If you haven’t seen the video I posted last month, you can view it here (definitely do so before you read my posts). Though the story itself isn’t bad, I believe that for Outside the Lines, it was actually quite limited. Time constraints may have had something to do with that, but I will offer a few of my thoughts in the coming days.  I begin today with two observations.

1) Everyone interviewed agreed that there is a certain ‘stigma’ concerning the quickness of white basketball players (particularly on defense). A few other words they could have used are ‘prejudice, preconceived idea, bias, preconception, etc.

What this means, essentially, is that in watching basketball players, most people inside the game are inevitably equipped with something deep inside that says, “White guys are slow on defense.” No one watches the game with a clean slate. Virtually everyone (myself included) tends to think that white guys can’t jump and/or can’t play great defense. The fact that we are apt to note the exceptions is confirmation of this (when you find a white guy who really can jump or can play great D, you are destined to find people of all colors joking about it!).

This point should be agreed upon by anyone inside or outside of the basketball community. After all, it is something of a running joke and even led to a movie (White Men Can’t Jump). In personal experience, my brother was/is one of those white guys who actually can jump. Because of this, during his playing days, he couldn’t help but hear about it (especially from the black players who would make fun of any of their black friends who was out-dunked by a white boy).

Though this might sound a little too racial for some, in the basketball community, this is just normal talk. Clear distinctions are made on the basis of the color of one’s skin. And the white-guy bias is readily spoken about, joked about, and made known. From the OTL piece, that point was plain.

2)  The way this ‘stigma’ or bias impacts the interpretation of basketball reality was not adequately addressed in the OTL piece.  It was mentioned as a barrier white basketball players have to overcome, but no investigation was made into how powerful this bias actually is, indeed, how powerful any internal preconception actually is.

I believe that this point is especially important.  I held this belief the first time I saw the piece, but after recently reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink (you can check it out by clicking on the link to your right), I now believe that this is a vastly underestimated issue.  I won’t take the time to summarize the whole of Gladwell’s book, but suffice it to say that his focus in chapter three, more than serves to support the notion that if there is a ‘bias’ of some sort, especially one that people are willing to acknowledge, it cannot help but ‘color’ the way you see and interpret reality…more than you know.

Sure, there might be some black basketball guys who knowingly discriminate against the white player and some white basketball guys who knowingly discriminate against the black basketball player.  But that is rare.  What is more prevalent, if we are willing to admit it, is a simple inability to see things perfectly clearly because of accepted stereotypes.  The basketball scouts’ (white or black) internally held ‘stigma’ cannot help but lead him to think certain thoughts the first time he sees a white player.   And any scout will tell you that first impressions are very, very important in the basketball world.

I will give a stated example of that tomorrow.  That is enough for the the comments today.