Quote:
Originally Posted by AremRed
In my personal, qualitative experience as an official I have found the racial composition of my referee brethren to closely mirror the racial demographics of the United States as a whole, with a few exceptions. Here's the breakdown:
United States racial breakdown:
White: 63.7%
Black: 12.2%
Asian: 4.7%
Hispanic: 16.3%
Other races: 3.1%
The national white/black ratio is roughly 5 to 1 (.1915), which is perhaps comparable to the racial demographics of officials nationwide.
Indiana racial breakdown:
White: 80.0%
Black: 9.6%
Asian: 2.1%
Hispanic: 6.7%
Other races: 1.6%
The Indiana white/black ratio is roughly 8.3 to 1 (.1200).
In Indiana they send 9 officials to the regional to work 3 games. Thus, you can expect 7.2 white officials and 1.8 black officials at each site, disregarding travel/location assigning preferences. At East Chicago Central's site there were 8 white refs and 1 black ref (who worked the evening final). This does not indicate a lower number of black refs working regional games however -- another regional was assigned 4 black officials. The overall regional assignments for black officials in Indiana were 17/144, for 11.8%. That's actually higher than expected given the Indiana racial demographics.
I am very interested to hear what kind of demographic numbers the IHSAA will release.
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AremRed....fascinating perspective. I would not be surprised if the IHSAA numbers confirm that the ratio of black/minority officials exceeds the state census ratio that you presented. I'd wager that this is the case in most states. By no means do I intend to sound insensitive by saying this, but as minorities tend to have lower per capita incomes, I believe the avocation of officiating basketball tends to be more attractive from a recruiting and retention standpoint as a means of supplementing income.
Again, I'm speaking strictly demographically, but what I'm trying to say in a roundabout way is that Coach Trgovich is full of poop.