Racial Bias in NBA Officiating A study has come out claiming there is a racial bias in NBA officiating. Just to set the conversation up, make sure you listen to the entire thing before you comment. They are claiming there is an approximately 4% bias, and that it is not attributable to ANY specific person. David Stern, coaches, and players are all claiming that they don't believe it. Personally, I would be shocked if it didn't exist at a level that is this low. I think it is similar to someone who might take a slightly different tone of voice with a tall person vs. a short person when speaking to them. I don't know if it is humanly possible to remove absolutely all forms of bias (not just racial) from your instinctive responses. Keep in mind that this isn't someone taking 10 minutes to review a job resume... foul calls take a split second to make. Basicallly, I wish someone would do a study on how accurate foul calls are, or how inconsistent from game-to-game and player-to-player foul calls are. Also, I think the only way to solve this problem is to get a mixed race officiating crew at every game. It would seem virtually impossible to fix this problem by training refs in a way that could fix the problem. I think anything you did would end up throwing the percentages off worse and really causing a bigger problem.
