We’ve talked casually for years about how white athletes are described in different terms than black or Latino athletes. The whites are smart, gritty and hard-working, the blacks are naturally gifted or are described in terms of raw athleticism and the Latinos are dumb or lazy. You’ve heard this kind of noise before. We all have, even if it’s extremely rare for so fine a point to be put on it.
It’s a subject worthy of more rigorous observation, so recently Seth Amitin of IGN.com and Dingersblog.com researched the topic. The results, in depth (though there is a longer version I’ll have my hands on soon) are published over at The Atlantic today:Are sports announcers guilty of this sort of bias, and are viewers unknowingly absorbing them?
To answer this question we dispatched a group of ten people to combine to watch every single television broadcast of a Major League Baseball game for a week last season—95 games total, and nearly 200 separate broadcasts, since nearly every team fields its own broadcast for every game. We analyzed these games for the words announcers used to describe players, with the goal of finding out whether broadcasters spoke about white players and players of color differently.Definitely worth a read. Indeed, if you’re white, the only excuse not to read it is that you’re suffering from a nagging injury that we all know you’d play through if you could. If not, it’s because you’re a lazy clubhouse cancer squandering your talents.
