Minority Athletes: Not so Minor

In the professional world, minorities are truly that--the minority among the population and work force. However, this is not the case in professional sports. In the three main professional sports in the United States, minority athletes comprise a majority of the team.

The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports located at the University of Central Florida, publishes the Racial and Gender Report Card to indicate areas of improvement, stagnation regression in the racial and gender composition of professional and college sports. According to this report card, the NFL, MLB and NBA all received A+ ratings on their report card. For the 2010 season, the NFL was comprised of 70% color while the NBA was comprised of 82% color. Not surprising, the MLB is still a majority white, but it is getting closer and closer with the 2010 teams equally 40.2% color.

But why do the sports teams get a perfect A+ score for diversity when the NBA and NFL have 82% and 70% color respectively? From a typical caucasian perspective, awarding a perfect score for there being significantly less than 2/3 white doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Ideally, a perfect score would represent an equal percentage of white, black, asian, latino and all the other races found in sports.

While this particular rating seems ambiguous to me, it was very helpful in determining the percentage of minority athletes in the professional sporting realm. Interestingly, in the same high ratings in the report card did not translate over the the management, employees and leadership positions of the non-athletes. This supports a strong argument that as far as sports go, the best will play and choosing the best is a color-blind process. I believe the best individuals are playing at the professional level because of their ability, not because of their ethnicity. The same cannot be said about management positions though, according to the Racial and Gender Report Card.

But are advertisers color blind and do they accurately portray minority athletes? According to a research report, 52.5% of advertisements portray white athletes and another 28.1% portray a mixture of races including whites. Watch this stereotypical commercial about Yao Ming as clueless and decide for yourself about advertising and minority athletes.