfers, an assistant professor of business and public policy at Penn's Wharton School, and Joseph Price, a graduate economics student at Cornell, have written a paper saying white referees call fouls at a greater rate against black players than against white players. They also state that the findings of their research worked the other way, too, but that black officials don't do white players wrong as much.

Ooooh! An assistant professor and a grad student! Towers of the intellect, they are! In the same article, Washington Post sports columnist Mike Wise applies common sense (unheard of in liberal circles) to take these punks down:

Ask any old-time referee, most of whom are white: The two most reviled players in the history of the NBA by officials were Rick Barry and Christian Laettner. It had nothing to do with their race, which is white. It had everything to do with the content of their on-court character, which ran between whiny and insufferable.
Rasheed Wallace is well on his way to supplanting both players, but not because he's black; Wallace morphed into a persecuted fool every time he got called for a foul.

When you get through the data, this is nothing more than a numbers facade, an extrapolation of facts employed to meet a desired end. At the center of the study is a huge fallacy: that referees want to punish players who don't look like them.

Meanwhile, it seems as if the New York Times is gearing up for saturation coverage (like their ill-fated Augusta Crusade of a few years back) of a perceived discrimination issue in sports, the one field where their leftist viewpoint holds such little water. For analysis of the issue, they go to an obviously unbiased source:

Ian Ayres of Yale Law School, the author of “Pervasive Prejudice?” and an expert in testing for how subtle racial bias, also known as implicit association, appears in interactions...

He tells us we are ALL racists, and our mean little selves just can't help it:

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.”

Is every ball/strike call made over the course of a baseball game defined by the race of the batter/umpire? According to Ayres, it must be....

Timeswatch mocks the shoddy opportunistic ethics used in reporting this story:

Would the Times have publicized an anti-global warming paper on its front page with these loose standards? The paper by Mr. Wolfers and Mr. Price has yet to undergo formal peer review before publication in an economic journal...

Ooops! Minor detail, that!

Longtime New York Post sportwriter Peter Vecsey slaps this silliness away as well, and calls it what it is:

I'm writing off a "study" by a University of Pennsylvania assistant professor and a graduate student - claiming white whistleblowers mark up foul calls on African-American ballers - as just another ivory-tower educator and his runner stirring up counterfeit controversy and justifying salary.
Yup, it doesn't get any more scientific than collecting data by perusing box scores and viewing pictures of refereeing crews.

Next on tap for the New York Times:
* An exclusive front-page report claiming money is the root of all evil.
* Most penalties in the NHL are called on white players.
* Michael Jordan left baseball because he kept getting his strike zone squeezed by white umpires.
* NBA female referees only call fouls on male players.

Thank our liberal elite for finding racism and discrimination under every rock, and in every nook and cranny, of American life - whether it is there or not. If they knew anything about sports (or the military, for that matter) they would realize that the playing field (or the battlefield) is the ultimate equalizer - it's only about winning (or living), and picking your 'mates based on race is suicide, plain and simple.

But that is common sense - and real life - neither of which exists in the ivory tower...

UPDATE 5/5: NBA Commissioner David Stern trashes the study, and the Times, here.