Institutional Discrimination Against American White Basketball Players

Thinking of the massive scale of the European club basketball system, of which the Euroleague 24-team competition is just the tip of the iceberg, is it any wonder there are almost as many foreign whites as American whites in the NBA? Think for a minute about the disparity in developmental opportunities. There are hundreds of professional clubs all across Europe developing their native talent. Nothing like that exists in America.

The European clubs also have an explicit affirmative action policy for their national players, limiting the number of foreigners on each club squad. Thus, they can't just stock their team with 10 American players in the hopes of winning their games, they are forced to develop their local white talent.

American whites, obviously, have no such protections. In fact, they play against a huge handicap: the American collegiate system. America runs its sports through the school system, not a club system like Europe, so our minor league system is the college game.

Number one, that system is biased in favor of early development. Your long term interest in and success in sports is heavily influenced by your state of physical development when you are junior high and high school. Thus, if you are not physically mature in 9th grade, you won't even make the team in a large school, or at best you will be riding the bench, in either case, severely impacting your future potential in a negative way.

It is enlightening to note that black boys enter puberty almost two years sooner than white boys. Blacks also tend to start school at a later age on average, and get held back in early grades more. Thus, whites in the school system are facing a significant disadvantage in terms of physical development compared to blacks in the same grade level. Not playing in junior high will obviously affect your ability to make the team in high school, and not playing in high school makes it real hard to get recruited by a college.

And at the college level, the white player faces another huge barrier: colleges are run on affirmative action FOR blacks. Because blacks are worse students, American colleges are always struggling to bring up their black student enrollments, which would otherwise be lower than white enrollment on a percentage basis, making a college subject to legal sanctions under anti-discrimination laws. Athletic scholarships are method number one that colleges use to bring up the number of black students, because athletic scholarships are by definition not concerned with academic quality. Bringing in blacks on athletic scholarships allows colleges to boost their black student numbers in a way that, for some reason, everyone seems to accept. Thus, white are preselected out of athletic scholarships entering college, because of discrimination policy aimed to assist blacks.

Look at the larger racial pattern going on here. The European club system discriminates in the favor of European whites, the American college system discriminates in the favor of American blacks.

And so, where else can American whites turn to develop their athletic potential? The American college system is the minor league for the American pro system, so the bottle neck at the college level of course negatively impacts the number of Whites at the pro level. The bottle neck also impacts the number of American whites who can play overseas, since with no pro or college experience, they have no basis for getting signed to a foreign club contract.

See how screwed the American white basketball player is? Not just on the level of biological discrimination because of later puberty onset, not just personal discrimination based on myths of black athletic superiority (the false idea that "White men can't jump"), but on the institutional level that gives an opportunity to play at all, the American white faces huge barriers.

In order to have a level playing field for success, American whites would have a professional league that limited the number of American blacks and foreign whites, like foreign whites enjoy in their national leagues.

Facing discrimination by having to compete against older and more developed blacks in the school sports system, and discrimination in college admission policies, and discrimination limiting participation in foreign leagues, a professional league based on affirmative action to develop American whites is a matter of justice and equity mandated under civil rights legislation.

Before the days of federally mandated school integration and affirmative action, American whites developed quite well, and were some of the best ball players in the world. If we end the systematic discrimination against them, they can easily rise again to the same high levels again.