73% of NBA players are black
Wait shouldn't there be an equal number of every color? smh my head
this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2023
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Relating the percentage of black players to announcers doesn’t really work because most announcers aren’t former players. Now color commentators is a little different, but announcers usually come from Communications/Journalism backgrounds.
It probably should be higher just in general based on general demographics, but like most things there’s a whole lot of factors that play a part, not just related to race.
Any gymnastic to avoid the truth.
Hb this
Name as many poc protags as you can, and I bet I can name 5x more white protags
Cause there's 5 times as many white people than poc in the US?
92% of radio and television announcers are white yet only 27% of NBA players are white,
This is not talked about enough as a manifestation of subconscious racial bias in the league.
Playing in the league is strictly performance based.
Sports media is rife with nepotism, favoritism and racism.
Go home nephew.
100% of white people are white, this is insane discrimination we aren’t talking about
White people have a systemic advantage over black people in this country. I think we can agree on that
If there's a profession where black people make up the majority of the elites, then it's probably not going to be because they received an unfair advantage or because the system was oppressing the white people. It's likely to be because of other factors like culture. Why? Because black people don't have a systemic advantage over whites in this country, so that cannot be the reason
If there's a profession where white people make up the majority of the elites, especially in a field that is majority black, then it's much much more likely that the white structural advantage that we've proven exists in so many other fields is playing itself out in exactly the same way in that field
Why would we presume that there is white structural advantage in all these other fields (STEM, medicine, politics, etc.) but NOT in broadcasting which is EVEN WHITER than those other fields?
Why is this not down voted.
Everything pro black and down with the white in 2023 is upvoted, thanks to propaganda and people being racist sheep
Shut up
Nah makes sense, most of the audience is white, need relatable ways of talking and connecting. It’s pure business.
It’s unlikely to see 2 black commentators as well, unless they were players. And even then, only certain kinds of players get the call. The media trained types. It’s a black league, and to make money the nba needs to make it as palatable as possible to non blacks, so everyone makes money.
Why does race matter? What's wrong with more white people announcing games? There are more white people than black people in America. Obviously at almost every job, there will be more white people than any other race. Why do you want to divide everyone?
The US is 60% white
NBA viewership is only 40% white (there are more black viewers at 45%)
There's no way that should translate to 92% of announcers being white
Please learn how to troll better, OP.
Interesting post. I hadn't thought about this before but you're definitely right. Let's change it!
thank you!
Go outside loser
Find other pearls to clutch.
It is what it is, if you pay attention to the announcers you can choose to enjoy them or be outraged.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.
Some white man prob said this idk.
What being terminally online does to a man
Damn, just looked it up...you're right.
We need to reduce the amount of black NBA players to restore league balance.
Shut the fuck up
Go back to bed
It's probably just because most basketball players in general are white but most elite basketball players are black. So there's way more white former players trying to get into broadcasting than black ones.
Oh stfu
Affirmative action in sports. We need more Asian, Caribbean, Mexican, central and South American representation. Also we need to allow trans man to play.
😂
As a white dude who played hoops my whole life I never had any delusions I could make the NBA, but I did have aspirations I could be the next Mike Breen. With those aspirations I worked in broadcasting, with a bunch of other white dudes who just wanted to be involved with their favorite sport but couldn’t make the pros.
To make this easier for everyone who’s interested in this question.
look at
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1098410/interest-level-nba-ethnicity/
If 54% of whites are not interested and THEY HAVE THE MOST MONEY, most efforts should be focused on making the people with money interested.
Aka white commentators, hyping up white players etc. So everyone makes more money.
Alright well I’ll respond fairly since most people aren’t.
If we’re all willing to accept that the reason black people are disproportionately represented in the league because they’re simply better at basketball, is it unreasonable to say white people are disproportionately represented in announcing because they’re better at announcing?
Y'all always throwing out theory as fact and don't none of y'all know what you're talking about
i don’t think i’ve ever read a piece discussing “subconscious racial bias” that provided even a shred of evidence or logic or reasoning that it was that, and not a whole host of other potential factors/explanations, causing the “issue”. it’s not some incantation. you gotta prove up your side.
and what’s a “black voice” anyways? a college professor of mine tried to tell me that’s why james earl jones was cast as vader, because “black voices are scary to wypipo”.
A different perspective but maybe the reason there’s more is because more white people don’t make the NBA so they choose to go to school for sports Journalism/broadcasting as a second option.
I think it would be interesting to see the percentage of black people going into broadcasting majors compared to white people.
Also, not fair to say Mark Jones “clearly has to whitewash” his voice. Did he admit to that? Is that on record somewhere? To me, he sounds like Mark Jones and no one in the industry sounds like him.
He sounds the same when speaking off camera or off the job. He didn’t codeswitch when he was on a “black” podcast. He sounded like Mark Jones.
What the hell does “black” sound like anyways? If someone doesn’t sound like your idea of black does that make them less black or whitewashed?
The website reddit dot come will definitely be receptive to this.
There definitely won't be any immediate lashing out from white people about their potential biases.
Nope.
If anything nba is highly disproportionately black based on statistics so IDK what dumbass point you’re trying to to make.
Tf this have to do about race?
If black dudes wanna commentate they will, if black dudes wanna ref they will.
Dude this is too critically thought out to appeal here.
These guys don't read, think, or have any original thought.
To be clear, 99% of dialog on reddit is (at best) at about a 6th grade level
Why was this post deleted?
Most of the black people who commentate games are color commentators rather than play-by-play.
- Former players provide insight and knowledge over the game. That leads directly to color commentary, not play-by-play.
For some reason, the voices of Kevin Harlan, Mike Breen, and Marv Albert feel right to us.
- Because they are great at what they do. There are plenty of white play-by-play commentators that get hate.
- see: Chip Caray, Joe Buck, Kate Scott, Doris Burke, Sean McDonough, Joe Tessitore, Steve Levy
But do we realize that when we imagine the "right voice for announcing" it's basically always a white cis-man's voice in our head? That's what represents gravitas and dignity for us
- the voice of James Earl Jones represents gravitas and dignity
- the voice of Keith David represents gravitas and dignity
- people often seek out Idris Elba even for voice-only roles.
- even tho you probably don't know their name, Phil LaMarr & Kevin Michael Richardson are some of the most-used voice actors in animation
- Done well people do not care about the skin color of a voice.
There are arguments to be made about representation in the media. This isn't one of them.
An aspect you don't touch on is that familiarity is really valuable. Literally nobody tends to like new play-by-play until they reach a point where their voice starts to become familiar, and announcers tend to hold their jobs for a very long time. So any change is going to come very slowly. Nobody is going to replace a well-liked, longtime play-by-play guy for a new, unfamiliar one unless they need to. So turnover in this industry is really, really slow.
And it's not a skill you can just step into, you need to have experience at it in the minor-leagues or other sports. But minor-league gigs tend to not pay well-enough to be a full-time job, so you have people who split their time between multiple minor-league teams and other broadcast gigs. Minor league teams generally don't have the luxury of trying different voices or letting an inexperienced commentator take time to learn the ropes. A lot of these guys have experience doing play-by-play for their university teams in one sport or another.
So to address that, you have to get right down to the roots: are sports broadcast journalism programs fair in their admissions? The journalism school I went to in Canada was probably about 65% white overall, but the sports broadcast journalism stream was almost exclusively white male, and I'd wager that's overwhelmingly the largest applicant group for US colleges as well. And there's all the complexity that is the debate over affirmative action in the US.
But then how are university sports programs choosing who gets the plum gigs of doing the college sports play-by-play, which are the best way to break into the industry? And is it fair to do anything other than a meritocracy at this point? And how do g-league and other minor-league teams handle choose their broadcast teams, and is it fair to require them to risk what precious little radio/TV viewership they have for experimenting with other voices? If so, who decides which g-league teams have to exercise this sort of affirmative action? And if you can manage all of that so that there's an actual pool of diverse candidates with quality abilities and experience, how does the NBA tell networks that they need to make certain hiring choices, when ultimately the NBA works in service of the networks to allow the networks to create the product that the networks feel is going to work for their audience?
In short, I don't think it's a solvable problem, especially when a lot of people seem fine with the black colour-commentator as a workable solution. It's certainly not solveable on a scale other than decades, and who knows what nba broadcasting is going to look like by then... you'll probably be able to have your favorite ai personality do entirely believable custom play-by-play with the personality you want before that point, customized how you want. Sexy korean girlfriend voice who gives you whatever the popular advanced stat of the 2050s is in actual conversation, can give you parlay tips and place them for you, and spends time-outs telling you about her day (including a suspicious number of mentions of mountain dew)? Yeah, that's probably closer in the future than a big change in the racial ratio of play-by-play announcers.
OP ignoring that once you get a good gig (which is super fucking hard) in Sports Broadcasting you are likely to never give up that position.