Commentary has cost for Black athletes
In the midst of this unprecedented summer, Raptors president Masai Ujiri has made the point more than once of late: The math doesn’t add up. How does it make sense that the NBA’s players have long been overwhelmingly Black, and yet the league’s front offices and coaching staffs are still largely white?
How can it be that, in a league in which the players are 75 per cent Black, the league’s headcoaching positions are roughly 75 per cent white? How can it be that, even in a league that has long had the reputation as the most progressive in pro sports, Ujiri is the only Black team president working today?
“I might be one of two Black presidents in all of sports,” Ujiri told ESPN a while back. “How is that possible? That distinction is disgraceful. It’s embarrassing. It’s not something that I should even be talking about.”
If there are undoubtedly many reasons behind the imbalance in the power structure, a Danish research firm, to this eye, may have pointed out a glaring one in a recent paper. The firm, RunRepeat, partnered with the Professional Footballers’ Association to examine the way European soccer commentators described Black players compared to the way they described white players. And the results spoke to the continuing perpetuation of racial stereotypes.
According to the firm’s analysis, when commentators spoke of lighter-skinned players, they were more apt to praise them as more intelligent and harder working. When commentators spoke of darker skin-toned players, they were more likely to focus their praise on them for their physicality — their speed and their power — than they were when talking about lighterskinned players.
The study looked at 80 games from the 2019-20 season in four of Europe’s best soccer leagues, specifically the top echelon based in England, Italy, France and Spain. And some of the data was awfully lopsided.
When the topic of intelligence, some 63 per cent of praise was aimed at lighterskinned players while 63 per cent of criticism was aimed at players with a darker skin tone. When the topic was work ethic, some 60 per cent of praise was heaped on players with a lighter skin tone.
Study author Danny McLoughlin said those ingrained clichés about the way we see athletes might be one explanation for the lack of diversity in the pro-sports hierarchy. If perception is reality — and if the popular perception is that one group of players is making it on brains while the other owes their success to brawn — it only makes sense that decisionmakers carry those biases into their hiring practices.
“If commentators are constantly saying white players are intelligent and Black players are less intelligent, obviously it makes sense that white players are more likely to go on and become coaches and managers,” McLoughlin said. “It can have very serious ramifications.”
This is a soccer study, it’s true, and Ujiri is a basketball executive. But it’s worth nothing that McLoughlin cited a similar study of U.S. college basketball that came to a similar conclusion about the way broadcasters talk about players.
“Predictably, Black men players tended to be stereotyped as naturally athletic, quick, and powerful, while White men players continued to be touted for their hard work, effort and mental skill,” went a snippet from that study’s synopsis.
It’s likely none of this is news to the athletes who have been saddled with the lazy characterizations. As a Black star striker who has starred in some of the world’s best leagues, Belgium’s Romelu Lukaku has long been a vocal critic of the predictable fashion in which Black players are both criticized and praised. Lukaku has coined it the “pace and power element,” this tendency to reduce players to their physical talents.
“It is never about my skill when I am compared to other strikers,” Lukaku has said. “I remember one comment from a journalist that (Manchester) United should not sign Lukaku because he is not an ‘intelligent’ footballer.”
McLoughlin said his study has already made various European broadcasting outlets take notice. More than one, after reading it, have vowed to demand their commentators take training in diversity and unconscious bias.
But the aim of the study, McLoughlin said, wasn’t to “hang commentators out to dry or call commenters racists.” It was to start a conversation about the way we talk about sports, and the things that ought to change. Rather than simply casting stones at talking heads, McLoughlin said it’s up to everyone to take more care in their language. And as a Scottish-born fan of Glasgow’s Rangers, he’s including himself in the cohort.
“I’ve watched football my whole life. So I’m kind of steeped in it. And I’ve picked up these bad habits myself. And I kind of became aware of it with other people educating me on it,” he said.
“I’m trying to be more cautious myself about how I speak about players … And I think that’s an important thing to point out. This whole study is not just about commentators … It’s about taking a step back and looking at what’s going on. Because the way things are at the moment, it means that Black players aren’t getting the same treatment as white players when it comes to the general perception in the public.”
The things that go into creating perception are the same things that go into building reputations, which, it follows, goes a long way toward defining one’s options beyond a playing career.
Ujiri is rightly perturbed that there aren’t more Black colleagues in his presidential midst. McLoughlin’s line of study would suggest it has at least something to do with how we talk about the Black players in his league.
“(Change is) not going to happen right away,” McLoughlin said. “But ultimately the main goal is that everyone’s treated the same. It’s as simple as that.”