Racism Study Among NBA Officials: Pointless and Stupid

There has been a lot of news as of late on the issue that the white referees in the NBA are using race as a factor for making foul calls. Personally, I think this study is stupid and really serves no purpose (but I'll get more into that in a second). What I found even more interesting is a little piece I read in the Chicago Tribune yesterday. Richard Jefferson (of the New Jersey Nets) asked an interesting question about the study. He said, "What if you are half-black, half white? Because there some mix in my family. I wonder how that works." Jefferson's teammate Jason Kidd was counted as black while Yao Ming was counted as white. Pretty ridiculous if you ask me. Also, the people who did the study did not know the racial identity of the referees making the calls, unless it was a crew of referees that were all the same race. Again, pretty ridiculous.

However, I want to step aside from criticizing the way the study was done, and instead move on to how studies like these continually remind us that race is always seems to be a factor in everything. In a country with so many races and ethnicities, isn't about time we stop doing surveys and studies to see how different races think? Personally, I am sick of hearing that white referees are racist or that more whites think Barry Bonds used steroids than blacks or whatever other study is being done to remind us that we are different colors.

Instead of pointing out that one race favors something more than another race, why can't we just take polls or analyze referees (or whoever) as a whole. We always want to use skin color or ethnicity to separate people, when in reality, we should be working to get rid of that mindset. We should be paving a path for the next generations to forget what race your neighbor, co-worker, classmate, etc. is and instead just acknowledge everyone for who they are as a human being.

I know this doesn't have much to do with sports, but it's something that has been bothering me for a while. And with that recent study of referees, it set me off. In the end, too many things come down to the issue of race/ethnicities and I would like to hope that we are trying to get past that. Unfortunatley, I don't think we are.