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Comment by blisterpeanuts | Hacker News Reader

Why are there so few white people in pro basketball?

Pro sports are (nowadays) highly specialized, highly optimized professions, where one millisecond counts. Whether it be though underlying genetic predisposition, or social opportunities/incentives (both discussed in other replies), it is not unlikely that one identifiable section of the population would have inherent advantages.

STEM (or similar endeavors) are no such thing and never will be. Progress in these fields require the entirety of human virtue (and perhaps vice) - over and above that which can be strictly measured, categorized, in-calculated or trained. There is no good reason why any part of humanity should be under-represented in these undertakings.

The thing is, basketball is no such thing either.

There's nothing really stopping anyone from playing or enjoying a game, and as kids back in the day we used to play for fun on schoolyard courts. The problem is cultural; we as a culture have not really valued sports as recreation, but as either professional calling or consumer activity.

Trying to argue from the outlier really doesn't work as you said, but its also more of a cultural issue that we really don't value participation in sport over production of it.

There is no good reason why any part of humanity should be under-represented in these undertakings.

So for you culture has no impact on an individual? Why should a particular field of human activities represent equally all the subsets of human groups?

Individuals are part of groups and groups have their inner dynamics and features.

Why are they more male chefs with 4 Michelin stars? Should there be an equal representation of women? No.

Because suburbia. The four year old kids are stuck in their cardboard palace and can't go shoot hoops in the public park, even if they would like to. It's inequality baked into the system.

> Why are there so few white people in pro basketball?

Because Whites don't face systematic discrimination in (or in the pipeline leading to) the whole host of fields where Blacks do, so taking a shot that is about as reliable as investing all your income in lottery tickets if you have the signs that you might be able to make it to shoot for a pro basketball career isn't as likely to make any kind of sense for Whites.

For more on this, William Rhoden wrote a book on the topic:

"Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete"

For those who may pass judgment based on the title and the inclusion of the word slave, I leave this NYT review from historian Warren Goldstein as a mark of quality. [0]

[0] https://www.nytimes.com./2006/07/23/books/review/23goldstein...

Pro basketball's viewership is also majority non-white, so there's probably some feedback loop effects going on with the people interested in becoming players in the first place (which then influences the audience, and so on).

Do you have data to back this up? My understanding was that the viewership was predominately White/Asian/Hispanic with black being the minority.

https://morningconsult.com/2018/01/25/nfl-isnt-divisive-spor...

> During the NBA's 2016-2017 regular season, 66 percent of TV viewers were racial minorities, according to data from ratings provider Nielsen: Blacks made up 47 percent of the audience, Hispanics 11 percent and Asians 8 percent.

Historically you can say interest and opportunity.. The league has gotten whiter over the years most because of influx of european talent. White people didn't get taller anything. They just in europe gotten to see the benefits of being a basketball player via things like the dream team, internet, and a more connected world.

What are you implying?

I read his comment as "inherent racial disparities in ability". For basketball, I doubt you'll find many that disagree.

For STEM, or computer programming and math at least, it's far harder to know. Certainly there are very few black people in tech/math, at least at the higher levels.

Perhaps part of the problem is that empty virtue signaling (like banning the terms "master" and "slave") is easy, but actually doing the work that would really matter is hard. I spent a couple hours helping a black kid polish up for his Google interview (he made it).

That's something, but it will really take serious tutoring and a society wide scale to bridge the gap. And other socioeconomic factors might still prove overwhelming.

And for gods' sake, the whole "girls that code" thing needs to die right now. Can you imagine how a young black man would be affected by that?

I'm implying no such thing. There's no gene for basketball, just as there's no gene for engineering. Yet, certain populations excel at one or the other. Aptitude arises out of cultural and socioeconomic factors. Clearly, science and engineering are not strong factors in some populations' culture and lifestyle. Whereas, it is a lifestyle from an early age for hundreds of millions of whites and Asians, mostly boys. There could be a genetic component but such has not been proven.

I'm sorry, but that's ridiculous. There is a gene for basketball--it's called being tall and fairly muscular. There's a reason why there are very few great Ashkenazi basketball players, and it's not racism or culture.

> There is a gene for basketball--it's called being tall and fairly muscular

so then by that logic, you can argue why there are so few whites in basketball must be that they aren't as tall and muscular.

I think most basketball fans would agree with that argument.

And yet when there's little or no representation of one race in one area of human endeavour, it's OK and accepted. But in another endeavour, it's frowned upon and spell racism.

Professional sports is a competitive industry where absolute performance is irrelevant. Only relative performance counts. In cooperative industries like engineering and software development only absolute performance counts. As long as someone is competent enough to be able to bring in enough money to pay for food and rent they will be hired and since that is such an incredibly low bar there is no reason to exclude "less skilled" people who perform 3.4% worse than the best. Those "less skilled" people are more important than the top performer simply because they are in the majority. Having 10 competent people is better than only having the best person for the job.

Maybe because there were 300 years of systemic natural selection in this country called "slavery" where black Americans were bought/sold and bred based solely on their physical attributes?

Do you realize that this is full-fledged, genetics-based racism?

That is what slavery produced, yes.

The Jews must have transcendent superhuman athleticism then. Basketball used to be dominated by immigrant Jews before World War 2.

Not sure about their athleticism, but it's true that they have been awarded Nobel prizes between 5000% and 20000% of their population share (depending on the discipline), and it's time to put an end to this blatant systemic racism. /s

Much like the basketball dominance was caused by Jews playing the sport in large numbers, the dominance of scientific prizes was largely a result of them going into scientific fields in large numbers.

Any decent sized ethnic group could dominate a profession if they wanted to.

Where do black Africans fit in within this theory?

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