NBA Officials - Research Topic

[jbduke]

Originally posted by xxssmen
Since we are on the topic of race, why is it that all you see is white and black officials. Basketball is grown to be an international sports but yet the officiating is black and white only at least thats all I have seen.
I was told that most evaluator look for tall white or black athletic people to officiate, which is probably true since most black and white grew up playing the sports or have a better understanding of the game than those of Hispanic or Asian culture. I have talk to many Hispanic and Asian who try to officiate but was told that its very hard to officiate at a high level meaning High school Varsity and up because they are from a diferrent culture, and also they have heard fans who made comment about there ethnic background how they need to stick to soccer and other popular international sports and they don't have a clue about american sports, comments like that probably has hurt the minority in comming out to officiate but I also believed that most evaluator do judge people by their ethnic background also instead of by there ability.

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Chuck,

I am well aware that you are one of the good guys around here. Having read your posts for several years now, I can say with little hesitation that you would never post a link to a website about punctuation when responding to a post which contained some errors in grammar, syntax or punctuation.

What really galls me about JR's post is its unwarranted sanctimoniousness. It should be clear to anyone with even rudimentary understanding of linguistics that the above post was written by someone for whom English is a second language. There are several clues that, when taken together, tell the story:

1) the level of vocabulary is good-to-very good
2) the sentence construction, while at times cumbersome,
is very ambitious.
3) several of the errors involve failing to properly
pluralize nouns.
4) problems with participles

When the level of vocabulary and complexity of sentence structure exemplified in the above post are taken in tandem, the "simple" mistakes made by the writer clearly don't fit; and they won't fit until one allows for the possibility that the writer is not a life-long speaker of English. Such English-speakers simply do not make the number of errors in noun pluralization that one sees there. Furthermore, there are a couple more "simple" mistakes with participles, which are a notoriously difficult part of learning a new language.

So, the first point is to take JR to task for not having enough mastery of his primary language to recognize when it was being written by someone for whom English is a second language.

The second point is directed to XXSMen: I want you to know that I did not post this in order to criticize your English; in fact, I wrote this to praise it. Your English is excellent, and you are to be commended for what has clearly been a tremendous amount of work on your part in developing fluency. I only wish I had worked as hard at my foreign language study as you have with yours.

Good luck in your hoops career. I recognize that there are barriers before you that I don't have to face, and I can only say that I will do my best to be active in trying to break down such barriers where they exist.

jb